Let’s be honest — ever since Apple’s Severance left us dangling with that white-knuckle Season 2 finale, we’ve all been searching for something to fill that eerie, corporate void. You know the one: Fluorescent lighting, morally ambiguous tech, and existential dread served with a side of beige. Well, guess what? The cure is about to arrive, and it’s even darker, weirder, and just as soul-twisting: Black Mirror Season 7 hits Netflix this Thursday, and if you’re a Severance fan, you’re about to feel seen in the most uncomfortable way possible.
After a two-year break, the return of Black Mirror won’t just offer more of the same techno-horror that you’ve been semi-traumatized by ever since the infamous “Fifteen Million Merits.” This new season is sharp, slick, and freakishly tuned to our modern anxieties, just like Severance. Only instead of elevator-bound memory wipes, Black Mirror offers stories this time around that range from a loner with a retro video game obsession to a heartbroken man who literally steps into photographic memories to relieve a sad period of his life.
If Severance made you question who you are when you’re not working, or whether you’re ever not working, then Season 7 of Black Mirror is for sure going to be your next spiral. The series returns to its roots with unsettling what-ifs, a sleek aesthetic, and a recurring question of what it means to be you in a world run by algorithms and bad decisions. “You can expect a mix of genres and styles,” Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker said during Netflix’s annual Geeked Week festival back in September.
“We’ve got six episodes this time, and two of them are basically feature-length. Some of them are deeply unpleasant, some are quite funny, and some are emotional.” The new season, he continued, is “a little bit OG Black Mirror.” He adds: “It’s back to basics in many ways. They’re all sci-fi stories — there’s definitely some horrifying things that occur, but maybe not in an overt horror-movie way. There’s definitely some disturbing content in it.”
One of the new season’s episodes will be a sequel to the classic Black Mirror Season 4 opener, USS Callister, in which a video game programmer invents a simulation where he’s a spacecraft captain, and his co-workers are the crew. “Fans of the show will recognize the cast of a certain spaceship from one of our episodes reappearing,” Brooker says. “We’ve done a sequel for the first time in Black Mirror history. Normally, I kill off all the characters at the end of an episode, [but] I kept some of ’em alive. I’m growing as a human.”
