Black Mirror’s Season 7 premiere isn’t just a dark comedy: It’s jet-black satire.
In “Common People,” Amanda (Rashida Jones) and Mike (Chris O’Dowd) are a working-class couple looking to start a family. But when Amanda falls into a coma, her grieving husband moves forward with a life-saving procedure that seems too good to be true.
Mike meets Gaynor (Tracee Ellis Ross), a medical tech company representative who pitches an experimental technology called Rivermind, which promises to restore Amanda’s cognitive function. There are a few caveats — she’ll need to sleep for a few more hours and must stay within the coverage range (much like cell phone towers) — but the surgery is free, and the subscription model costs a “reasonable” $300 per month.
The couple quickly realizes the downside of relying on a subscription service to stay alive. Mike is soon exhausted from picking up extra shifts at his construction job to help cover the additional expense, and Amanda sleeps longer and longer as Rivermind’s servers demand more of her energy. And when coverage for the service doesn’t extend as far as they believed it would, Gaynor pitches the pair Rivermind+, a new tier that costs an additional $500 per month with coverage that extends to all of North America.
Soon, however, Rivermind+ becomes the standard tier and Amanda spouts commercial advertisements mid-conversation without even realizing it, making it impossible to do her job. Plus, she’s sleeping for even longer periods, and Mike has turned to humiliating himself on the internet for extra cash. As their user experience deteriorates, Gaynor pitches the couple Rivermind Lux, a premium tier that comes with the benefit of enhanced sensations such as pleasure and serenity. The new tier costs an additional $1,000 per month, which is way out of Mike and Amanda’s budget, so Gaynor informs them of “booster” packets that offer temporary Lux benefits as a more affordable option.
By the time they reach their next anniversary, the pair have reached their breaking point.
Another year has passed, and Mike and Amanda are drained, both physically and financially, having lost their jobs amid the struggle to keep up with Rivermind’s new tiers. Amanda can barely function and Mike has been pulling his teeth in humiliating internet videos to pay for Luxe booster cards.
With her serenity levels dialed all the way up, Amanda decides that it’s time for her to die, which Mike agrees with. Her final request is that he ends her suffering “while I’m not there.”
“When she’s advertising things, she’s not really aware it’s happening,” creator and showrunner Charlie Brooker tells Tudum. So when Mike smothers Amanda with a pillow while she’s delivering an ad, it’s “almost like it’s in her sleep, so she’s not aware at that moment that it’s happening.”
After killing Amanda, Mike heads to the room he filmed the internet videos in and looks right into the camera. “We see Mike going into the room, and we leave it slightly up to your imagination what’s going to happen when he shuts the door,” the Black Mirror executive producer adds. “But you’ll notice he looks directly at you, the viewer, at the last moment.”
Rashida Jones, who plays Amanda, has her own interpretation of how Mike and Amanda’s story ends. “They've both been trying so hard to make it work with their finances, with all the sacrifices they made in their life, but ultimately they couldn't live together, and they couldn't live apart,” she says. “It’s sweet in a way, but I think he goes to join her.”
As Mike and Amanda plead for Gaynor’s sympathy amid their financial woes, the Rivermind representative maintains a professional demeanor while pitching new subscription tiers. But is that chipper attitude just a front?
“I don't think Gaynor knows anymore,” Tracee Ellis Ross, who portrays Gaynor, notes. “I think she is utilizing the [Rivermind] technology to leave her feelings and emotions [out of it], just like her swipe up toward the end. She's probably a beta tester on a lot of their technology — [that] is what I would imagine as her backstory… I think that she is playing her part and [is] part of the same system that she is perpetuating.”
Earlier in the episode, Gaynor reveals to Mike that she was a Rivermind client following a harrowing accident — and is back to her old self because of the innovative tech.
When Brooker first began “Common People,” he thought it was going to be more of a light, comedic hour.
“I’d been thinking about, what if someone needs a subscription service to stay alive? And then what if somebody was running adverts?” Brooker explains. “The adverts came from a funny place because I’d been listening to a lot of podcasts where the hosts would suddenly break off and start pitching products and then go back to the rest of the podcast. So I thought, ‘Oh, this is going to be a funny one.’”
But as he got deeper into the script, he explored the story to its grimmest conclusion.
“They’re extending the amount she has to sleep, and she’s tired all the time. It’s exhausting. And now they’re living this existence where she’s constantly advertising things,” Brooker notes. “I felt like her request, being smothered to death while giving a pitch, felt sort of perfectly bleak and perfectly Black Mirror.”
All six episodes of Black Mirror Season 7 are now streaming on Netflix.
