Black Mirror Series 2In childhood the monster that lived under my bed was a shadowy, shape-shifting fear of the unknown. By adulthood that monster had morphed into a more specific beast: insecurity. Will my relationship survive? Is my life, my job, my future, a joke? Who am I, how did I get here? Does anybody care??

Charlie Brooker’s Emmy winning Black Mirror returns for a second series with three more self contained stories. The broadcaster and columnist this time serves as writer for all three and his pithy insight packs a punch that lands well across each drama in the anthology.

The DVD opens with Be Right Back. Ash and Martha are looking forward to starting a new life in the country together. As the young couple unpacks, Ash cannot resist uploading a photo of his younger self for his friends to mock online. Martha gestures to the phone and jokes that it is a thief – so much time does he squander sharing music, opinions and the myriad detail of their everyday lives. The two are separated soon after and Martha has occasion to be grateful for such a cache. But Ash is not the man he used to be and his loyal, loving partner quickly begins to wish that their split be made far more permanent.

Be Right Back is a fine example of the quality and deceptive simplicity of Brooker’s writing. From the plausible technology to the easy bickering between the lovers, the story is built deftly and the relationship established well. Co-stars Hayley Atwell and Domhnall Gleeson have a familiarity and chemistry that sells both the preamble and the thrust of the tale despite a somewhat sci-fi twist. Hayley Atwell’s performance is especially striking – she handles the multiple zig zags of Martha’s moods with aplomb. Domhnall Gleeson, challenged to be both original and ‘new’ Ash, also rose to the occasion. I felt a judder of delicious disquiet run straight through me when he casually threw a phrase newly taught by Martha into their next conversation. The episode tugs insistently at well worn heart strings – it is television at its most emotionally manipulative and it is absolutely excellent.

The second drama, White Bear, plays its cards far closer to its chest. Victoria (Lenora Crichlow) wakes and cannot remember a thing about her life. And we are equally in the dark. The house she is in is unfamiliar to her and pictures of her partner and child on the mantel only elicit white noise in her mind and strobe-like flickers of recall. Out on the street strangers with blank faces record her distress on mobile phones and turn their back to her pleas for help. Beyond the estate a masked man appears, he pulls a gun and runs her to ground. The only communicative allies she finds turn her focus to the sanctuary of the White Bear facility. It should be a safe place to shelter and try to piece together her misplaced identity but the name is horribly familiar to Victoria…

White Bear is the more tabloid of the new Black Mirror trio and this was, for me, the most crudely drawn of the three dramas.  Lenora Crichlow lends chilling authenticity to Victoria with her beaten down demeanor, credible enough under the circumstances, subtly altering until it becomes hangdog with the cycle’s endless repetition. Michael Smiley as Baxter, the ‘Good Samaritan’, deserves a special mention for the Ringmaster pizzazz he brings to his role. The denouement is stirring and it is the episode which, I suspect, will most polarize opinion but that shock ending suffers for being specifically contrived for shock. A lighter hand with the melodrama and some wiggle room for viewers’ imaginations would have allowed the sinister safari park concept to shine. Nevertheless it was an effective and entertaining watch.

The Waldo Moment concludes this series. Failed comedian Jamie is floundering on late night TV. His sole income stream is provided by the stream of four letter words he spits for an anarchic CGI character on a satirical comedy show. But when Jamie (Daniel Rigby) attacks smarmy politico Liam Monroe he accidentally taps into the extremely lucrative zeitgeist – and channel boss Jack Napier cannot resist cashing in. Jamie makes a personal connection on the campaign trail with ambitious candidate Gwendolyn (Chloe Pirrie) but her inadvertent rejection sends him spiraling back into resentment and darkness while Waldo is gaining a momentum of his own.

Brooker is undeniably a master satirist. He understands mob mentality and plays with the concept adeptly. While The Waldo Moment is the most straightforward of the anthology, he still manages to plunge a manipulative hand deep into our expectations and squirm us into discomfort at the very moment we are smugly ‘getting it’. Jason Flemyng’s Jack Napier is a caricature of every grasping TV exec on the media radar yet his international ambitions for Waldo are quite farfetched enough to ring true and sufficiently bonkers to exhaust an amateur conspiracy theorist’s blogging fingers. My only criticism of the episode regards its place in the running order. The DVD reprises the broadcast sequence of episodes and holding back The Waldo Moment until the end reduces it to something of an anticlimax, in my opinion. To get the maximum enjoyment out of this outstanding series, flip the first and last episodes around and watch them all back to back. These New Millennial Tales of the Unexpected are unexpectedly compelling viewing – you might as well make a night of it!

[Rating:5/5]

Black Mirror Series 2 is available to buy on DVD from 6th May 2013