The season starts off with a star-studded episode focusing on a very in-love couple who are forced to sign up for a new high-tech system to keep one of them alive.
It’s scarily plausible, shocking, and seems like a commentary on the era of subscriptions, with nods to the U.S. healthcare system. The couple found themselves grappling with the horrible reality of subscriptions changing outside their price range.

It also touches upon the darker sides of the internet, including meme-coins and gig-economy jobs.

The good part of this episode is that it’s very reminiscent of the first couple of Black Mirror seasons.

Ironically, this episode was put out by Netflix, seeing as they keep changing their subscription tiers and angering lots of users.

I would rate this episode a 3/5

“Bête Noire” might be the most surprising episode of season 7. Maria works as a researcher at a chocolate company whose life goes haywire with the arrival of a new coworker, who went to school with Maria. Maria starts to feel like the reality around her is changing. People around her are not remembering things the way she does, leading to apparent mistakes at work, and she begins to suspect Verity is to blame.

It’s an odd episode. Much of it doesn’t even feel particularly like Black Mirror, and it seems to be spinning its wheels in the first half. But as the nature of what’s going on gets more extreme, the fun side of the episode emerges.

Watching this episode makes you feel like you’re being gaslighted the entire time. Netflix actually released two versions of this episode to further the Mandela effect. One has a hat labeled “Barnies” and the other labeled “Bernies”

I liked this one up until the ending, it felt a little over the top and out of character. So I would only rate it a 2/5. If the ending were different, I would have rated it higher.

“Hotel Reverie” is an ode to ’40s Hollywood classics like Casablanca. Hollywood star, Brandy, agrees to participate in a reimagining of “Hotel Reverie”, one of her favorite old movies, using technology that turns the original black-and-white film into a virtual AI-infused experience to film the remake. Dorothy Chambers, who co-starred in the picture, is supposed to be an AI character. The story is meant to play out the same as the original, but when things begin to go off course, Dorothy develops an awareness of her artificiality and the two begin to fall in love.

I think the writers were aiming to recreate the popular episode, “San Junipero”, but its romance feels more hollow, and its premise relies on gullibility. I love the concept, but it’s not clear why anyone would want to remake a movie this way.

If you like old Black Mirror episodes, I would skip this one; it’s emotional but lacks the storytelling that the other ones this season have.

Set in the same universe as Bandersnatch, the interactive Black Mirror movie from 2018, Plaything’s main character, Cameron Walker, is a man booked for murdering someone and stuffing him in a suitcase. During his interrogation, he shares the story of his younger days as a video game critic. He’s given an early preview of a game created by  Colin Ritman from Bandersnatch. It’s a game called Thronglets, which involves taking care of little digital creatures. Ritman explains, they’re a form of digital life.

It’s a simple episode, told mostly in narrated flashbacks, and is too exposition-heavy to be truly elegant, like the best of Black Mirror. The premise is still a fun one, and the twists and turns in Walker’s tale lead up to a hell of an ending.

I’d give this episode a 4/5.

“Eulogy” is easily the most affecting episode of the season. A man who learns that his ex-girlfriend has died. He receives a package from the woman’s family containing a device that allows him to enter into old photographs of his as part of an eulogy project. But in his anger over their breakup, he scratched out any photos of her face, and now he can’t really remember it. He enters into photo after photo, tracing the story of their relationship while trying desperately to bring the image of her face back.

The writing in this episode is exceptional. It shows a man sorting through the facts of his life and what he did and did not understand about the woman he loved. “Eulogy” is a beautiful story about regrets, miscommunications, and the way love stays in our hearts even as memories fade.

I’d give this one a 4/5. I loved the story, but it didn’t feel like a black mirror episode.

For the first time ever, Black Mirror made a sequel to its most popular episode, “USS Callister.” “USS Callister: Into Infinity” succeeds like its predecessor, by just being a great science-fiction adventure. Set in the aftermath of the original “USS Callister,” Nanette Cole is still leading the ship’s crew of sentient digital clones through the perilous worlds of the online multiplayer game Infinity. The trouble is, they’re not tagged players, meaning they need to rob players of their in-game credits to stay alive. But players begin to notice something is off, and that gets back to the CEO of Callister Inc. He and the real-world Nanette team up to help the in-game crew survive, while trying to hide the evidence of the illegal cloning tech.

The plot gets wilder from there, maintaining the sense of humor of the original episode while throwing in even more action and even bigger twists. Though it’s not the most emotionally affecting episode this season, it’s certainly the most entertaining, making a raucous meal out of its nearly 90-minute running time. Better still, the ending only has me more excited to see if they make a third one.

I loved this episode so much that I’d have to give it a 5/5.