Anthologies are all the rage these days, from Ryan Murphy's ever-expanding empire of not-so-mini mini-series to Joe Swanberg's recent collection of romance shorts. And yet no program has taken advantage of the elasticity of anthology storytelling quite like Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror, trading pet themes, genres, creative personnel, and tones from one episode to the next.
A newfangled, potentially disastrous technology pops up in each installment, giving the collection a healthy sense of cohesion, but the 13 episodes aired so far could not be more all over the map. Political satires and future dystopias, cop procedurals and war dramas, soulless nihilism and life-affirming humanism — if you dislike Black Mirror, perhaps you just haven't found the right episode yet.
Such a varied palette of styles and stories means that the series is naturally hit or miss. It delivers far more hits than misses, but hashing out which episode hits hardest can be helpful for a newbie who wants to customize their viewing order.
Read on for Vulture's definitive ranking of all 13 episodes of Black Mirror, from the worst to the best.
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13. "Men Against Fire" (season 3, episode 5)
Turning his attentions on the ravages of wartime and the way troops are brainwashed to kill, Brooker stumbles on his landing in an uncharacteristically weak third act. A soldier starts to wrestle with new feelings and a peculiar sickness after gunning down three of the feral mutant abominations that stalk a futuristic society. His sudden changes could be PTSD, or they could be something else.
The eventual "twist" is so clearly telegraphed ahead of time that it hardly qualifies as such, and then when Brooker unloads it, the script fails to break any ground not already terraformed by the likes of Starship Troopers. Add a dash of violence falling further to the side of gratuitousness than usual, and you've got a slog of an hour with no reward for completing the mission.
12. "The Waldo Moment" (season 2, episode 3)
The best Black Mirror episodes tiptoe along the tightrope between the plausible and the absurd, but "The Waldo Moment" loses its balance. In today's political climate, the notion that a bawdy cartoon bear could have a shot at public office is but one step down from a permanently enraged pumpkin-man doing the same, but Brooker doesn't give his premise the fidelity seen in the equally outrageous "The National Anthem."
As such, the political commentary goes too broad, accusing the public of being dum-dums and filing the tired charge that politicians are phony. Brooker's at his most effective when he avoids pointing fingers and lets the story implicate whatever needs damning all on its own. "The Waldo Moment" fails to do either.
11. "White Bear" (season 2, episode 2)
This is Brooker's shakiest "uh, what's going on?" episode, a subcategory of Black Mirror installments defined by the presentation of a strange new circumstance with hidden significance, which isn't revealed until a key moment. (Also fitting this profile: the equally lame "Shut Up and Dance," and third-season highlight "San Junipero.") A woman flees unknown attackers, recorded via smartphone by everyone in her immediate vicinity.
There may be some larger point about voyeurism or exploitation or how annoyingly fast phone batteries drain, but it's lost beneath a simplistic twist that pulls a switcheroo and fails to do much else. "The good guy was the bad guy all along!" is almost always a feeble turn for short fiction to take, and if Brooker pulling that once was bad enough …
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