The first episode of Black Mirror saw the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom forced to get intimate with a pig; somehow, even that doesn’t match up to the inconceivable weirdness and horrors going on in IRL politics. A new trailer for Black Mirror mashes up the real world with scenes from the series, looking to blend fiction and reality in reference of the show’s fourth season.
Black Mirror has always been a cautionary tale, proving that science fiction is usually prescient and that humans are, often, straight-up horrible to one another. This new trailer, which premiered on Friday, emphasizes the ways in which technology is moving forward by leaps and bounds as humans look to tear one another apart.
“We’re genuinely empathetic as a species,” Michael Kelly’s Arquette said in Season 3’s “Men Against Fire” as feral mutants honed in on their victims. “I mean, we don’t actually really want to kill each other.”
This new trailer argues that, yes, actually, humans very much do want to kill one another. Soldiers smirk their way through realistic training simulations; people (almost) vote a cartoon character into office; dating apps turn dark; riots erupt; “fake news” dominates the human consciousness; and, all the while, we’re staring into the black mirrors of the technology we’ve surrounded ourselves with, arguing, screaming, bleeding, and running our society into the ground.
At least, that’s what Black Mirror is positing.
“Not everything that isn’t true is a lie,” Jodie Whittaker’s Fi says in Season 1’s “The Entire History of You,” referencing the lies we tell ourselves and others so we can sleep at night. You can undoubtedly expect even more hard truths in Season 4.
Black Mirror Season 4 is now streaming on Netflix.
