Black Mirror's 10 bleakest episodes

At first glance, Black Mirror’s third-season premiere looks sunny and bright. “Nosedive” is anything but. A dreadfully accurate representation of how society is crumbling in the face of social media, the episode digs into our obsession to appear different, aka better, online. Michael Schur and Rashida Jones’ screenplay shows a slow deterioration of Lacie Pound’s (Bryce Dallas Howard) mind as she seeks more “stars” for favorability. As her rating drops, so does her ability to purchase a new home—and it only worsens. “Nosedive” has a beautiful pink color palette, so it’s easy to get tricked by its disposition, but it feels bleak because of how eerily accurate it is. The damage is done even if the episode ends with Lacie living without the eye implant.

For most people, “The National Anthem” is their introduction to Black Mirror. And what an introduction it is. The series premiere’s premise is simple but haunting: Britain’s prime minister, Michael Callow (Rory Kinnear), has to fuck a pig on TV to save a kidnapped princess. Will he do it or won’t he, and how much will everyone enjoy his public degradation through bestiality? It’s a wild outing that, yes, is darkly funny. But it’s a visceral political and media satire that feels The Twilight Zone-esque and leaves you with a terrible aftertaste. It doesn’t help that since the episode aired in 2011(!), our political leaders and our coverage of them have become a bigger nightmare.

Black Mirror season six embraces horror quite literally. Not the horror of what AI and advanced tech will do to humans, but actual tropes like true crime, as seen in the second outing. “Loch Henry” takes place in a scenic location—green pastures, traditional homes, and a quiet small town. That beauty is negated when the location’s true evil is unearthed. Pia (Myha’la Harrold) travels to her boyfriend’s hometown to film a nature documentary. They pivot to making one about the village’s former serial killer instead, and it’s someone with personal connections to the couple. The hour takes harrowing turns when the culprit’s identity is gradually revealed. It’s a twisted take on the global obsession with the genre, and there are no gleeful Only Murders In The Building or Based On A True Story comedies or characters here. “Loch Ness” is dark as shit, especially the climax that zeroes in on how innocuously true-crime tales are celebrated.

Once again, a Black Mirror episode nails the pitfalls of social-media dependency with a twist. “Hated In The Nation” is a not only a perfect title. The jarring episode is also a police procedural with additional layers of commentary on government spying. The installment follows Detective Karin Parke (Kelly Macdonald) investigating the suspicious murders of victims of a #DeathTo movement on Twitter. Has any theme felt more scarily accurate than that? While running slightly long at 90 minutes, “Hated In The Nation” has an ambiguous moral ending that feels pointedly hopeless about its subject matter.

Much like “Hated In The Nation,” the new season’s “Beyond The Sea” is too long and sad. It’s an ending that makes you say, “Charlie Brooker, you sick son of a bitch.” The episode has multiple WTF moments as it embraces Black Mirror’s trademark futuristic tech notions. David (Josh Hartnett) and Cliff (Aaron Paul) are astronauts on a space mission for several years, but they use a machine to simultaneously live life on Earth (as fellow machines). Things go awry when David witnesses his family being butchered but cannot stop the killers. “Beyond The Sea” captures the David and Cliff’s isolation and loneliness in space and their respective homes. Everyone is alone, including Cliff’s wife, who finds unexpected solace in David. Hints of a love triangle are dispersed when Black Mirror digs into David’s fragile emotional state and the wreckage it causes. The unnecessarily bloody end cements this episode as one of the show’s most tragic outings.

Grief is a powerful narrative device in Black Mirror’s second-season premiere. “Be Right Back” is simmering with emotional intensity as it deals with the fear of being alone, bolstered by Hayley Atwell’s moving performance as Martha, who’s mourning her boyfriend Ash’s sudden death after they moved into a new house. Unable to cope, she orders an artificial Ash (Domhnall Gleeson) based on her departed partner’s social-media posts and other online communication.

The episode is wistful, capturing an inherent problem of relying on AI to fill an inevitable void, especially once Ash’s virtual avatar becomes more purposefully menacing, lacking any human emotions. So why are we still attracted to this form of technology? It’s an inscrutable question that “Be Right Back” explores beautifully.

“Shut Up And Dance” is one hell of a title for an episode that establishes that we’re mere puppets to anyone who has more online prowess. Kenny (Alex Lawther) pays the price for masturbating to child pornography, and Hector (Jerome Flynn) suffers for deciding to commit adultery. It’s unrelentingly negative because there’s no person or situation to root for, no optimism to be found at all. Kenny is being punished for being a pedophile, forced to kill a fellow criminal to save his videos from leaking. In the end, he becomes a murderer for no reason because the hackers spread the footage anyway.

Why is “Crocodile” among the top three of Black Mirror’s super-bleak episodes? The most straightforward answer is it features the murder of a blind baby. The Nordic noir-themed episode is brazen with its doom and gloom and gets progressively more shocking every minute. First of all, implanting a device that lets others view your memories doesn’t seem too far-fetched anymore. Add a panicky murderer played by Andrea Riseborough, and you’ve got a winner. Riseborough is Mia Nolan, who commits multiple kills across several years, struggling to keep her secret. She’ll go to any length to protect herself. As they keep pouring in, the reveals get more depraved and anxiety-inducing. But the fact that she killed a baby she didn’t know was blind (and therefore didn’t have any memories to view) cements this installment as an all-timer.

The concept of a White Bear Justice Park, where ruthless criminals spend their days undergoing psychological punishment, is a nefarious one. Victoria (Lenora Crenshaw) thinks she’s suffering from insomnia and is under attack when she goes on the run, but it’s all just playtime for an audience and a master of ceremonies. She’s being punished for kidnapping and killing a child with her fiancé. And instead of prison time, justice is being served as public torture.

“White Bear” is a stinging representation (much like “Loch Henry”) of the increasing comfort in torture and humiliation being meshed into entertainment. As much as she deserves to be in jail, Victoria’s suffering feels like a wicked reality TV show. Her memories are erased every day before she embarks on the same sick journey. What’s the point? Who’s learning from this? And who is this benefitting besides an indulgent mob? Black Mirror leans into these questions as the audience is left to wonder how far down we’re willing to go.

“Playtest” is undoubtedly the most damning Black Mirror episode because nothing is worse than facing your fears, let alone facing them in augmented reality. (It also hits close to home in light of Apple’s latest Vision Pro announcement.) The episode is psychological horror at its finest, with Cooper (Wyatt Russell) agreeing to play a VR game that brings him face-to-face with everything he despises, from spiders to his former bully. This offering’s gnawing sense of claustrophobia is unparalleled, thanks to the cinematography and Dan Trachtenberg’s direction.

It’s impossible not to get immersed in the fake world Cooper has to fight. He’s making it up as he goes, and Black Mirror presents the case that there isn’t a greater threat to you than your mind. Oh also, that implanting a device in it is the worst possible idea, as Cooper quickly finds out because as soon as the video game company does it to him, he dies due to signal interference from his phone call. This is, without a doubt, one of Black Mirror’s most realistic and sinister installments—and definitely its bleakest.