Black Mirror Season-Premiere Recap: Life Stream

How long is Black Mirror built to last? It’s an evergreen question, especially now that Charlie Brooker is back to churning out seasons on a slightly more regular basis. When I recapped season six in 2023, I appreciated the show’s willingness to experiment more with genre and tone, even if the hit-to-miss ratio was a bit lower than usual that time around. Going into season seven, I’m cautiously optimistic that we’ll get at least a few fun installments with new bizarre, fascinating premises.

But I’m not sure this premiere is one of them. I expect some people to quite enjoy “Common People,” as I expected many people to enjoy “Joan Is Awful” as a competent opener to last season. Ally Pankiw directs both episodes, and they share a similar sense of humor that will work for some viewers, though the jokes don’t always mesh perfectly with the dark themes and character drama. Broadly speaking, this episode has its moments, but it also feels like an unholy mash-up of several earlier episodes and themes, and by the end, it didn’t really work for me.

There’s a lot of promise early on. Amanda Waters (Rashida Jones) and her husband, Mike (Chris O’Dowd), make for a charming couple; she’s an elementary-school teacher, he’s a welder, and they’re trying for a kid despite recent fertility issues. They live a modest but happy life and don’t travel much outside of a regular anniversary trip to the rustic mountain lodge where they got married: Juniper, a kitschy spot with charmingly mediocre live performances and charmingly mediocre food. One day, Amanda passes out at work, and the diagnosis is grim: She has a serious brain tumor and may never regain consciousness.

Luckily, “Common People” takes place in a near-future society familiar to most Black Mirror episodes, a world abound with experimental miracle treatments. The doctor refers Mike to Gaynor (Tracee Ellis Ross) from Rivermind, a start-up that can essentially clone patients’ brains onto a mainframe and then stream their consciousness back to the original source. Gaynor herself once had a terrible accident and ended up with her brain on a cloud-based server, and she’s perfectly well-adjusted! The only catch is that the new Amanda will require more sleep per night, plus she can’t leave her current coverage zone until Rivermind expands the range next year. Oh, and it costs money: $300 a month, which doesn’t initially sound like an unreasonable price point for tech this groundbreaking.

Of course, in practice, this means Mike has to work overtime just to keep his wife alive, a classically Black Mirror metaphor for capitalism, health-care costs, and … streaming services’ ever-changing subscription models? Here’s where the episode starts to lose the plot a little for me.

On their splurge trip to Juniper for their fourth anniversary, Amanda passes out briefly from leaving the coverage area. It turns out contrary to how Gaynor initially sold Rivermind to Mike, the company is now limiting out-of-coverage-area travel to people with Rivermind Plus, a new subscription tier that costs $500 more. People like Amanda on Rivermind Common, meanwhile, suddenly can’t go anywhere without unconsciously spouting “contextually relevant” commercials: a snack called Honey Nugs during a school lesson about pollination, lube, and erectile dysfunction gel during sex.

This presents obvious problems at work when Amanda coldly advertises faith-based family counseling in response to a kid who comes to her about his troubled home life and violent father. She’ll get fired if she can’t stop the constant ads, and then they won’t even be able to afford this lower-tier subscription. So Mike resorts to livestreaming on Dum Dummies, a site he heard about from his slacker co-worker Shane. Viewers will pay you to do various fucked-up stuff like drink your own urine, put different objects up your ass, or hurt yourself.

After beginning that side gig, Mike upgrades to Rivermind Plus, stopping Amanda’s ads and letting her continue work. We don’t always see what he’s forced to do on the site, but sometimes we do, like when he puts a mousetrap on his tongue. And yet it’s still not enough! Amanda is sleeping 12 hours a day and still doesn’t feel rested when she’s awake, a result of Rivermind putting her on “sleep mode” to borrow her brainpower to power the server or “give back to the grid.” But not to worry, because there’s yet another new tier: Rivermind Lux, which heightens senses and allows users to adopt new skills for an additional $1,000 a month.

This strategy of continuously changing the business model, adding ads in previously ad-free spaces and inventing new tiers to squeeze more money out of customers, is a recognizable tactic. But its presentation here also feels … a little bit like a Saturday Night Live sketch? The ad bit goes on for a while (and returns at the end), and while it’s unnerving in its own way, the comedic element is a bit too present and broad. And Dum Dummies sounds like a discarded Black Mirror idea, something too familiar and insubstantial to structure a whole episode around. That theoretical episode would probably interrogate our obsession with watching people hurt and humiliate themselves online, but that theme has very little to do with the rest of the episode. The site just becomes a generically unpleasant way of showing Mike debasing himself to meet the escalating prices.

Besides, I would have rather the episode spent more time exploring the implications of this type of cloud-based tech; “San Junipero” and “Black Museum” introduced the concepts of digitizing and transplanting a human consciousness, respectively, and there’s plenty of untapped potential to the idea. Could Amanda’s consciousness be stored indefinitely, eventually streamed to some other brain? If worse came to worst, could her body be kept alive while Mike worked for a year and saved up to bring her back to life? The episode doesn’t take this premise in the most interesting direction.

Mike buys 12 hours of Lux for Amanda during their anniversary weekend, which she spends in a state of weird, artificial bliss thanks to the dialed-up pleasure centers that make the toughest burger a delicacy and sex almost too good. Unfortunately, this experience is paid for Mike de-masking himself on Dum Dummies, resulting in a compromising photo of him tacked to the bulletin board at work when he gets back. Shane is responsible, of course, but he doesn’t deserve the fate he gets next, run over and presumably disfigured by a big machine during a fight with an incensed Mike. It’s enough to get Mike fired, and he’s probably lucky he doesn’t face worse consequences than that. Gaynor won’t budge on maintaining their Plus subscription, of course, and she’s quick to inform them that it’ll cost them an extra $90 a month if they want to have a baby. After all, pregnancy takes a lot of processing.

From here, “Common People” picks up another year later, on their fifth anniversary. Both Mike and Amanda look unwell, tired, and pale, and, in Mike’s case, they have missing teeth. He’s clearly still on Dum Dummies, presumably their only monetary source outside of the remaining baby money they’re living on? It’s a bleak, bleak scene, and it’s almost a relief when Amanda says, “It’s time” during a 30-minute serenity Lux booster (paid for thanks to a “private buyer”). So we get that disturbing, somber final scene of Mike tucking his wife into bed before smothering her with a pillow during an unconscious “antidepressant lozenges” ad, a logical destination on this episode’s long march to a grim inevitability. And in the closing image of the episode, he returns to Dum Dummies with a box cutter, back at it again.

In the end, this premiere feels jumbled on a tonal, narrative, and thematic level, unable to really settle on one target to satirize and explore in depth. As a result, I didn’t feel very moved during those theoretically tragic final beats, despite liking Jones’s and O’Dowd’s performances. I won’t take this as any definitive sign of season seven’s overall quality, but if Brooker wanted to start off with a bang and prove Black Mirror still has ideas in the tank, he may have chosen wrong.

Final Reflections

• Amanda advertising “Silver Swans” 50-plus dating to her indignant 49-year-old principal is funny, I won’t lie.

• Tracee Ellis Ross is another highlight of this episode, of course. Her polite deliveries of bad news are infuriating in a good way.