After a successful fourth season on the streaming service, Netflix is bringing back Black Mirror and it’s set to be more anxiety-inducing than ever before as art will imitate, well, art.
According to Charlie Brooker, the creator of the Black Mirror series, the technology-obsessed sci-fi anthology is bringing its ideas to life in the fifth season.
One episode is set to be an interactive experience, similar to video game formats where the player can choose the fate of the character. The details are scarce but it looks like viewers will get to choose how the episode unfolds.
It looks like an interactive experience has been on the cards for quite some time. After the ‘Playtest’ episode of season four, Brooker told The Hollywood Reporter last year that he wanted to make that episode something viewers could watch twice – once in a nightmare realm and the other from the perspective of the viewer watching the actor experience the nightmare realm.
We could keep one on an infinite loop! You could do that on Netflix — make one a Groundhog Day that literally never stops. And disable the ‘back’ button for viewers. That’s something to think about. We did talk to some of the tech people about things we could do. When we were doing ‘Playtest,’ the video game episode, I wanted to do it in nightmare mode, where after you watched it once, if you watched it again it was different.
Now, Brooker spoke to THR and revealed that: “we try to do things that are markedly different from what we’ve done before, so hopefully we’ve got that.”
In a world obsessed with technology and a pool of fans who think they can write a better ending than the creators and writers of the show, it’ll be interesting to see how this episode plays out.
HBO released a limited series called Mosaic earlier this year which allowed fans to engage and choose the storyline of the show. Outside of its children’s programming, Black Mirror is set to be Netflix’s adult push into the interactive realm.
The fifth season of Black Mirror returns this December.
