In a world in which the creator of the Oculus headset claims to have invented a new virtual reality system – called NerveGear – that kills players for real when they are bumped off in a game, it is clear that Black Mirror has its work increasingly cut out. NerveGear is similar to the premise of Playtest in season five of Charlie Brooker’s tech dystopia magnum opus, in which Amazon is promising to enable Alexa to speak to you in the voices of dead loved ones – see season two’s opener for how that works out – while digital recreations of celebrities a la Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too are becoming increasingly common and China runs a credit scoring system one notch down from the one Bryce Dallas Howard navigates in Nosedive. And the less said about the whole prime-ministers-interfering-with-pigs prescience, the better.
Season six opens in another avatar-based nightmare with Joan Is Awful. Joan, a mild-mannered, mildly depressed HR manager (Schitt’s Creek’s Annie Murphy), settles down with her boyfriend to watch a new series of the same name on “Streamberry” – a platform that looks remarkably similar to Netflix, home of Black Mirror since 2016 – only to find that it is a dramatisation of that day in her life. It stars Salma Hayek Pinault (getting a chance to exercise her comedy chops on the small screen for the first time since her glorious turn in 30 Rock) as an awful version of Joan. Every new episode recaps that day’s events. Life becomes unbearable as people in real life assume the awful Joan’s personality is hers, her secrets are revealed to everyone and nightmarish layer is laid upon nightmarish layer until the denouement.
