Charlie Brooker has been teasing the new series of Black Mirror and revealed he once planned an entire season of Red Mirror horror episodes.
We’ll have to wait a while for a new season of Black Mirror, but writer and creator Charlie Brooker has been chatting about the forthcoming episodes with The Hollywood Reporter.
In their chat, Brooker teased the return of Jesse Plemons for the sequel episode to ‘USS Callister’ (“You’ll see…”) and talked in depth about the first episode of season six, released in June 2023. Titled ‘Joan Is Awful’, the episode hit a nerve with its depiction of AI and streaming platforms, and remains a Black Mirror all-timer.
One of the most interesting nuggets of information from the interview, however, is Brooker’s plans for a season of Red Mirror episodes. The final episode of season six, ‘Demon 79’, was branded as Red Mirror, mostly because it focused on a more supernatural threat rather than the usual dystopian, technological advancements of earlier Black Mirror episodes.
Talking about ‘Joan Is Awful’, Brooker said he knew the episode was going to be timely, and continued: “That season was originally going to be a season of all horror stories called Red Mirror. I was part way into the season and then I had this idea and I thought: It’s not horror. I mean, it’s existentially terrifying, but it’s not horror. It’s definitely a very Black Mirror idea. So I thought, “Fuck it, OK” [about the Red Mirror idea]. I felt like it had to be done now. I definitely couldn’t wait for another season to do it.”
Brooker has previously described the episodes of season six as “some of the bleakest stories we’ve ever done.”
The Hollywood Reporter brings up Red Mirror again later on in the interview, probing whether a whole season of Red Mirror episodes is still coming.
“Not just yet, no,” Brooker said. “We’re in mid-production [on season seven] at the moment, and it’s all quite mad right now.”
The option of making more Red Mirror episodes is clearly still open.
The next season of Black Mirror doesn’t have a release date yet, but we can expect more existential and technological anxieties to make their way to our screens sometime in 2025.
Brooker also teased that they’re “doing something really cool right now that we’ve never done before” but naturally, he couldn’t reveal what that all means.
More on Black Mirror and, hopefully, Red Mirror, as we hear it.
