Black Mirror - disturbingly brilliant

On Monday evening Black Mirror returned to Channel 4 for a second series of three stand-alone episodes.  The new series follows on from last year's critically acclaimed triptych, which explored ideas about the alienation of humanity through technology, and the self-aggrandisation of traditional and social media.  The series is notable for being darkly comic in places, and just plain dark in others.  The opening episode last year raised the bar extremely high, by creating a wacky story in which a terrorist group kidnap a member of the royal family, and promise to release her only if the British PM performs an act of bestiality live on TV.  Yep, that's right.

Now though it takes someone with the darkly labyrinthine mind of Charlie Brooker to come up with this stuff, it isn't there just for the shock value.  The opening episode is a layered commentary on the nature of 24 hour news, on how the issue of the day is built up to be the be all and end all of news by the dedicated news channels - but is forgotten quickly afterwards.  Though to the people involved, its impacts last for years to come.  It's also about the fickle nature of public opinion, and how the public are as complicit as producers in all the shit that ends up on our TV screens these days.

The second episode of last year's series was my favourite.  It imagined a post-modern version of 'The Machine Stops' in which people live in virtual isolation from one another, interacting through online avatars and working long hours pedalling bikes or playing computer games to an unknown end earning credits to spend on facile entertainment.  The epitome of success in this society is to earn enough credits to appear on an X-Factor style show in which the panel - aka the Twittersphere - judge your act / worth.  To succeed here is to succeed in life, to fail here is to consign yourself back to the treadmill.  It's a wry look at modern popular culture extrapolated to an extreme.  But also it's a warning about a nightmare future where the entirely of culture has been sold out to Simon Cowell and the value of human labour has been diminished to almost nothing.

Monday night's episode was startlingly simple yet extraordinarily powerful.  It felt like a 21st century version of the Twilight Zone as it detailed the story of Martha (played by Hayley Atwell), a woman who loses her husband and seeks solace in the remnants of his life that exist out there in his now-dormant twitter and Facebook accounts.  It's drama and science fiction rolled into one, looking at the potential for technology to help us while at the same time making us less human.

It was bloody brilliant.  I'm looking forwards to next week's episode, something about a woman waking up and finding out she's being hunted by people.  Sounds mental.