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Black Mirror's new season has more emotion, but is still catastrophizing about the future
"Who would want to just watch nothing but dystopia now," asks creator Charlie Brooker
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Hidden at the core of Netflix’s Black Mirror is a a great, big, beating heart. For all of its cynicism about human nature (and there is a lot), and its fear that technology is ultimately very bad for all of us (there’s a lot of that, as well), the series is ultimately a humanist show that wants the best for its characters, even if it knows that’s very, very unlikely to happen because of who they are.
With the new season of the show about to drop, series creator and showrunner — indeed, someone who basically writes every episode himself — Charlie Brooker is finally ready to admit that there’s always been more to the show than techno fear… and, as the show continues into its seventh season, that thread is only growing.
“Well, it’s partly that the world keeps getting more and more horrible, and so the show gets more and more escapist in response,” Brooker told Empire magazine in its latest issue, arguing that the show has to evolve in order to have a reason to exist. “Who would want to just watch nothing but dystopia now, when you can look at it out your window?”
Elsewhere in the same piece, Brooker also teased, “It’s not all utopian this season, but there’s quite a lot of emotion overall.” But don’t get too comfortable ahead of the new episodes. As he put it, “I’m definitely still a catastrophist. And it wouldn’t be Black Mirror if there weren’t moments where you go, ‘Oh my fucking God! This is horrible!’”
Black Mirror returns April 10.
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