The rest of the season is, to be charitable, a little uneven. The second episode relies on technology that won’t be comprehensible to most. Indeed, the villain flat-out says at one point, “I don’t care if you don’t understand how it works.” Next is “Hotel Reverie,” a truly awful episode in which comedian Issa Rae plays an A-list actress who agrees to appear in an AI-reanimated black-and-white classic film. To no one’s surprise, she becomes stuck in the “movie” for years of subjective time, a predicament with which viewers will no doubt come to identify as “Hotel Reverie” slouches its unhurried way through a 76-minute runtime almost entirely devoid of excitement or even coherence. 

Episode 3, “Plaything,” is half an hour shorter but could still have been half an hour shorter. It’s a thin idea made worse by overacting and endless flashback exposition, culminating in a plot point that will strike even a novice computer hobbyist and plenty of regular people as entirely unnecessary. 

If there is a highlight in this season, it is probably “Eulogy.” The episode follows the story of a man invited to stir long-buried memories of a catastrophic relationship by an AI-enhanced examination of old photographs. Paul Giamatti brings a remarkable amount of humanity and credibility to the protagonist, and if the plot twists are slightly less believable than what we got from Season 9 of Dallas — you know, the one where Bobby was just in the shower the whole time — Giamatti is skilled enough to invest them with dignity. There’s just one problem: this didn’t need to be a Black Mirror episode. It would be equally plausible with the technology of 2025, or even 1985. As fate would have it, the final scene relies on having a cassette player available and already plugged in. It’s a bad sign when the future tech of a Black Mirror episode feels tacked on. No episode has been a worse offender in this regard since the lamentable “Black Museum” of Season 4. 

“USS Callister: Info Infinity” is the final episode, and the one that had fans excited before airing. With some justification, because it’s a direct continuation of the original “USS Callister,” bringing back the same characters and some of the same conflict, it stands in the same rough relation to the highly regarded original as Air Bud 2 does to Air Bud. It’s the same delightful idea, but rendered slightly shopworn the second time.

FORMULA ONE ROARS INTO WHAT COULD BE ITS FINEST SEASON YET

It’s worth noting that Black Mirror debuted in 2011, long before “binge watching” or COVID-19-fueled TV consumption habits, and it had just three episodes, each of which came across as original, daring, and discussion-provoking. One wonders if this season could have benefited from a similar approach. Too much of it is filler, both on the aggregate and within the episodes. Nearly 14 years later, the show feels aimless and formulaic. The near-future ideas that crackled and sizzled across the early seasons are gone. In fact, a viewer who watched Season 7 before Season 1 could be forgiven for concluding that the former was filmed in 2010 while the latter is brand-new. 

Aimless, ennui-soaked, and largely unambitious to a fault, Black Mirror’s Season 7 fails to provide much sense of the future at all. The show’s little tropes, from the temple-mounted brain-interaction dots to the Uncool Britannia set design that seems primarily intended to continually raise the bar for “depressing rooms in which to live,” have gone stale after a decade and a half of reuse. Is it the fault of the showrunner and chief writer, Charlie Brooker? Or has he merely been swept aside or even swept up by an ever more unpleasant techno-reality of soulless “AI” garbage, crowd control via drones and robots, ever-more-intrusive mandatory phone apps, and a sort of limping stagnation in everything from desktop computing power to online-shopping payment delays? Why bother to have a show about a dystopian future when the horrors of the present are sufficient unto the day?

Jack Baruth was born in Brooklyn, New York, and lives in Ohio. He is a pro-am race car driver and a former columnist for Road and Track and Hagerty magazines who writes the Avoidable Contact Forever newsletter.