I long ago speculated that Black Mirror would never get as bad as The Waldo Moment again. Well, they still haven’t, but they’ve taken a good run at it with this absolutely dire, painfully unfunny episode. I should say from the off that Miley Cyrus is not the problem with this episode. She’s fine. I mean, she’s not giving anything like a GREAT performance, but she’s fine. The problem here is with the godawful script. There’s some potential in the set-up, which follows a teen girl who idolizes a pop singer with a sunny persona while we also follow the pop singer’s life, which is far from the sunny front she puts forward. Yes, we’ve seen this about a hundred times, but that’s because there’s something enduringly compelling about the story and the technology of the doll with the singer’s personality implanted in it is a great creation and something that feels like we might all actually see in our lifetimes. But the script is uninspired at first and then, after the half-point of the episode, increasingly desperate and cringey. The episode eventually takes on the tone of a farce and everyone is just charging around screaming and flailing. Did I mention there’s a vehicle that is wearing a rat costume? Did I mention the mouse toys equipped with tasers? Did I mention that there is NOTHING in this episode that is funny? It’s weird; there’s often a lot of dark humor in the satire of Black Mirror, humor that lands with a bit of a sting. But when the show tries to be overtly comedic, it’s in an incredibly shrill and annoying way. Kind of a shame really because this episode actually has the most Black Mirrory scene of this season, a chilling sequence in which the Ashley Too doll implacably watches a news report about the real Ashley having fallen into a coma; it’s a grim, suspenseful scene and as a viewer you have no idea where it’s going – it is pitch black and kind of existentially terrifying. In the next scene, there’s a joke about Miley Cyrus getting a computer cable shoved up her butt. Oh, Black Mirror. Oh, honey. Season six? Yeah, me neither. A true artistic masterpiece brought to these painfully terrible depths, going out with this cringe inducing nonsense. Could this be intentional? Because maybe the bleakest, most despair-inducing, least redemptive ending of the series actually is the ending to the series. Somebody made a wrong choice somewhere. 1 star.
tl;dr – painfully bad, cringe-inducingly unfunny and increasingly desperate, this episode still isn’t quite the worst of the series, but it’s certainly punishing in all the wrong ways; what an ending. 1 star.