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Black Mirror fans were licking their lips and crying “exit game” when Netflix announced a sequel to the much-loved ‘USS Callister’ episode, and creator Charlie Brooker has dished more on how the next instalment came about.
Speaking to Deadline in the days leading up to Black Mirror Season 7, Brooker told us the idea to follow up on the Star Trek-esque episode that starred Jesse Plemons, Cristin Milioti and Michaela Coel had been percolating almost immediately upon its conclusion.
Brooker revealed there had even been early-stage plans to make a ‘USS Callister’ limited TV series or feature film.
“Of all the stories we’ve done this one ended as though we were setting it up for the sequel,” said Brooker. “It went through various guises but in the end we made it feature length within the season. It took so long getting it together – we had the pandemic, writers’ strike and then had to get everyone’s schedules lined up and that was its own Rubik’s cube on a unicycle.”
The ‘USS Callister: Into Infinity’ sequel is the final ep of the upcoming Season 7 and features most of the returning cast bar Plemons and Coel. “Robert Daly is dead, but now the crew of the USS Callister – led by Captain Nanette Cole – are stranded in an infinite virtual universe, fighting for survival against 30 million players,” reads the synopsis.
Having spent so much of his past 15 years writing an anthology series, Brooker said he relished the opportunity to write for the same characters a second time, as he joked that “the character I have written for most consistently is [comedy creation] Philomena Cunk.”
Black Mirror EP Jessica Rhoades added: “Charlie gets to write these incredible scripts and create these abundant ensemble casts, and then he waves goodbye to them. To me Black Mirror is really a set of pilots.”
Artificial Intelligence, old movies & ‘enshittification’
With ensembles in mind, Black Mirror Season 7 features the crème de la crème of acting talent including Paul Giamatti, Harriet Walter, Issa Rae, Emma Corrin, Peter Capaldi, Rashida Jones and Will Poulter, the latter of whom returns for a second stint in the Black Mirror universe following his turn in the interactive ‘Bandersnatch’ ep.
Episodes have titles including ‘Common People’, ‘Plaything’ and ‘Eulogy’ and deal with a wealth of themes as ever including high-concept technology, artificial intelligence, digitisation and ‘enshittification’, the latter being a term coined by Cory Doctorow describing the gradual decline in quality of online products as platforms prioritize profit over user experience. Meanwhile, TCKR Systems Communications, which has featured in previous eps, makes a reappearance. A new TCKR product, Nubbin, was teased in a ‘leaked email’ sent to press yesterday intended clearly as an Easter Egg.
Brooker said Season 7 differs more from last season than it does from older series of Black Mirror, which has been airing for nearly 15 years first on Channel 4 then Netflix.
“Season 6 was ‘Red Mirror’ in that we had more horror and less emphasis on tech-related storylines,” added Brooker. “I knew going into this one that it would be a little more of the original Black Mirror certainly in terms of that [tech] focus. So in a way there is less difference between Season 7 and say 3 or 2 as there is between Season 7 and 6.”
As ever, some episodes are “a bit of a gut punch” while others hit a “slightly different register and are more reflective,” Brooker explained.
He cited two eps that pay homage to older technology, these being ‘Hotel Reverie’, which is about an immersive remake of a British black-and-white movie, and ‘Eulogy’, about an isolated man (Giamatti) introduced to a groundbreaking system that allows users to step inside old photographs.
On these two, Brooker said he was inspired by Peter Jackson’s Get Back Beatles doc, which remastered hours and hours of old Fab Four footage.
Rhoades said the team had “spent time thinking about the tangibility of actual objects.” “We thought about what that tangible quality was about photographs from the past,” she added of ‘Eulogy’. “It’s not just digital versus practical but also the fact that people didn’t look perfect in them, there wasn’t that curated quality of digital photoshop.”
With all these variations, Brooker said Black Mirror continues to follow an “idiosyncratic” path.
“Within and under the umbrella of Black Mirror you will have eps that are gritty, grounded and nasty, and you will have ones that are more fanciful, epic or ‘swoonsome’,” he added.
‘Joan is Awful’
Artificial Intelligence will unsurprisingly rear its head plenty in Season 7 and having been such a part of the 2023 writers’ strike himself, Brooker has had time to reflect on the impact of the Season 6 ‘Joan is Awful’ episode, which started to play out in front of his eyes when AI guardrails became a key part of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA negotiations.
“About a month after we wrapped [‘Joan is Awful’], ChatGPT launched and it was bonkers that this then coincided with the strikes,” he added. “The debate has been fascinating.”
Brooker treats AI developments with a “combination of impressed awe and rising horror.” “I see the value of AI as a tool but I think humankind should be designing tools to be wielded by humans and I worry when you start cutting people out of the equation.”
Black Mirror Season 7 launches April 10.
