Keep those knives away from your Roombas! Netflix has announced that its science fiction/horror anthology series Black Mirror has been renewed for a seventh season. The renewal is hardly a surprise, as Black Mirror is an international hit despite a four-year gap between seasons 5 and 6. And as the world’s technology inches ever closer to Black Mirror‘s dystopian worlds, there’s clearly no shortage of “technology run amok” stories to tell.
Season 6 saw series creator Charlie Brooker branching out with a new take on his cult series. “Demon 79”, the final entry of the season, debuted under the Red Mirror label. The episode follows mild-mannered store clerk Nida (Anjana Vasan) who accidentally releases the demon Gaap (Paapa Essiedu) from a talisman. Gaap informs Nida that she has three days to make three human sacrifices, or the world will end. “Demon 79” isn’t your typical Black Mirror episode, as it is set in the past and focuses on the supernatural instead of dangerous technology.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, Brooker said,
“I started this season with a “Red Mirror” story, Demon 79, which was set in the past. The idea [with the “Red Mirror” label] was to do an alternative horror companion to Black Mirror. But Demon79 links back to regular Black Mirror episodes near the end. That made me think, yeah, I can do episodes [set] in the past, so why am I locking myself into setting things in a future with lots of chrome and glass and holograms? For the “Beyond the Sea” episode, I’ll set it in 1969. What would that look like? And incidentally, that’s quite exciting, because it feels like a sort of lost science fiction story of the 60s. And it means that the characters within it are behaving like people of their era, not of our era. Is there a term for that? Retrofuturistic? Psychedelic steampunk?
Vanity Fair
Brooker added, “I don’t want to sit here feeling like I’m in a box where I have to write an episode about NFTs or whatever’s on the tech pages today. That’s not what the show was ever intended to do.” It’s a smart move to diversify the series’ offerings and to expand the idea of what a Black Mirror episode can be. Exploring the past (or alternate histories) opens up lots of avenues for the series, which audiences saw in the episodes “Beyond the Sea” and “Mazey Day”.
It’s unclear if season 7 of Black Mirror will include Red Mirror episodes as well. Brooker told the Radio Times, “It depends what people make of it and how it gets received and this that and the other,” adding that “It was really really useful as a sort of refresh – a reset.”
Season 7 doesn’t yet have a release date, and no casting has been announced. But we’ll keep you updated when it does.
(featured image: Nick Wall/Netflix)
