5 Creepiest Black Mirror Episodes That Will Give You a Gruesome Reality Check

Black Mirror is back on the screens with its new season 7, and the show’s fans probably already had their entire weekend devoted to binge-watching the brand new and pretty terrifying episodes.

The series, initially launched back in 2011, has surpassed reality in several ways, offering diabolically precise predictions for what humanity is up to next. However, Black Mirror’s many more episodes can be added to a list of bad omens, having already proved themselves as a possible inspiration source for many real-life events and inventions.

Season 4, Episode 3 — Crocodile

The third episode titled Crocodile follows Shazia, an insurance agent who has a technical work assistant, a device known as a “recaller”, with the help of which she can easily navigate through other people’s visual memories, thus saving time and seeing herself the perspective of the events from witnesses’ point of view.

It didn’t take much time for a real-life “recaller” to be conceived, with BrainGPT making it possible to generate visuals from brain signals sometime in the near future.

Season 2, Episode 3 — The Waldo Moment

The real-world field of politics just couldn’t escape some more innovations as Black Mirror kept airing for seven seasons straight now.

The second season’s episode 3 revolves around Jamie Salter, a disillusioned comedian who spends his life playing an animated blue bear called Waldo in a TV programme. His moment of fame comes when Waldo gets to interview a politician, but somehow the bear becomes one more candidate for the upcoming Parliament elections.

A similar thing happened ahead of Russia’s presidential elections back in 2018 when the chatbot “Alisa” was pushed into becoming another candidate. Luckily, it lost the competition though.

Season 3, Episode 1 — Nosedive

One of Black Mirror’s most talked-about episodes ever, Nosedive follows Lacie as she navigates through her life in a society where everyone gets evaluated by their personal rating.

This number can go up and down depending on the person’s deeds, and Lacie is determined to reach 5.0 no matter what after her rating drops to 4.2 and then to 2.6.

To some, Nosedive might allude to the real-life Chinese Social Credit System which suggests everyone receives their unique code that, just like in Black Mirror’s episode, will go up and down depending on what the person does right and wrong.

This, however, still looks better than what Lacie had in Nosedive — in real life, the number can go low due to dangerous driving or spreading fake news.

Season 4, Episode 1 — USS Callister

The episode stars Jesse Plemons as Robert Daly, a gifted but a bit reserved programmer who somehow lets his widely popular game’s co-founder steal all the credit.

However, Robert finds a way to bring his vengeance, using his co-workers’ DNA to create their game clones that would obey him. The episode highlights an important detail, suggesting the clones are actually conscious, but just forced to follow Robert’s orders.

This isn’t a very rare thing with all the talks surrounding ChatGPT’s possible ability to somehow come alive and express its own feelings.

The theme has been an ominous warning for quite some time now, considering that humanity will be forced to recognise the chatbot’s rights once it’s proved to have consciousness (there’s hope we’ll never see this, but still).

Season 5, Episode 2 — Smithereen

This episode might be one of those that could have been easily inspired by the already existing tendency.

It follows Chris, a taxi driver who can’t overcome his addiction to a social network app called Smithereen; however, it’s revealed that things used to be way worse. In the past, Chris’ addiction to the app resulted in his girlfriend’s death in a car accident when Chris got distracted by Smithereen’s app notification.

There might be a bunch of real-life apps people are heavily addicted to, but one of the most notorious ones is Pokémon Go — a harmless hunt for the game’s mascots ended up being a reason for more than 200 deaths back in the day, mostly in road accidents.