Black Mirror season 5: the verdict

Episode 1: Striking Vipers ★★★★★

What makes this new story particularly involving is the sustenance of the belief that technology can be used to help and support our emotional makeup – rather than always hindering it – but most importantly that even in increasingly digitalised and sterile realities, the appearance and feeling of another human body still holds irreplaceable importance.

Episode 2: Smithereens ★★★★★

‘Everywhere you look, people are hooked on the things! It’s like chain-smoking!’

Who hasn’t felt like this at one time or another? It’s often difficult not to scream at the modern obsessions with smartphones and apps and noisy notifications and strenuous updates and infinite photos of funny cats. It’s a reality streaming with constant information that can’t be ignored, like a required dose.

In Black Mirror: Smithereens, cab-driver Chris takes this digital anxiety to the extreme. Andrew Scott takes the wheel, delivering a tensely unpredictable performance - turning from calm and concerned (like his Priest in Fleabag) to mad and unstable in half a heartbeat.

Episode 3: Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too ★★★★★

The stage lights that Miley Cyrus sings under in her Black Mirror episode are too bright. The real-life global pop superstar is playing the character of a global pop superstar, as Charlie Brooker’s plaything at the top of the charts.

The story of Ashley O and Ashley Too, the person and the product that sounds like her but looks like a robotic doll, taps into a fashionable curiosity about the relationship between pop music makers and consumers, both loving and irreparably isolating.