'Black Mirror' season 3 news: Creator teases season 3 episode themes; episode synopses revealed
"Black Mirror," the British sci-fi/satire anthology series, is back with its third season later this month and creator Charlie Brooker, who also produces the show, has teased what lies ahead.
"Black Mirror" season 3, which consists of six episodes, streams on Netflix. The first two seasons, each made up of three episodes, aired on the U.K.'s Channel 4.
In an interview with The Independent, Brooker revealed that the upcoming season features numerous issues, including social media, populist anger, video gaming, insecurity and the future of military technology.
"We touch on all sorts of different themes throughout the series," he said.
In the first episode, "Nosedive," Bryce Dallas Howard plays Lacie, a woman who lives in a world where people are given numerical ratings that fluctuate by the minute. The character "lives her life trying to please everyone so that they will give her a good rating," Brooker told Mirror Online.
"Play Test," the second episode, is what Brooker called a "techno horror romp." In it, Cooper (Wyatt Russell), a thrill-seeker, tests a video game that is so realistic it basically becomes a living nightmare.
In "Shut Up and Dance," the third episode, Kenny (Alex Lawther) gets sucked into an online trap and has to ally himself with the dubious Hector (Jerome Flynn). "It's not giving too much away to say that it's essentially a blackmail story about people forced to dance like puppets on strings," Brooker said.
He described "San Junipero," the fourth episode, as the show's most romantic to date. "It's very much influenced by '80s cinema and '80s pop culture," he added.
Future soldiers protecting villagers against feral mutants are at the center of "Men Against Fire," the fifth episode." "They've got technology to assist them, and we come to see how these technologically assisted soldiers fare when faced with a visceral, ugly threat," Brooker said.
Finally, in the sixth episode, titled "Hated in the Nation," a detective and her sidekick investigate a series of deaths linked to social media.
Netflix originally intended for the third season of "Black Mirror" to have 12 episodes. Instead, the other six episodes will make up "Black Mirror" season 4.
When asked about what's in store in the next season of "Black Mirror," Brooker told Deadline that there will be a wide mix of themes, with epic stories standing alongside "kitchen sink level domesticity."
"Black Mirror" season 3 drops Friday, Oct. 21, on Netflix.