Creator Charlie Brooker on season sevens unsettling inspirations and endings.
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Spoilers follow for all ofBlack Mirrorseason seven.
In many ways, the seventh season is the quintessentialBlack Mirrorexperience.
The season tackles gaslighting,biomedicalenshittification, and the validity of life within artificially created consciousness.
All of those things are valid parts of theBlack Mirroruniverse, says Brooker.
I was surprised to realize that the firstBlack Mirrorseason came out nearly 15 years ago.Isnt that terrifying?
In television and technology terms, thats 2,000 years.
My motivation was to do an ideas-based show likeTheTwilight Zone.
This was around the time of the Arab Spring.
It was full of dull narcissists saying, Look at my sandwich.
The problem is that now its full of exciting narcissists.Right.
Its exciting in the wrong way.
There would be adverts for iPhones that were utopian with interesting-looking people smiling holding these shiny devices.
I recoiled from that inherently.
Ive always been a nervous person who expects things to go wrong.
The more utopian something is, the more I mistrust it.
I wasnt necessarily thinking ofBlack Mirroras a show about how technology is bad, because Im very pro-technology.
Its more that I want to worry about things in a hopefully entertaining way.
Theres along-standingaccusationthat the show has become Americanized and more reliant on big Hollywood talent.
What do you think about that line of argument?Ive heard it.
By the time we did White Christmas, with Jon Hamm, the show was already evolving.
When we did the first Netflix season, the very first episode I wrote was San Junipero.
Netflix never said, Can you Americanize this show?
Things like that dont happen at all.
So I sort of feel like it became an international show then.
But in that same season, we had an episode aboutpeople being blackmailed in Croydon.
In this season, Bete Noire and Plaything are very British.
Hotel Reverie is kind of about a British film studio thats struggling and is trying to interest U.S. streamers.
Im sounding very defensive, arent I?
But San Junipero did feel like a turning point where you started writing more overtly humanistic episodes.
It was a few different ideas glommed together.
And then, walking around in the world, you cant help but notice that.
I cant drive, and when Uber came along, it was miraculous for me.
Ive also got an Amazon Alexa unit in my house.
Then, suddenly, it started showing adverts as well, and you cant switch them off.
It made me think aboutLuigi Mangioneand forms of resistance.
Maybe its part of the DNA ofBlack Mirror.
Theres an undercurrent of sadness, even when were doing comedic episodes.
Maybe its because I dont believe those fables and stories.
Maybe thats a failure of imagination on my part.
And I dont know how you get back from that.
Then came the thought, What couldnt they have done in 1987?
That eventually became, What if its a same-sex couple that got married?
Thats how I approach things as a storyteller.
Im just writing, Heres what I think a person would do in this scenario.
Im a heterosexual white middle-age guy from London, so thats not my lived experience.
you’re free to see it in Hotel Reverie with Corrins character.
With USS Callister, sometimes Ive seen people saying: Robert Daly did nothing wrong.
Theyre not real, theyre just computer.
And I just dont know how it’s possible for you to watch that episode and believe that.
Will an AI ever be conscious enough to feel pain and heartbreak?
Whereas to them, they are completely and utterly real.
Yet the humanism of that idea is so complicated by the ending.
But frankly, that wouldve been a little too twee.
I have to credit Toby Haynes, the director, who said, Come on.
Thats not veryBlack Mirror.
It felt better to keep them in a comically bad, veryBlack Mirrorsituation.
We had this backstory where we thought that Walton (Jimmi Simpson) had exploited Daly.
Walton mentions this in the first one when he apologizes to everyone.
And the thing about Daly is hes weak and wounded.
Obviously, hes in a nightmare scenario, but that makes him an interesting villain figure.
Going into this episode, we wanted to play with there being two versions of these characters.
Two versions of Nanette, two versions of Walton, two versions of Daly.
And then youve got Daly.
It was important to us that we didnt just have Daly come back and have a redemptive arc.
You see him as almost a prequel version, this desperately lonely figure in a bad situation.
Nanette knows she cant trust him.
It felt like we were maintaining the arc of the original and also showing you something different.
It is, in a weird way, almost like doing an origin story.
I read something about somebody who leftSimCityorCivilizationor something like that running on a computer for years.
I was a video-game journalist in the 90s, so it was a world I knew.
Once, I was given a game calledCreaturesto review, which they said was an artificial life simulator.
I playedThe Simsas well, like everyone else.
you’re free to quickly bond with these things andfeel really guilty about it.
Maybe I was wrong, but I dont know.
But Im ambiguous on whether thats a good thing.
Everything Peter Capaldis character explains is held to be true in the episode.
He also suggests it doesnt overwrite anything on the inside.
He describes this blissful process.
So that was the idea.
Would we lose our humanity?I dont know.
Youre in your mid-50s.
To be honest, we do play with nostalgia a lot on the show.
Unless you were an avid photographer, you might have three, four, five photos at best.
And the images that are there are imperfect.
Peoples eyes are closed.
Theyre inelegantly framed, or theyre overexposed.
Its about stepping back into those half-remembered moments.
And then that led to the notion of, what if he hasnt got these memories anymore?
There are things in that episode that couldnt happen now.
They lose touch with each other, which would be very hard to do.
She wrote him a letter on paper that he never saw.
Its kind of a love story, but at a slightly different register.
Im not sure how that episode will go down with people.
There isnt a villain, really, in that episode.
So Im glad that its resonating with you.
How many moreBlack Mirrorsdo you think youll make?It depends how long the world lasts.
