Black Mirror season 5: What the Must Watch reviewers think
Must Watch reviewers Scott Bryan and Hayley Campbell share their thoughts on season 5 of Black Mirror which is available on Netflix from 5 June.
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(Photo: Invision)
Hayley says: "Great ingredients... terrible cake"
"Controversially, I am not historically a fan of Black Mirror.
"Everyone loves it and I feel like maybe I am an alien. Here’s my theory - every episode is a thought experiment about how we interact with technology. Now, the Twilight Zone - which is kind of the same - is thought experiments about anything and everything so it can go anywhere.
"With this you're kind of limited as to where it’s going to go and because of that I get the idea of where it is going very early on, and I already know where the ending is.
"Because these episodes are 70 minutes long - then I have to sit through 70 minutes of it plodding on and on.
"If these were 30 minute episodes then I think I would be more on board. But I think it is just too much.
"Sometimes these episodes can feel as cold and soulless as the technology they’re writing about and I come away feeling nothing at all.
"Tonally, the new episodes we’ve got are different.
"The Andrew Scott episode in particular is very human and emotional. But what I don’t understand is why they have chosen to lead with the episode they chose, which is a video game episode coming so soon after Bandersnatch. When I saw it was video-game my heart sunk. I was like ‘I have to sit through another video-game one?’
"I will watch actually dystopian things until the end of the world. With these, it just seems a bit too much that 'phones are bad', and then there is nothing else said about it."
(Photo: Netflix)
Scott says: "I love that it's so different every time you revisit an episode"
"Many people say this is a show about technology and devices and how we need to be off our screens and off our phones but I think there’s a bit of a misunderstanding about what the premise is.
"One of the joys of Black Mirror is going in a bit blind.
"But I have to say is that what surprised me about the new three which are coming out this week is how tonally they are not like what we have seen before. If you look at the first series they were all... so cynical, so dark, so dry emotionally.
"They also do a video-game one in - I think the third or the fourth series - about a guy who is in the haunted house. He has put himself in a VR experience that has gone wrong.
"I once chatted to Charlie [Brooker] and Annabel [Jones] - Black Mirror co-creators - about the ordering of the episodes, and I could not believe the amount of detail that I got back. There is so much detail about how they structure the episodes and the particular order and the particular route as to which one goes where. I was like ‘OK, I thought it was going to be a light question’ but it’s a lot."
Black Mirror season 5 is available on Netflix from 5 June 2019.
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