As one of the most successful anthology shows to crop up in the last decade and change, there’s a special pleasure that shows up in our lives any time a new season of Black Mirror is getting ready to release: Looking at the esoteric episode titles of Charlie Brooker’s latest batch of TV dystopias, and trying to figure out what these latest installments will actually be about. What’s Aaron Paul doing in space, huh? (Will he meet Jesse Plemons in space for a Breaking Bad space reunion?) Good news for us, then, that Netflix has released a whole new crop of titles (along with a handful of basic plot descriptions, which are available over at Entertainment Weekly) ahead of the show’s upcoming sixth season, leaving our brains to pick away at the new reveals.
Like “Joan Is Awful,” which sounds hard on Joan, if you ask us. That one stars Schitt’s Creek and Kevin Can F**k Himself’s Annie Murphy as an “average woman” who discovers that her life is being made into a prestige TV show, complete with Salma Hayek playing her. (We don’t know why Murphy is consistently drawn to this kind of meta project, but we’re not going to argue against it; meanwhile, Michael Cera and Rob Delaney co-star.) Or “Loch Henry,” in which a young couple (Samuel Blenkin and Myha’la Herrold) travel to a small Scottish town to film a “genteel nature documentary,” but end up being drawn into something much more sordid. Does it involve a monster? Are we exposing our ugly American natures by revealing we automatically associate Lochs with monsters? Only time will tell.
Space Aaron Paul, meanwhile, will appear in “Beyond The Sea,” where he’ll apparently be sharing a space setting with Space Josh Hartnett. This is the most immediately flashy of the five episodes, promising “an alternate 1969, where two men on a perilous high-tech mission wrestle with the consequences of an unimaginable tragedy.” (Said tragedy appears to also involve Kate Mara.) Black Mirror has gotten a lot of mileage out of “two guys in very isolated circumstances lose their minds at each other,” so seeing Hartnett and Paul play out that dynamic sounds pretty exciting. Then there’s “Mazey Day,” which stars Zazie Beetz, and is yet another Black Mirror episode about the ways our various panopticons encroach on regular life, in this case, in the form of paparazzi hounding a starlet. And finally, “Demon 79,” which stars Anjana Vasan, and which, at the risk of being reductive, sounds pretty Knock At The Cabin to us: “A meek sales assistant is told she must commit terrible acts to prevent disaster.” EW also notes that it’s the only one of this batch not to be written solely by Brooker, who collaborated on this one with Ms. Marvel’s Bisha K. Ali.
Black Mirror returns to Netflix this June.
