"Black Mirror" © Netflix
Ahead of the sixth season of the dystopian Netflix anthology "Black Mirror", we look back on five seasons from which we have picked out the best episodes for you. It doesn't get any more pessimistic than this.
Next Thursday, June 15, the first new "Black Mirror" season since 2019 will come to Netflix. Before that, however, the highlights from twelve years and five seasons of series history are reviewed, in which author Charlie Brooker held up the black mirror to the viewers in a clever, disturbing and thought-provoking way.
Fifteen Million Merits
The episode Fifteen Million Merits (1x02) depicts a futuristic society in which people do the same hard work day in and day out on fixed wheeled machines, watching brainless reality shows or playing dull video games before returning to their uniform living cells. In order to shine a little light in this dreariness, the worker Bing (Daniel Kaluuya) spends his saved merits to buy his colleague Abi (Jessica Brown Findlay) a ticket for a popular TV casting show. However, when he notices how his crush is then burned by the media, he sets out to shake up the system...
As a cynical media satire, the episode cut off a lot from Sidney Lumet's film "Network". As a "Black Mirror" episode, she showed us the first elaborate sci-fi setting that didn't remind us of our world at all... except, of course, in the figurative sense of socio-critical persiflage. The other best episodes of the series can be found at Serienjunkies.de. (Mario Giglio)
