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The benefit of creating stories involving the horrors of technology is you’ll really never run out of inspiration. All you’ve gotta do is use facial recognition to unlock your phone, close a few targeted ads, and read an AI-generated synopsis of the latest news stories served to you by an algorithm. You’ll be chilled to the bone within minutes.
All that inspiration is why Netflix series Black Mirror is poised to enter its seventh season on April 10. And while the anthology series has always connected its various cautionary tales with little threads and references sprinkled throughout its episodes, Season 7 is straight-up revisiting a few episodes directly, like a continuation of fan-favorite episode “USS Callister” from Season 4.
More excitingly, Black Mirror Season 7 has a follow-up to Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, Netflix’s interactive film from 2018.
Plenty of Black Mirror episodes have something to do with videogames, but Bandersnatch actually was a game where viewers could make choices about the events happening on-screen. The film, which itself was about a developer adapting a pick-a-path book into a videogame, won an Emmy for best TV movie, and we liked it a lot too, calling it “Must-play TV.”
In the Season 7 trailer above, we see several shots of Will Poulter, who appears to be reprising his character from Bandersnatch.
“We have to create software that elevates us, or else what is the fucking point of the tools at our disposal?” he asks.
Near the end of the trailer he foreshadows the horror a bit more.
“What are most games about?” he asks another character.
“Escapism?”
“Killing,” Poulter says, as we see someone washing their hands in a blood-soaked sink.
What we don’t know yet is if this sequel to Bandersnatch will be interactive like the original film was. I sure hope so—it was a lot of fun rewatching the movie and making different choices to see how it changed the story.
Based on the trailer the series looks like it’s also tackling VR, augmented reality, and artificial intelligence, or as a character played by Peter Capaldi calls it, “artificial life.” As always, it doesn’t look like anything turns out that well for anyone, though the series does occasionally include, if not a happy ending for its characters, at least a semi-hopeful one.
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Kurt Indovina
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