All Black Mirror Episodes, ranked
"People think it’s a happy game. It’s not a happy game. It’s a fucking nightmare world. And the worst thing is? It’s real and we live in it."
With Black Mirror Season 6 out today, i rewatched the complete show and compiled a list of all episodes (minus the new season which i will binge over the weekend), ranked by awesomeness. I’m not sure if i’ll just update this list once i watched and reviewed the new season, or simply repost an updated version into your mailbox. I guess it will be the latter, but we’ll see.
While watching the show, i got aware that this series, despite being 12 years old already, only has 23 episodes up to now, including the xmas special 2014 and the interactive movie Bandersnatch. This tells you something about quality, expectations, and the flood of new stuff on the streamers. I still haven’t seen the Lord of the Rings-series or any of the new Star Trek-stuff or Succession or Willow or whatever and it took me ages to watch Andor. It’s simply too much out there and watching cool scifihorrorfantasy-stuff is becoming an annoying endeavour, so i don’t bother and prefer reading a book.
But not with Black Mirror — as soon as this new season is out, i’ll binge it in one or two sittings over the weekend. It’s just that good, and, on a sidenote, Charlie Brooker did not use ChatGPT to write an episode, though he tried and the output “was shit“ — which is very apt for this series.
So, here’s every single episode of the best SciFi-show on screen, ranked from okay to awesome (actually bad Black Mirror episodes do not exist).
Warning: Spoilers abound.
Accompanying this list are the fantastic illustrations by Butcher Billy from Brazil, who did illus for many episodes and season five, art used in USS Callister, and some imaginary comic-covers.
The National Anthem (S01E01, trailer) maybe is Black Mirrors most cynical episode, it’s just a politician being blackmailed to fuck a pig on telly, and that’s pretty much it. Sure, it’s about the media spectacle, the media and the audience, but it’s also just straightforward: Politician gets blackmailed, can’t do anything about it, and then fucks a pig live on television.
Charlie Brooker is awesome, but i hate his cynical edge. Black Mirror is famous for being bleak and gruesome, but usually Brooker balances his pessimist worldview with some weird, awesome, clever stuff, or even fun and romance. The lack of cleverness in this first episode of the first season however annoyed me twelve years ago already and it’s kind of a wonder that i became the fan that i am after this first shot. If i didn’t know Brooker from his end of year wipes and the fantastic zombie series Dead Set, i may have skipped the show. I’m glad i didn’t.
The Waldo Moment (S02E03, trailer) is about a digital CGI-avatar going into politics. A disjointed episode that has, despite it’s interesting idea, not much to offer. A lot of wasted potential in this one, unfortunately.
Men Against Fire (S03E05, trailer) plays with themes that are highly relevant today: Soldiers with AR-glasses kill mutant roaches, except those roaches are actually people.
In an age of deepfakes, generative AI and the just announced Apple AR-device this is a very terrifiying vision of the future in which these technologies are used to their maximized deadly ends. Still, the episode lacks surprise to make it really interesting.
Playtest (S03E02, featurette) - Cooper is a drifter testing an experimental AI-game that learns from his fears through a neural implant in his neck, causing memory loss.
Albeit I’m very interested in neural technology for years, this episode and it’s twists and turns never really worked for me and i consider this one of the weaker episodes of the bunch.
Hang The DJ (S04E04, trailer) - Romantic relationships in this episode are moderated by an app which calculates lifelong partners with a 99.8% success rate. Hilarity ensues.
This is one of the more lighthearted, sometimes even funny episodes, and because this is Black Mirror, it’s surely more interesting than other romantic couple stuff. But it’s still romantic couple stuff, which, yeah, fine.
Striking Vipers (S05E01, trailer) about some straight men discovering gay love in virtual reality is a cool idea, and i like this story as a parable about how stuff we may experience and feel in the digital realm don’t necessarily translate to the real world, whereas these experiences and emotions still can absolutely entail real world consequences. A bit too mundane for my taste, though.
Bandersnatch (interactive film, trailer) - Netflix’ and Black Mirrors interactive film experiment is a tough one. I do like the production design and the actors, the story about psychological experiments in a game dev setting during the 80s, and the fact that the story quotes it’s own technical presets, making it an interactive film about adapting an interactive choose-your-own-adventure-book into an interactive videogame. Very meta. Black Mirror always was self aware and postmodern by choice, and here they just pump up the volume to 11. But it’s also confusing, and the script is a bit of a mess.
Crocodile (S04E03, trailer) - What do murderers do when mindreading tech enables law enforcement to retrieve memories from brains? They start to kill every witness and their kids too. Another very bleak episode about guilt and how (neural) technology amplifies selfprotective urges in our darkest moments in a very good scifi-crime-drama which is maybe a tad too “normal“ for a Black Mirror-episode.
Metalhead (S04E05, traier) - Though i like the overall atmosphere, the filming in black and white, and the minimalism of this vignette about robot dogs hunting down humans, there is no real surprise in this chapter and the retreaval of some teddy bears doesn’t really hit home for me. I still like the unforgiving pressure on the hunted characters leading to action packed paranoia, and the ruthless execution by the script.
Shut Up And Dance (S03E03, trailer) - Hackers record Kenny masturbating to CP and blackmail him to do their bidding, rob a bank, and making him fight to death with another blackmail victim. Then release the jerkoff footage anyways.
The sadism and cruelty of psychopathic behavior on the web aka “trolling“, and the tendency of people who do it to excuse their cruel behaviour by pointing at allegedly wrongdoings of their victims, brought to their extreme ends. In typical Black Mirror-fashion, a harsh and bleak vision of a future that is already happening right here, right now.
Hated In The Nation (S03E06, trailer) maybe is the most untypical of all Black Mirror-episodes. With insects on the brink of extinction, a corporation develops "autonomous drone insects" which get hijacked by a hacker who kills people targeted by the social media swarm with a hashtag.
Usually, Black Mirror explores the more psychological undertones of technological development and their consequences for society, while this is "just" a straightforward scifi-thriller with these themes pushed aside for some swarm action. It’s still great ofcourse, this is Black Mirror after all, but i miss the subtle cleverness of other episodes.
Smithereens (S05E02, trailer) - A man full of guilt for causing the death of his fiancée in an accident by checking his socmed notifications while driving, is taking an employee of the social media company hostage, trying to get a call with the CEO and make him hand over the password to the account of a dead girl for her mother he slept with.
I love myself a paranoid claustrophobic thriller setting featuring hostage situations and this delivers. Also, Topher Grace as the hippieesque CEO but total prick on a mindfulness-trip is a delight.
Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too (S05E03, trailer) - Fifteen year old Rachel gets her favorite toy, an AI-puppet-version of popstar Ashley O, played by Miley Cyrus. When the real Ashley starts to rebel against her producers, trying to make real music, they poison her and she falls into a coma, which causes the AI-puppet to freak out. After removing a block in the puppet, it gains consciousness and it’s revealed that there is a whole copy of the origial Ashleys persona trapped in each toy. The producers unveil a huge holographic Ashley-version live on stage that can play AI-music generated from her brainwaves nonstop, when Rachel and Ashley crash the venue. Ashley is finally free and becomes a rocker, playing in small clubs.
Once more, with AI-Drake and AI-Oasis being a thing and Meta just revealing it’s latest AI-model MusicGen while a revived Abba playing giant venues as holograms, this episode is super appropriate for this moment in our age.
Nosedive (S03E01, trailer) - In a world where a social credit system, a clone of Klout on steroids, determines how you are perceived by your social environment, where you can go and the services you can use, a woman fails her way down the social hierarchy, just to find new freedom in prison.
This episode is our new world, and it’s already happening. I’m not talking about the real life social credit system in China, which is bad enough, or failed startups like the beforementioned Klout. The fact alone that “klout“ today is common internet slang for reputation tells you that we all are already living in this episode, where our online behaviour often determines our real world fate, with all the traps and shortcomings of the digital realm.
This episode is not science fiction, but a contemporary satirical dramedy set in an alternate universe with slightly different apps on our phones. And that should give you a pause.
White Bear (S02E02, trailer) - The episode in which Brooker defined one of the themes he returns to repeatedly over the whole series: What happens when we can use technology to punish people for wrongdoings, using torture in psychological extremely distressing ways because, you know: It’s just a simulation, get over it buddy, it’s not real.
In this episode, the simulation is not digital, but a so called “justice park“, where people can hunt down criminals for entertainment, whose memory is wiped out and reset at the end of the day with the whole thing repeating itself.
Brookers finest themes are all there: Looping narratives, recursive realities, fake and simulation, crime and punishment, all enclosed in the overarching question about human rights for criminals and murderers in a world where we can “simulate punishment“, over and over again.
Black Museum (S04E06, trailer) - I love this collection of three vignettes about digital telepathy and consciousness upload embedded in a meta story about mind transfer itself.
The titular Black Museum is a museum that, besides being full of easter eggs, shows various stages of mind technology going wrong in cruel, deadly, and outright torturous ways. It’s pulpy, very meta and clever, and seeing the main villain of this story being caged in his own virtual torture chamber, while a mind uploaded into a teddy bear enjoys new found freedom, is just great. And, you know, for a horrorhead, it’s always great to see a movie quote Abel Ferraras Driller Killer.
The Entire History Of You (S01E03, trailer) - Many people consider this to be the best episode of the show, but couple romance love stuff just isn’t my thing, even when it’s about the dark consequences of technology that enables you to record and retreave every moment of your life, transforming the concept of human memory from an ambivalent psychological mechanism into a quasi-legal fact machine.
I really like the latter, and i do think that the consequences of such a technology are best told in context of romantic relationships where abuse of this tech always would foster the most intimate impact. Still: Couple stuff is just a bit meh for me. Ofcourse, they optioned this episode for a movie adaption, but the project seems to go nowhere.
Fifteen Million Merrits (S01E02, trailer) - The episode which gave this series it’s unofficial soundtrack, a sweet lovestory set in a totalitarian media-dystopia, where people generate energy on spin bikes all day and their only escape is through a sadistic talent competition broadcast to whole of society. Brookers cynicism is on full display here, shattering both protagonists to pieces, leaving no place for love or life.
This one got me hooked back then, and while story and execution don’t merrit a place this high on the list, it is a fact proven in multiple studies from international renowned psychologists that people who don’t immediately fall in love with Jessica Brown-Findlay performing Irma Thomas’ “Anyone who knows what love is (will understand)“ have no heart and no soul.
Arkangel (S04E02, trailer) - A bitter, cruel story about what happens when helicopter parenting meets extreme surveillance technology with which you can not only see what your target sees, but also censor and manipulate their perception. Another very timely episode in an age of peer surveillance, where the democratizing effects of technology caused a power shift that enabled Benthams panopticon not just for state authorities, but everyone. For parenting, in Brookers vision, this has unintended and bloody consequences for both the target and the perpetrator.
USS Callister (S04E01, trailer) - Surely the most FX-driven episode that leans heavily into scifi-fandom, featuring a simulated Star Trek-ish game universe made by a shy nerd who plays evil overlord in a private and closed version of that game. In real life, Robert Daly (played by Jesse Plemons from Breaking Bad) is the overlooked and laughed at CTO of a successful VR-gaming company, and he secretly collects DNA from his colleagues to recreate copies of them in the game. When he creates a clone of Nanette Cole, played by the wonderful Cristin Milioti, a new programmer in the company, she finds a way to contact her real life version and to trick the guy, finally trapping him in his own universe, with her digital “self“ set free in the game. And the first guy she meets there is an angry gamer, voiced by none other than Aaron “Jesse Pinkman“ Paul.
If you look closely, when Nanette tricks Daly on the alien planet while standing in the lake, you can see Milioti looking straight at you, winking into the camera for a second, which is a nice, ironic meta-shot for nerds like me.
Also, this episode seems to be a very, very loose adaption of Harlan Ellison’s short story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”, where an evil computer tortures human consciousness inside a machine, where they are denied death, can be manipulated and their bodies changed and mutilated at the will of their virtual master.
With the digital giving every and anyone powers over their own perception, and AI-clones of real people around the corner, all of this is a dire warning to the future, packaged into a suspensefull, actionpacked scifi-episode.
White Christmas (Special 2014, trailer) is the only Black Mirror-xmas-special yet, featuring three miniatures baked into one recursive overarching plot, giving the whole thing a recursive, fractal character.
Joe is a murderer sentenced to live eternity in a cabin in a snowy wilderness, where Matt is using his interrogation methods to make him relive his past crimes and confess, which is used as testimony in the real world. Matt is a former AI-trainer who used to torture so called “cookies“ into submission: copies of the consciousnesses of their owners trapped in an assistant device. (The torture method is especially cruel: You flip a switch, and the conscious AI has to live through a year in a white room, where there is absolutely nothing, driving them to the brink of madness.) For the service of interrogating Joe, Matt is released from his virtual prison to live in the real world, but is blocked as a sex offender by everyone, whereas Joe has to relive his interrogation, which actually is five years long, and remember his crimes for a thousand years in a loop.
I love the simplicity here and it reminds me of the eternal electric chair at the end of Black Museum. Brooker has a knack for eternal torture, it seems, which seems apt: In theory, uploading a mind to a computer would expose them to various computational principles no human has ever actually experienced in the real world, with true loops, recursion and eternity being one of them.
This episode and it’s subtle, mathematical, recursive cruelness is so clever and very, very Charlie Brooker. The mean bastard, i love him.
Be Right Back (S02E01, trailer) is maybe the most famous episode of the whole series, and it’s up there for a reason. A bittersweet story about grief and death in a future where you can order robot copies of real humans.
It’s themes are very timely again, with mimetic AI already being used to deal with the loss of loved ones and the first startups offering services to preserve digital clones of humans after their death, a theme Brooker returns to multiple times over the whole series. Thus, the conclusion of the episode seems very fitting: What if you can revive a clone of your dead mother, but it’s just too much to take and too confusing while simultaneously you can’t just get rid of her/it? You stow her/it away in the attic were she/it “lives“ as a synthetic ghost.
San Junipero (S03E04) - This is just the sweetest story about love and death in times of consciousness upload ever: Lesbian couple Yorkie and Kelly meet in the titular simulated beach town and it is revealed that, in real life, Yorkie is on the brink of dying, soon to live in San Junipero for eternity, as tiny blinkenlights in a giant datacenter in real life.
The existential struggles about decisions of life and death and love and a very un-brooker-ish happy-but-also-ambivalent ending, all accompanied by a lighthearted 80s-setting which translates beautifully in our times, where nostalgia plays on an endless loop, make this the best Black Mirror-episode up to now: If technology can actually create heaven as a place on earth, and if only as an illusion, then what do you prefer — a real nothing or a simulated eternity with your loved ones?
I saw this post’s title and „San Junipero“ just flashed into my mind. I read the post and slowly scrolled through your ranking, getting happier with every rank to not see my favorite … until the end ❤️