🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐

Bringing your girlfriend home to your mom is always stressful. But if your hometown is as beautiful as Loch Henry is in Black Mirror Season 6, then that at least takes a bit of the edge off, right? So you’d think…

After all, this is Black Mirror, so stress is soon to follow that spinning circle in the opening titles — no matter how idyllic the fictional Loch Henry in Scotland looks. Series creator Charlie Brooker was particularly excited to shoot up north. “What was great about ‘Loch Henry’ was that we hadn’t ever used Scotland in a Black Mirror episode,” he told Netflix in April. 

In the episode, when Davis (Samuel Blenkin) shows his girlfriend and fellow film student Pia (Myha’la Herrold) around his hometown, he informs her that the village used to be quite the tourist destination for people to visit on holiday. That is, before a horrific series of murders rocked the town and made national news 20 years prior. “As you can imagine, it doesn’t look great on Tripadvisor,” says Stuart (Daniel Portman), Davis’ old pal and the manager of the pub The Lochside Inn, in the episode.

The town is so beautiful that, along with Pia, you might be tempted to book a flight over for a wee summer jaunt yourself. That was exactly Brooker’s intent. “A bit like [Episode 1] ‘Joan is Awful,’ the original idea for this episode came to me while I was watching TV with my wife, Konnie, only this time it was a true crime documentary about something terrible that happened in Scotland,” he told Netflix in April. “Like all true crime documentaries, it had millions of drone shots over lochs and forests. Oddly, despite this horrible story, the stunning landscapes were so beautiful we found ourselves Googling where it was and wanting to go on holiday there.”

Now, while you can’t actually visit the invented Loch Henry and grab a pint with Stu, you can head to Scotland and behold the beauty of Loch Lomond, the real freshwater loch just 45 minutes outside of Scotland’s biggest city and entertainment hub, Glasgow, where the crew set up their base camp. “We shot the episode by Loch Long in a village called Arrochar, near the Argyll Forest,” Blenkin told Netflix. “We’ve shot in some amazing locations, and it’s been a visually stunning environment to work in.”

With those stunning backdrops in mind, Brooker compares true crime documentaries to a gourmet burger. The aesthetically pleasing packaging helps disguise what you’re actually tuning in to do which is “to have a good old bloody gawp,” he said previously. “You’re still eating something full of fat and salt, but because it’s called an artisan burger, you almost feel good about yourself rather than like a horrible pig.”

Let’s Break Down the Visual Effects of Black Mirror Season 6Have you ever wondered how a nuclear blast is created on-screen? Wonder no more!

All 18 filming locations for “Loch Henry” were found by the episode’s location manager, Liam Irving, who himself is a Scotland native. The major challenge was that a number of the spots were quite remote, like the river near the Falls of Falloch where Pia slips and hits her head. As Davis warns her in the episode: “Around here, the countryside can be pretty dangerous. There’s deep water and all that, you know?”

Herrold told Netflix that her trek running away from Davis’ mother Janet (Monica Dolan), after she discovers that Janet was in fact a conspirator in the terrifying murders all those years ago, was one of her favorite scenes to shoot. “It was creepy and had this eerie atmosphere,” she said. “Although I can’t say I am a fan of the midges I had to battle […] when I was wading in water.”

While Davis’ shocking family ties to the murders ultimately manifest into a BAFTA-winning documentary for Streamberry and a skyrocket in tourism for Loch Henry, Irving says that they, in turn, tried to include the real-life locals as much as possible in the making of the episode. “When we turn up in a town or village, we drop letters off to the residents and engage the community,” he said. “We want them to know that we are here and leave a positive legacy so the next film production that wants to come and shoot somewhere like this, they can do that.”

At least the legacy around Loch Lomond in real life is a little less infamous than that of Loch Henry. Loch Ness, on the other hand, well, you’ve heard the rumors…

Black Mirror Season 6 is now streaming.

‘Black Mirror’ Season 6 Trailer