Editor’s note: The below interview contains major spoilers for Black Mirror Season 7.
A new season of Black Mirror always drops with high expectations, and in the case of the latest installment of Charlie Brooker’s sci-fi anthology series, there are even more emotional ups and downs than you might expect. From the bittersweet yet romantic “Hotel Reverie” to the arguably bleak “Common People,” one thing Season 7 could never be accused of is resting on its laurels — and while some viewers may have expected at least one planned sequel to a previous Black Mirror episode in “USS Callister: Into Infinity,” it turns out there are even more links to older seasons beyond the most obvious one.
Ahead of the premiere of Black Mirror Season 7, Collider had the opportunity to speak to several cast and creatives about the Netflix anthology’s return, including Brooker and executive producer Jessica Rhoades. Over the course of the interview, which you can read below, Brooker and Rhoades were happy to respond to every spoiler question we could think of during our sitdown over Zoom. Is “Plaything” an unofficial sequel to the Black Mirror: Bandersnatch interactive film? What fueled the decision to bring Jesse Plemons’ Robert Daly back for “USS Callister: Into Infinity”? Does Clara (Emma Corrin) remember anything about her previous time in “Hotel Reverie” before the film resets? Read on for the answers to all of these and more below.
COLLIDER: Charlie, should we be concerned about the sheer number of prodigy computer geniuses that apparently exist in this Black Mirror universe?
CHARLIE BROOKER: So, we’ve got this character, Colin Ritman, who’s clearly quite a computer genius, played by Will Poulter. Is he good? Is he bad? He’s an interesting figure. I wouldn’t say they’re always necessarily evil. Not all the time, anyway. I’ll leave it at that.
Is ‘Black Mirror’ Season 7 Also a ‘Bandersnatch’ Sequel? Charlie Brooker Has Answers

Image via Netflix

Since you mentioned Will and Will’s character in Bandersnatch, Colin Ritman, I did want to ask about “Plaything.” We knew in advance that “USS Callister” was getting a sequel, and “Plaything” does sort of feel like an unofficial sequel in its own way. Did you know early on that you wanted to bring Ritman back for that episode?
BROOKER: What happened was the idea was already there for that basic story. Obviously, it shares some kind of Bandersnatch DNA, because you’re talking about a British story about the video games industry. Bandersnatch was like the early ‘80s; this is like 10 years later. I was a video games journalist in the 1990s, so that’s a world I know pretty well. While writing it, I just thought we’re going to meet our character Cameron, who’s played by Peter Capaldi in the future and Lewis Gribben in the past. I needed to write a scene where he meets the programmer of the game that he becomes obsessed with, and I really, really loved writing Colin Ritman, particularly for Bandersnatch. I think Will is a fantastic actor. So, you write the best version. I just love writing that character.
There’s something about that character that really makes me laugh, but I also really respect him. He’s odd and mercurial and unpredictable and fiercely intelligent, slightly scary and angular, and so I just wrote the Colin Ritman version of that scene and hoped and prayed that we could persuade Will to do it, and it turned out we could. We also got Asim [Chaudhry] back as Mo, who’s the boss of Tuckersoft, who’s also really great fun in his own right. Even though the story didn’t start out as an attempt at doing a sequel, and it isn’t a sequel to Bandersnatch, there are definitely shared elements of DNA. You could call those character-based Easter eggs, or you could just say the characters who have gone through the veil between Black Mirror episodes have just shown up.
Charlie Brooker on the One Piece of Technology That ‘Black Mirror’ Keeps Coming Back To

Image via Netflix

The experiencer disc, on its own, seems like a returning element that we’re seeing — in Season 7, specifically, there are a few instances of it, not just in “Into Infinity,” but also the “Eulogy” episode with Paul [Giamatti]’s character. Was that also intentional? It really does feel like it ties many more episodes together than you would think.
BROOKER: You’re right. I think the first time we showed that particular tape being used was probably “San Junipero,” historically, but we’ve had a sort of similar-ish sister device in “Playtest” before that. In “Crocodile,” there’s an episode where it’s the square. We basically use a sort of nubbin that you put on the side of your head as almost shorthand for something. Also, I knew going into this season that they were all going to be classically OG Black Mirror episodes, and so it’s probably less self-conscious in a way. There’s something fun about leaning into how we’ve established what that’s shorthand for. So, even though it behaves differently in all those episodes — it’s different in “Hotel Reverie” to “Eulogy” to “Callister” — it does slightly different things, and it behaves in different ways, it’s just fun.
JESSICA RHOADES: It’s really satisfying when you hand one to an actor. At this point, the actors who are coming to be a part of the series have been fans themselves. They’re very excited. First, they’ve gotten this incredible script from Charlie, and then someone hands them the nubbin. It’s pretty much an encapsulated Black Mirror experience.
BROOKER: There are slightly different product designs for the nubbin. Clearly, they are, like, Android versions of the nubbin and Apple versions of the nubbin.
RHOADES: I think that’s kind of the perfect thing about the series; each of these episodes are their own little world with a director and a team of creatives who have really fought for their episode and done everything they can to make it the best, and Charlie and I and a few others are across the entire series. So, the little tweaks to the nubbin, to the experience of this, I actually think, is part of the fun of the series.
BROOKER: It’s definitely the slightly different interpretations of the slightly different bits of the multiverse that we’re in.

Related

“There’s a Bit of Debate Around That”: Will Poulter Talks Reprising ‘Bandersnatch’ Role in ‘Black Mirror’ Season 7

He also discusses what it was like reprising the role of Colin Ritman so many years later and if Chef Luca would ever return to ‘The Bear.’

One new addition to the cast this season that I know is a self-professed genre fan is Paul Giamatti. I’m sure he must have been very excited to put on the nubbin for his episode. Did he express interest in joining the show first, or was he approached to be part of the season with “Eulogy”?
RHOADES: I’ll be honest, Charlie wrote the script, it was so amazing, and he became at the very top of the list for casting. We sort of thought, “Would he do it, really? That’s amazing.” Of course, we tried. It turns out he had been telling his manager again and again how much he would love to do the show, and so I give her kudos. Perry read the script immediately and flagged him down. He had just come off of Downton. Anyway, it turned out he was a fan. Had we known that, maybe we would have felt more confident about sending the script.
BROOKER: And you’re right. He properly is a genre fan. I was chatting to him about things like Blake’s 7, so he knows his stuff.
‘Black Mirror’s Creator Explains Bringing Back Jesse Plemons for the “USS Callister” Sequel

Image via Netflix

Charlie, I wanted to circle back to the point you made about terrifying geniuses. I don’t think we can talk about this season without talking about Robert Daly. When we spoke before about trying to make a “USS Callister” sequel happen, you mentioned a lot of it was a matter of making sure you could bring the original gang back together. Why was it so important to bring Daly back for this episode? As we also see, this version of him is a more surprising one than people would expect.
BROOKER: Good! Hopefully, yes. As you’ll appreciate, we’ve kept it well under our hearts that we brought him back. We knew for a while that we were going to do that, but we also wanted to honor the fact that his character died in the first one. We didn’t want to cheat on that. But luckily, it was always an interesting conversation we were having about how we showed in the first one [that] Daly is not a nice guy. We definitely show that. We play with your emotions in the first one, because we show that he is disrespected at work, he’s marginalized, his boss exploits him — and so there were things we could draw on for the sequel, which make him complex and interesting, while also sort of exploring his character in a different way.
It’s quite odd because he almost becomes a prequel character, in a way. He’s sort of distilled the essence of Daly, and he’s sort of in a nasty predicament himself when we meet him in this. Again, we were constantly asking ourselves, and this is beyond character things, in a way, what’s unique to our premise that isn’t something you could just do in Star Wars or something like that? There was something about the logic of, OK, he was this genius — this DNA coding stuff, how come he had that? Where did that come from? It made logical sense to have Walton on the outside being an exploitative boss.
Basically, there’s this notion of crunch for video game developers, and we sort of did the ultimate version of crunch, and [Walton] was the instigator. What appears to be this incredibly clever engine at the heart of it is actually an honest enslaved consciousness. It felt so Black Mirror-y. And then also, it meant that we could bring Jesse Plemons back. We could have him and Cristin [Milioti] face off, but it’s a different kind of encounter from them, and I think that makes it just really interesting and delicious. It’s a testament to those two actors that, as that scene is happening, there’s a giant space battle going on, and then two people talking in a garage, and that holds your attention as much as all the pyrotechnics.
It’s also a pretty long episode, too. Was the plan always to really try and make it feel like a mini movie, or was it more that, as the story was being developed, the realization came that maybe you couldn’t really condense it into an hour?
RHOADES: We did need that time to tell the story and to tell it right. “Hotel Reverie” is also about feature-length within the season, and that felt like it needed to be because it was a feature film that it was about and paralleling. So, we knew going in what it would take to tell the story of this scope.
BROOKER: The original “Callister” was about 76 minutes, so in a way, we knew when we’ve got quite a few slightly more complex plates that we’re spinning in this one, because you’ve got literally cast members doubling up as themselves, sort of overlapping, meeting each other. So, there were a lot of narrative plates that we had to spin, so we didn’t want to crush it down too much.
To touch on “Hotel Reverie,” Charlie, there is a moment in that episode that feels like a precursor to the inevitable tragedy, which is where the movie reboots, essentially, and Clara/Dorothy doesn’t remember anything about her time with Brandy. But it does feel like the character has been building more agency, having more of a realization about who she is. Do you think that the character does remember any part of that shared history by the time we see the new ending to the film?
BROOKER: That’s a good question, and it’s a nuanced question and a nuanced answer in that, I think, definitely, what I was hoping to channel in that moment, was the sense that she’s been reset in a way to back to where she was, so she hasn’t had that time together with Brandy. We show that when the movie world breaks, Dorothy/Clara gets to spend all that time with Brandy and gets to learn stuff about her own real life. She kind of becomes Dorothy, right? She’s Clara, and then she becomes Dorothy. When the film is reset, she’s back to Clara again. She’s on rails and she’s back to, in a way, only comprehending the parameters of the story she’s in. So, I guess that would be my answer is that Clara goes from Clara to Dorothy and kind of back to Clara again.
RHOADES: I think she has the echoes, because the agency is there.
BROOKER: The echoes are still there. No, you’re right. She’s still got more agency. She’s not got the full knowledge of Dorothy, is what she’s not got. So, if she was 25% there, she goes to 100, then she goes back to 25%, and it should feel tragic in that moment. It should feel tragic that when the film is rebooted, it’s like she’s had her mind wiped.
Black Mirror Season 7 is available to stream on Netflix.

Black Mirror

Release Date

December 4, 2011

Network

Channel 4, Netflix

Directors

Owen Harris, Toby Haynes, James Hawes, David Slade, Carl Tibbetts, Ally Pankiw, Bryn Higgins, Dan Trachtenberg, Euros Lyn, Jodie Foster, Joe Wright, John Hillcoat, Sam Miller, Tim Van Patten, Uta Briesewitz, Colm McCarthy, Jakob Verbruggen, James Watkins, John Crowley, Otto Bathurst, Anne Sewitsky, Brian Welsh

Writers

Jesse Armstrong