Why Black Mirror’s big twist has the series tied up in knots

If you’ve seen Black Mirror, you’ll know it has a thing for twists. Charlie Brooker’s satirical sci-fi series has established itself as this century’s answer to Tales of the Unexpected: each episode doles out 40 to 90 minutes of grim techno-parable before – blam! – pulling the rug from beneath you. But even those familiar with Brooker’s penchant for narrative curveballs will have likely found themselves stumped by “Mazey Day”, the third episode in an uneven sixth season of Black Mirror, released on Netflix last week. In case the obvious needs stating: spoilers follow.

“Mazey Day” follows Bo (Zazie Beetz), a ruthless paparazzo who decides to quit the trade after the suicide of a celebrity of whom she had sold compromising pictures. After initially putting the sordid racket behind her, Bo is lured back by the promise of one last big scoop: photographs of buzzy young actor Mazey Day (Clara Rugaard), who has disappeared from a film set in the Czech Republic, prompting whispers of scandal and substance abuse. (There are shades of Britney Spears in the press’s relentless hounding.) After a tortuous hunt, Bo and a trio of other, even less scrupulous paps, find her at a secluded rehab facility. Coming face to face with the thespian shut away, it is revealed that she is not, in fact, an addict, but a werewolf. An actual, Hammer-horror-style, grab-your-pitchforks-and-silver-bullets werewolf. Who saw that coming? We get a few scenes of B-movie carnage, then, finally, the beast is taken down. Now human and cognisant again, lying in a pool of her own blood, Mazey Day resigns to shoot herself in the head, while Bo stands astride her, capturing everything through the lens.

The episode is a tonal and generic departure for Black Mirror, which usually traffics in horrors of an altogether more technological bent. It’s also – perhaps not unrelatedly – one of the series’ weakest satires. (The moral depravity of paparazzi culture was skewered with far greater insight and invention in the 2014 Jake Gyllenhaal film Nightcrawler.) In the past, Black Mirror has reflected – and even anticipated – news headlines; here, the story of a media feeding frenzy leading to a celebrity suicide inevitably brings to mind real-life tragedies such as the death of Love Island presenter Caroline Flack. But Black Mirror has nothing substantial to say about cases like these, where 21st-century technology and social media exacerbates the damage of personal struggles. Celebrities, like everyone else, deserve privacy – yes. The press can be predatory – true. Society’s appetite for exposé is unhealthy – duh. What else is new?

We also have to question “Mazey Day”’s big lycanthropic twist by the end. It’s clear Mazey is no innocent: she is a vicious killer. That the episode initially disguises Mazey’s werewolfism as addiction presents its own problematic implications; a charitable reading would dismiss this as a red herring rather than a metaphor. But it also raises questions about the media’s handling of those who have truly transgressed. Does a crime strip away any reasonable entitlement to privacy? What if it’s bloody murder? We can infer, from the way Mazey’s suicide is framed, that we are supposed to feel some sympathy for her in her dying moments. But why? Who exactly is the victim here? Rather than deepen the episode’s satirical message, the werewolf plotline merely muddies it.

Muddy, too, is the episode’s depiction of Bo. Beetz is a terrific screen presence, whose turn as Vanessa in the FX series Atlanta deserved every superlative thrown at it. Her character here, though, is ambivalent and inscrutable, a photographic voyeur driven by circumstance, not conviction. By the episode’s end, as she leers over Mazey’s body holding a camera, it’s clear Bo is the principal target of Black Mirror’s social critique. From predator to prey, and back again. And yet, the series equivocates. The episode makes clear that Bo takes the job because of financial pressures. Her life is far from ideal; we get multiple scenes devoted to the passive-aggressive behaviours of her white housemate. The blame clearly goes further than just this one photojournalist – this goes without saying. So where does the buck stop? That’s a question “Mazey Day” isn’t really interested in exploring.

Black Mirror’s foray into horror has not been a welcome one: the episode has been slated by fans and critics alike. Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with schlock. Supernatural horror can be as useful and pliable a framework for social satire as any other. We can find art, and even grace, in pulp. (Think Andrzej Żuławski’s Posession, or Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day.) But with “Mazey Day”, the trashy genre leanings never feel honest. That’s because they aren’t: since being revived and spit-shined by Netflix in 2016 (after initially airing on Channel 4), Black Mirror can be unambiguously considered a “prestige” series, thanks in part to burlier production values, big-name stars (Miley Cyrus; Salma Hayek; Aaron Paul), and runtimes that inflated many of Brooker’s sci-fi fables into de facto feature films. Black Mirror is about as “pulp” as Springwatch. We can sometimes forgive a hokey B-movie for handling sensitive topics with crass abandon – that’s what they do. Black Mirror should not be afforded the same slack. It should be held to the standards of what it is: popular, big-budget adult programming, with all the expectations and responsibilities that go along with that.

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The best Black Mirror twists function like a magic trick. One whoosh of a wand, and a rabbit is plucked from a hat. “Mazey Day” succeeds at this, I suppose – I doubt even seasoned Black Mirror viewers would have predicted the episode’s supernatural turn, the abrupt gear-change into werewolf horror. But what does it really mean? As the rabbit bounds away, we have only the echoes of a self-satisfied “voila” in our ears, and in our hands an old, empty hat.

‘Black Mirror’ is available to stream now on Netflix