Future imperfect
As Black Mirror returns with more cautionary tales about new tech, Charlie Brooker has one eye on the past, but says he's not 'anti-tech'…
Michael Wharley/Netflix
- Gabriel Tate
This article was first published in Radio Times magazine in April 2025.
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This year is more reflective,” Charlie Brooker says of his seventh season of Black Mirror. “While I was writing it, I was thinking about how the Beatles’ Get Back documentary used technology to bring the past back to life. It was startling, like staring through a periscope into 1969, so reliving moments from the past was definitely on my mind.”
This tone is most evident in the fifth of the new season’s six stories, Eulogy, in which solitary Philip (Paul Giamatti) experiences new technology that enables him to step into old photographs in search of memories of a long-estranged lover, now deceased, so that he can contribute to her memorial service.
“One of the key ingredients,” says Brooker of what he calls his “Rolodex of ideas”, “is a technology whose appeal and use you can absolutely understand. It’s always a bit of a barometer for an episode: would you use it yourself?”
Charlie Brooker on the set of USS Callister. Netflix
And would he? “Oh yeah, although maybe only in small doses with a therapist present. I found myself having to read an actual eulogy for my dad while we were finishing the episode. My mum had dug out some old photos I hadn’t seen in 40 years; one had my dad going to a fancy-dress party wearing a plastic ape mask and a coat with something written on it. I thought, ‘If only I could step in, I could read it…’”
The thing that scares me about the future is disinformation
Brooker, 54, who started out writing for a gaming magazine, tries to keep an admirably open mind when it comes to his sons – 13-year-old Covey and Huxley, 11 – and screens. “It would be hypocritical of me to go, ‘Get off that machine, it’s a sunny day outside!’ I just hear echoes of my parents. Instead, I’m often saying to them, ‘Why are you playing Fortnite? You should be playing Split Fiction!’ I’m probably annoying like that.
“I’m not anti-tech in that way that people might think. The thing that scares me about the future is disinformation, people getting radicalised or misled by the horrible stuff that they see.”
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The seventh season of Black Mirror has its fair share of “horrible stuff” to go with the contemplative, openly affecting moments, all of them testament to a big, boiling brain that seemingly cannot stop dreaming up new narrative hooks. “One of the things that makes old photos even more evocative is that they’re candid because you don’t get a chance to polish them,” Brooker concludes. “You can now use an AI tool to make it so everyone’s smiling – you’re constructing a false memory in the moment.” He goes quiet, filing another entry for that Rolodex. “That’s a good idea for a story!”
Authors
Gabriel Tate
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