Black Mirror Season 7 Episode 1 Review: Common People

This article contains spoilers for the BLACK MIRROR episode “Common People.”

“Every comic is someone’s first.” That (possibly apocryphal) quote is often attributed to one of pop culture’s great storytellers: the late Stan Lee. And like many of Stan the Man’s musings, it doubles as sound advice. Getting new audiences up to date while still satisfying dedicated adherents is not only a solid strategy in episodic storytelling, it’s a damn-near mandatory one for ventures like comics, television, and now apparently Black Mirror.

A television institution since it first premiered in 2011, Black Mirror is one of entertainment’s most well-established brands. The sci-fi/horror anthology series’ impact on the culture is immense, particularly as reality continues to insist on proving its vision of a dystopian techno-hellscape prophetic. While almost everyone understands what Black Mirror‘s whole deal is by now (“what if phones, but too much”), statistically-speaking every Black Mirror episode is also certainly at least one person’s first. For that lucky individual, it’s hard to imagine a more fitting introduction to the show than season 7 opener “Common People.” This Chris O’Dowd and Rashida Jones two-hander is neither the best nor the worst episode of Black Mirror. But it might just be the “most” Black Mirror episode of Black Mirror yet.

“Common People” is an angry, ugly little beast, though it does start on a human note. O’Dowd and Jones are Mike and Amanda Waters, a working class American couple just trying to make it through the year so they can enjoy their usual anniversary celebration at the Juniper Swiss Mountain Lodge where they listen to the local old-timers perform “Anyone Who Knows What Love Is” on karaoke. (Yes, the Easter eggs to other Black Mirror episodes come early and often in this one. Note also that school teacher Amanda is instructing her class on the Autonomous Drone Insect technology that will eventually ruin everything in season 3’s “Hated in the Nation”).

This peaceful status quo is soon interrupted when a tumor fuses itself to Amanda’s parietal lobe, sending her into a coma she’ll likely never wake up from. Thankfully though, there’s an app for that! Gaynor (Tracee Ellis Ross), a representative of tech startup Rivermind, visits Mike in the hospital with an offer. Rivermind’s technology can get Amanda’s brain back online thanks to some sci-fi mumbo jumbo involving digital backups and synthetic tissue. What’s more is that the surgery to do so will be free. All Mike has to do is lock in to a $300 monthly subscription model for his wife’s brain, and make sure she stays within Rivermind’s cell tower network. Mike agrees and Amanda wakes up into a brave new world.

Surely even the Black Mirror neophytes can see where this is all going but that doesn’t make “Common People’s” execution of it any less terrifying. Amanda’s streaming gray matter runs into the same buffering issues that any streaming service does (including the Black Mirror universe’s own Netflix analog Streamberry). The Rivermind network is routinely taken down for updates and repairs, rendering Amanda unconscious as the company installs the wiring for its $800 a month Rivermind+ model. But then, of course, Rivermind+ becomes “standard” as Rivermind Lux ($1800 a month) gets rolled out and Amanda’s baseline model is rendered so obsolete it doesn’t even get a name on the Rivermind product offering sheet.

Soon Amanda is sleeping up to 16 hours a day as her puny cranial hardware struggles with the latest Rivermind update and her waking hours are mostly spent parroting hyper-localized advertising to anyone unlucky enough to enter her orbit. With Amanda soon fired from her job, Mike has to resort to humiliating gig work and literal teeth-pulling on the “Dum Dummies” app to keep his wife online. Due to their unfortunate addiction to being alive, Mike and Amanda are utterly crushed financially.

The episode’s satirical approach is clever and its hatred for the subscription model era of late capitalism is palpable. As a series of unfortunate working class events to be cringed at and emphasized with, “Common People” is a delight. It falls flat, however, in cobbling it all together into a timeless fable like the best Black Mirror episodes are capable of doing.

A lot of that can be attributed to some unfortunate casting. Jones and O’Dowd are both talented and charismatic performers but they’re also not quite “common people.” One has to wonder why no one on Mike’s blue collar construction site points out “Wait, why is the British guy from Bridesmaids here?” or why no one in Amanda’s school calls her a beautiful, tropical fish. Finding older, less conspicuous actors for the roles would have made “Common People” more effective. Finding actual workers a la Nomadland would have made it one of the most gut-churningly horrifying hours to ever stream on Netflix.

There’s also the matter of “Common People’s” ending. Given how poorly things go for Mike and Amanda, euthanasia ends up being a pretty sensical option for them. But it didn’t need to be the only option for the episode itself. After all, most episodes of Black Mirror could conclude with a character opting for self-deletion, it’s up to the show to come up with something more clever.

Black Mirror creator and this episode’s writer Charlie Brooker has previously been agnostic on the order in which viewers consume episodes in a new season of the show, comparing the anthological format to “a film festival.” For season 7, however, Netflix’s press notes specifically requested that journalists watch the episodes in the following order: “Common People,” “Bête Noire,” “Hotel Reverie,” “Plaything,” “Eulogy,” and “USS Callister: Into Infinity.”

Having seen all the episodes now, I can confirm that there appears to be no serialized reasoning behind that instruction. It’s purely all about the vibes. And the vibe that season 7 wants to open with is “haha wow, life really is a nightmare.” Hard to argue that’s not the right tone to set for any first-time watchers.

All episodes of Black Mirror season 7 are available to stream on Netflix now.

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