Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker has spoken out about how the Covid pandemic influenced one of the new series’ new instalments.
During a Q&A at the BFI about season six offering Beyond The Sea – which was repeatedly referred to as being among the most “intense” of the new episodes – Charlie commented to the audience: “I don’t know if you can tell, but it was written in lockdown.”
The episode in question sees Josh Hartnett and Aaron Paul playing two astronauts aboard a two-man ship in outer space, which Charlie also referred to as the “ultimate working home from story”.
“It feels a bit pandemic-y,” he explained. “It’s a bit Zoom, isn’t it? It’s a bit ‘working from home’... it felt like the right time to do it.”
Each of the two characters also have an on-land “replica” which they can occupy during hypersleep, with Aaron’s character Cliff’s “replica” living in an isolated remote area with his wife and son.
Josh said that having lived through lockdown also helped him empathise with his character, David, pointing out that the story deals with “love and companionship and touch”.
He explained: “These [characters] haven’t been touched in years but they get this sort of simulated touch.
“[David] has an obvious need, from the very first scene to connect with Cliff on a different level, and that doesn’t ever come to fruition. I felt like I got it, and I understood why he went to that place [at the end of the episode].”
However, Charlie also insisted that he deliberately avoided making an episode that was too literally or explicitly inspired by the Covid pandemic.
“We’d just lived through that!” he said. “One of our other new episodes is set in the present day, and we made a conscious decision to pretend it was set in 2019. We don’t ever say that, but we just didn’t want to reference the pandemic or show people wearing masks, because I was slightly thinking that everybody was slightly fucking sick of it.
“This season is quite different in that we have quite a few of our episodes set in the past, and that was a conscious decision to try and shake up what Black Mirror was, partly because I was aware that there was a danger the show was becoming, ‘let’s look at the technology pages in the paper this week and turn that into a horror story’.
“There was a perception that that’s what it was becoming, and certainly in my head that was a danger.”
Charlie recently teased that season six of Black Mirror is among the darkest ever, with several episodes featuring elements of horror.
However, he also pointed out that I Hate Joan – starring Annie Murphy and Salma Hayek – is “one of our most overtly comic episodes that we’ve ever done”.
Black Mirror season six is now streaming on Netflix.