Anthologies are all the rage these days, from Ryan Murphy’s ever-expanding empire of mini-series to Joe Swanberg’s collection of romance shorts. Yet no program has taken advantage of the elasticity of anthology storytelling quite like Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, trading pet themes, genres, creative personnel, and tones from one episode to the next.
A newfangled, potentially disastrous technology pops up in each installment, giving the series a healthy sense of cohesion, but the four season aired so far could not be more all over the map. Political satires and future dystopias, cop procedurals and war dramas, soulless nihilism and life-affirming humanism: If you dislike Black Mirror, perhaps you just haven’t found the right episode.
Such a varied palette of styles and stories means that the series is naturally hit or miss. It delivers far more hits than misses, but hashing out which episode hits hardest can be helpful for a newbie who wants to customize their viewing order.
Read on for Vulture’s definitive ranking of all 19 episodes of Black Mirror, from the worst to the best:
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19. "Arkangel" (Season 4, Episode 2)
The bad moms of Bad Moms have nothing on Rosemarie DeWitt’s Marie, the baddest mom of all. She thinks she’s only got her daughter’s best interests at heart when she signs the girl up for an experimental program that livestreams her vision to mommy’s iPad, but once young Sara hits her teen years, she doesn’t see the flagrant violation of her personal privacy that way.
Situated on a shaky foundation — how could anyone in their right mind not see this idea’s potential for disaster? — and indelicately directed by Jodie Foster, this episode muddles its own commentary on the hazards of overzealous parenting and the emotional malformation resulting from it. If an episode insists on being dumb, the least it could do is be entertaining. “Arkangel” is neither.
18. "Men Against Fire" (Season 3, Episode 5)
Turning attention to the ravages of wartime and the way troops are brainwashed to kill, Brooker stumbles on his landing in an uncharacteristically weak third act. A soldier starts to wrestle with new feelings and a peculiar sickness after gunning down three of the feral mutant abominations that stalk a futuristic society. His sudden changes could be PTSD, or they could be something else.
The eventual “twist” is so clearly telegraphed ahead of time that it hardly qualifies as such, and then when Brooker unloads it, the script fails to break any ground not already terraformed by the likes of Starship Troopers. Add a dash of violence falling further to the side of gratuitousness than usual, and you’ve got a slog of an hour with no reward for completing the mission.
17. "The Waldo Moment" (Season 2, Episode 3)
The best Black Mirror episodes tiptoe along the tightrope between the plausible and the absurd, but “The Waldo Moment” loses its balance. In today’s political climate, the notion that a bawdy cartoon bear could be elected to public office is but one step down from a permanently enraged pumpkin-man doing the same, but Brooker doesn’t give his premise the fidelity seen in the equally outrageous “The National Anthem.”
As such, the political commentary goes too broad, accusing the public of being dum-dums and filing the tired charge that politicians are phony. Brooker is at his most effective when he avoids pointing fingers and lets the story implicate whatever needs damning all on its own. “The Waldo Moment” fails to do either.
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