Netflix – On Demand – Series

A distant heir of The Twilight Zone (1959-1964), Black Mirror, an anthology series created (initially for Channel 4, then for Netflix) by British journalist Charlie Brooker, has explored for over a decade, with a good dose of dark humor, our relationship with new technologies, their influence on our lives and the society in which we live.

From three episodes per season, the series has stretched to five, then up to six episodes in this seventh installment. However, it has not become more cohesive, and Black Mirror remains more than ever an uneven series, one that is dipped into rather than devoured. This way of going against the grain of series consumption modes is not its least interesting characteristic.

Nevertheless, this new season, released less than two years after the one prior, is an average vintage, despite a rather successful first episode about a device allowing a young woman to survive a brain tumor, provided she accepts, and pays for, the condition that her organ no longer fully belongs to her. Sentimental and beautifully portrayed by Rashida Jones and Chris O'Dowd, this episode overshadows the next, an interesting but incomplete variation on gaslighting (a form of psychological manipulation), and especially the third, which was meant to be the highlight of the season.

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