The more films and TV shows I watch, the less I feel like commenting on or discussing them. It’s inevitable—there’s nothing new under the sun. When I first started working in this field, I’d still get excited over fresh takes on old stories. I’d applaud directors for adding a new spin to an overused trope and marvel at their creativity. But as time goes by, you realize that even the most innovative ideas have a shelf life, while our aesthetic fatigue lasts forever.
Take Black Mirror Season 7 for example. I still owe my thoughts on the last three episodes. Then again, I’m not convinced this show is immune to sequel fatigue. But it does have one thing going for it: it’s still one of the rare shows that can get people talking. Honestly, I enjoy reading the fierce debates in the comments more than watching the show itself. Watching people argue over which episode is the worst is more entertaining than Trump’s daily outbursts. Open any discussion thread and you’ll find pure chaos: someone calls it a masterpiece, while someone else says it’s so bad it made them question life. There’s hardly ever a consensus—and that might just be the most unique thing about it.
After all, this show was never meant to be a warm, palatable soup that comforts everyone equally. It’s more like a mirror that exposes monsters, and those monsters are us. What you like, what you fear, what values you hold—it all shows up in how you respond to the episodes. In this age where algorithms feed you only what you’re likely to enjoy, Black Mirror forces you to confront the things that are uncomfortable, unpleasant, even repulsive. It’s like being thrown into a technological nightmare with no remote control.
So, let’s pick up where we left off in the previous article.
Episode 4: Plaything
This was the dullest episode of the season for me—so dull I nearly fast-forwarded through it. It follows a disheveled, half-crazed old man named Cameron Walker who gets himself arrested on purpose at a supermarket, only to confess to a decades-old murder. He says it started with this retro virtual pet game, Thronglets, that only he had access to. He got so obsessed with it that he started taking hallucinogens to “communicate” with the creatures inside. To him, those digital life forms weren’t just lines of code—they were alive. One day, a friend named Lump killed some of these virtual beings while Cameron was away. Cameron snapped and killed him, then buried the body.
It sounds cultish and bizarre, but in practice, the pacing and structure of the episode don’t do the weirdness justice. It’s basically two stories stacked together: one about Cameron’s emotional attachment to his digital creatures, and another about the interrogation with a hot-headed detective. The first doesn’t go deep enough; the second feels formulaic. The detective is a classic tough-guy archetype who grunts “I don’t buy your crap” in every scene. The dialogue is blunt, but there’s no tension underneath. It’s the kind of setup that can lull you to sleep.
That said, the central question it raises is genuinely compelling: If digital life develops human-like consciousness one day, will we still treat them like pets? What do we do when digital life breaks out of the framework of human-centered thinking? These questions are far more thought-provoking than the episode itself.
Episode 5: Eulogy
This one’s a sentimental piece about memory and regret. Phil’s former lover has passed away—but he can no longer remember what she even looked like. For the funeral, he agrees to use tech to revisit the old photographs they once took together—not just flipping through an album, but literally stepping into the photos, reliving moments, replaying conversations and walking through the past.
It’s a touching concept. Technology can take you back to moments you thought you’d moved on from, only to reveal you never fully understood them in the first place. Phil realizes that it wasn’t his lover who abandoned him—it was a misunderstanding that he let fester for years.
The script clearly aims to tug at your heartstrings, to make you cry. But I didn’t cry. All I saw was a man with an oversized ego. For years, he never reached out to her or tried to make sense of what happened. He just hit the delete button and blamed her for everything, painting himself as the victim. This extreme self-centeredness made it hard for me to feel sympathy for him. In other words, while the episode paints “regret” beautifully, it skims too lightly over “accountability.”
Episode 6: USS Callister: Into Infinity
Long-time fans were thrilled—this is a spiritual sequel to one of the show’s best episodes. Like the original, it digs into the ethical limits of digital consciousness and cloned identities. If a game character is a digital copy of a real person, do they embody Descartes’ philosophy of “I think, therefore I am”? Can we still treat NPCs like disposable playthings?
This isn’t just sci-fi anymore. Centuries ago, philosopher John Locke said a person is defined by his or her memories. But if memories can now be duplicated, transferred, or implanted in another medium, our concept of “self” has to be rewritten.
The episode lays it out clearly: once a digital copy starts forming its own path, it’s no longer a copy—it’s a whole new self. Sharing memories doesn’t make you the same person. This idea has been explored in many stories about AI and digital identity, but Black Mirror handles it with more clarity and finality than most.
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Overall, this season adopts a noticeably “softer” approach. While it still questions technology and dissects human nature, it’s moved away from the brutal edge that defined the early seasons. Now there’s a tentative hopefulness—a question of whether people and tech can coexist more gently. The human-tech relationship isn’t just black or white anymore. And maybe that makes it more honest to the times we live in. I mean, if even Black Mirror is learning to be tender, what excuse do the rest of us have for staying numb?
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