Black Museum ★★

Out of all of Season 4, the most disturbing moments occur within the hour of ‘Black Museum’. Structurally and thematically, the episode is most similar to the fan-favorite ‘White Christmas’, featuring three vignettes of horrifying technological advances connected by an overarching plotline. Nish (Letitia Wright) is charging her car in the middle of the western U.S. desert when she stumbles upon Rolo Haynes’ (Douglas Hodge) Black Museum, a collection of criminological artifacts. Rolo tells Nish three stories, each about an artifact found in the museum and the proprietor’s involvement with it.

The first follows a Dr. Peter Dawson (Daniel Lapaine), whom Rolo offers a neural implant allowing him to feel patients’ pain in order to better diagnose them. The plan turns south when Dawson soon finds himself sadomasochistically addicted to the pain. The second is about a man (Aldis Hodge) who undergoes a procedure (again, offered by Rolo) to transfer the consciousness of his comatose wife into his head. The final vignette ties the first two together by a piece of background news seen in both. Rolo shows off a sentient hologram of Clayton Leigh (Babs Olsunanmokun), a death-row inmate cloned before his execution. Rolo has profited from allowing customers to pull the electric switch on Clayton’s copy, effectively executing him thousands of times. Finishing the twisted tale, Rolo collapses after Nish reveals that she is Clayton’s daughter and poisoned him. Inflicting the same fate onto Rolo, Nish makes a keychain copy of his consciousness eternally suffering in the electric chair before driving off into the sunset.

This is probably the darkest Black Mirror has ever gone. Sure, there are episodes based more in reality like ‘15 Million Merits’ and ‘Shut Up and Dance’ that I personally found more upsetting, but ‘Black Museum’ takes the show purposely down the darkest, most twisted path Brooker can dream up. And down this road, the show loses something. As in other moments scattered throughout the season, ‘Black Museum’ never escapes the feeling that we’ve seen this all before. The idea of eternal suffering was already explored better in ‘White Christmas’, not to mention the structure of an anthology within an anthology. Indeed, ‘Black Museum’ winds up feeling neither original nor truly compelling. It’s sadistic for the sake of being sadistic, and that’s something I simply can’t enjoy.

Black Mirror has a reputation for aiming to break your soul, but to me that’s not at all what it represents. To me, Black Mirror is cathartic science fiction, tapping into our deepest fears and insecurities about the future and exposing how technology could come to exploit them if we’re not paying attention. If Black Mirror is disturbing, well, that’s because real life is disturbing. There’s a trailer for Season 4, for example, that mixes real footage from 2017 with scenes from the show, and it’s utterly terrifying. Black Mirror is exactly what its title implies, a mirror reflecting back onto our modern world. Most of its painful suffering and darkness is earned, but nothing about ‘Black Museum’ is earned; it depicts literal eternal suffering just because it can. So yes, I know many will be praising the episode for how uncompromisingly messed up it is, but I cannot in good conscience do the same. As an exploitative hour engineered to repulse, it succeeds marvelously, but totally fails to preserve the humanity of the Black Mirror I know.

Like all good things, Black Mirror feels like it is ready to come to an end. While there’s no word yet if future episodes are in the works, I would be thoroughly surprised if Brooker can manage more than one more season. Season 4 mostly remains a gripping piece of television, but one that can’t keep up with the incredibly high bar set by itself and oftentimes real life. I will always be a fan, but it pains me to say that many of these episodes are not quite as compelling nor as insightful.

This season does manage to be a bit more hopeful though. Despite his infamy for creating such hopelessly cynical dystopias, I firmly believe Charlie Brooker is an optimist. He holds up a mirror to the injustices of the world, of what is and can still be, so that we never become this far gone. “The future is bright”, the show’s sarcastic tagline taunts. “The future is bright” indeed.