Black Mirror Season 6 highlights supernatural horror over sci-fi | review

venturebeat.com:

Missed the GamesBeat Summit excitement? Don't worry! Tune in now to catch all of the live and virtual sessions here.

I watched Season 6 of Black Mirror streaming series on Netflix. While these sci-fi horror shows are always tough to watch, I find them occasionally brilliant and often memorable. But it’s like tough medicine to watch horror shows while waiting for the lessons they offer about technology.

This season, which arrived in June, was a shortish five episodes. It was the first new season since before the pandemic in June 2019. The real world was so bad, I suppose, that we didn’t need a new season of Black Mirror.

But there was clearly some fodder for the writers. We could see the politics of Trumpism made it into one of the episodes and the cruelty of modern social media and docudramas made it into another. Perhaps the only further artifact of real life that seeped into it from the pandemic was a much darker view of the world and humanity than in the past shows, if that is even possible.

Some of the past episodes always made me think about the use of technologies like surveillance, social media, and even the simulation theory – which holds that we’re living in a simulation. I like to always think about the crossover of science fiction, technology and games. Black Mirror remains one of the key ways I can stay in touch with all of those elements at the same time.

But this season seems different, as many of the episodes are set in the past. They’re speaking about society at a particular point in time, rather than our future.

1. Joan Is Awful

An average woman is stunned to discover a global streaming platform has launched a prestige TV drama adaptation of her life — in which she is portrayed by Hollywood A-lister Salma