With Season 7, Black Mirror is opening the floodgates. For the first time, Charlie Brooker’s anthology series is retreading old ground with “USS Callister: Into Infinity,” a sequel to the Season 4 episode “USS Callister.”
That’s apparently just the start. “We’re now looking at old episodes and thinking, ‘How could you revisit that idea?’” Brooker told The Hollywood Reporter ahead of the season’s premiere on Netflix. But what could possibly be next? Some of the season’s stars have a few ideas.
In the first episode of the season, “Common People,” Rashida Jones plays Amanda, a young teacher who suffers a medical emergency but is revived through Rivermind, a subscription-only brain implant that can sustain life, as long as you can pay the bills and stay within the coverage zone.
She learns about Rivermind from Gaynor, played with corporate chipperness by Tracee Ellis Ross. While, without spoiling anything, Amanda’s story is definitely finished by the end of the episode, Ross believes Gaynor could be the subject of her own story.
“Gaynor is not going anywhere,” Ross says at a roundtable interview attended by Inverse. “I feel like there's going to be a lot of Rivermind subscribers, and I feel like she's going to keep becoming the role model. She's the representation of what's possible for Rivermind, and she'll probably live forever because of it.”
Rashida Jones’ experience with Black Mirror actually goes much further than “Common People.” Together with Michael Shur, she wrote the Season 3 episode “Nosedive,” the influencer parody episode starring Bryce Dallas Howard. “I really do love the ‘Nosedive’ ecosystem,” Jones says. “It’s so awesome the way it's realized, the way that Joe Wright created this pastel hellish heaven. So I think there's a lot of creative room there.”
Another standout episode with creative potential is “Hotel Reverie,” the episode following Issa Rae as Brandy Friday, an actress who uses AI technology to enter into a classic Old Hollywood romance. Its story is self-contained, but it brings to mind multiple episodes in the past. It uses the same button-like VR technology, colloquially known as the “nubbin,” seen in multiple other episodes, but its time-bending queer love story echoes one episode in particular — “San Junipero.” There’s even a direct reference to the episode, as it’s revealed Brandy lives on Junipero Drive.
But is “Hotel Reverie” secretly a spiritual sequel? “You'd have to ask Charlie that,” Rae says. “He said that this was the first episode he wrote for this season. The nubbin plays through many episodes, and he's established this kind of world where Black Mirror episodes already talk to each other, and there are Easter eggs. So I would imagine yes, given that there's an Easter egg for San Junipero in ours, he had it in mind and it is big shoes to fill.”
Even if the episodes don’t share characters, they’re still connected. “I just hope that people can look at them both separately, but also appreciate them both as complements to one another,” she says.
So while we may only have one official sequel so far, there are plenty of connections to be found — and now, there are six seasons of Black Mirror full of possibilities for future formal continuations.
