Black Mirror has become somewhat synonymous with brutal endings. Episodes like 'White Bear' and 'Shut Up and Dance' pulled the rug out from under their audiences in their final acts, but the latest season of the show – while still pretty bleak, for the most part – feels a little more hopeful.
"You've got a fair share of despair and/or melancholy endings, I would say," Brooker tells GamesRadar+ when we ask if he thinks he's stopped giving his characters such a hard time.
"But you're right, not everyone leaves the episodes reeling on the floor… There's some hope in the world, yeah. I mean, I don't know if you've looked out the window recently, but there's not much hope outdoors, so we're trying to give you a bit of indoor hope."
Along with tentative hopefulness, another thread that ties the majority of this season's episodes together is the way work intersects with tech, whether that's through exploitative moneymaking practices in 'Common People', toxic workplace dynamics in 'Bête Noire', or the struggle to find meaning in what we do for a living in 'Hotel Reverie.'
For executive producer Jessica Rhoades, 'Bête Noire', the second episode in the season that deals with an increasingly life-ruining workplace rivalry, resonated with her the most. "I think that when you're discussing gaslighting, or the concept of someone slightly reframing reality from what you experience it as, it's the most mundane things that usually drive you berserk," she explains. "Because you feel like those are provable, and that happens a lot in workplace dynamics."
Brooker, meanwhile, thinks the appeal of stories about work lies in their universality. "It's relatable, because most people are in workplaces, or have been in workplaces, and there's probably a lot of anxiety about work and what it means, and jobs being under threat," he says. "I mean, there's a lot of anxiety, generally, about jobs being under threat from AI and so on and so forth. So maybe that was kind of in my head somewhere."
And on the other hand, in the case of 'USS Callister' sequel episode 'Into Infinity', "it's fun to write an ensemble cast in a workplace."
Black Mirror season 7 arrives on Netflix on April 10. In the meantime, fill out your watchlist with our picks of the other best new TV shows on the way in 2025.
