Liam Hoofe ranks the Black Mirror season 3 episodes from worst to best…
Three cheers for Charlie Brooker! Season three of Black Mirror arrived on Netflix last week and it proved, beyond a shadow of doubt that Charlie Brooker is an absolute genius.
Any concerns that the show may have lost its touch with its transfer to Netflix were wiped away in the opening ten minutes of the first episode, when it become clear that Netflix was just going to make Black Mirror even bigger and better than it was before.
Season three is perhaps the show’s finest to date. Expanding outside of London/England and taking the show to places that simply weren’t possible during its channel 4 days.
Join me here as I break down and rank each of the six episodes that make up Black Mirror season 3 (and be sure to check out my ranking of the first two seasons here)…
6: Men against Fire
Men against Fire is not a bad episode of Black Mirror by any means, it is just one that feels a little too familiar and the moral of the story, and the twist that comes with it feel a little too predictable.
Men against Fire spends its first half traipsing its way through various different army movie tropes, we see an ambush, a series of training sessions and some manly banter exchanged between the troop. Madeline Brewer, of Orange is the New Black fame is good fun to spend time with as the trigger happy Ray, but the inclusion of an ass kicking woman who has the men’s numbers also feels a bit generic.
The episode’s finest moment is the final conversation that takes place between our hero Stripe and the military psychologist; a clear battle of good vs evil that is as gripping as it is horrifying. Men against Fire is an episode that highlights the way we treat the downtrodden in society, in a world where empathy is treated as a weakness, not a strength.
5: Hated in the Nation
One thing the increased budget of Netflix has allowed Black Mirror to do is to explore different genres, and in its final, hour and a half long episode it gives us its first ever take on the police procedural.
A journalist is killed one night after receiving hate filled messages on social media and the police, no matter how hard they try can not seem to find a culprit. The episode, like many others, explores the dangers of social media and how reactionary and twisted we can become when we are granted the mask of anonymity.
The episode does well to fill its lengthy run time and genuinely keeps us guessing until the closing moments. I would also recommend watching this after reading Jon Ronson’s You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.
4: Playtest
Another genre that Black Mirror dipped further into this season was horror. If Men against Fire is an episode about an augmented reality then Playtest is one about the dangers of virtual reality, or is it?
Playtest, like a lot of Black Mirror episodes can be viewed in a number of ways and most people appear to be writing this episode off as one that is fairly straight forward and inconsequential. What I saw in Playtest was an episode about how our lives are increasingly becoming video games.
Cooper, played by Wyatt Russell, is a traveler who runs out of money in London. To fund his journey home he agrees to partake in an experiment for a games company – one that will see him experience horrors through a virtual reality headset. Except, in typical Black Mirror fashion, not all is at it seems the further he progresses into the game.
Except this episode isn’t just about that- throughout the whole show Cooper lives his whole life like it is a video game. He meets a friend on a Tinder inspired app where he must swipe right or left to find somebody, he chooses a job on another app, this time he must select the one with the highest risk, to earn the best reward. Through out the episode we see this theme explored more and more, and it is only when he doesn’t follow the rules of life’s games (failing to ring back his mother) that the virtual reality itself goes wrong.
It is also the most frightening episode of the season, with 10 Cloverfield Lane director Dan Trachtenberg lending the show his services and delivering a nerve shredding hour of television.
Click below to continue on for the top three episodes…
Originally published October 29, 2016. Updated April 16, 2018.
