Ranking Netflix’s ‘Black Mirror’ Season 6 Episodes From Worst To Best

Black Mirror

Black Mirror has finally returned to Netflix after a hard-to-believe four year hiatus sparked in part by COVID delays, but still, that’s an extremely long time. Now it’s returned with five new episodes and I’m going to do something I haven’t done in well, four years. Rank them.

There is no good way to do this without some level of spoilers, so I would save reading this until you’ve watched them. However, if you want to skip the bad ones and watch the good ones, this may be helpful if you at least just glance over the ranking order.

Black Mirror

5. Mazey Day - Despite including the excellent Zazie Beetz in the cast, this was far and away the worst episode. An actress, Mazey Day, is involved in a hit and run where she kills a man, and while it appears she’s suffering from grief and guilt because of it, going off the rails and being hounded by Beetz and her paparazzi friends, the twist is uh, something else. Mazey Day did not hit a human, she hit a werewolf, was bitten, and is now a werewolf herself who butchers a ton of people in the finale. This was…not good. Not a good surprise ending, and just thoroughly bizarre.

Demon 79

4. Demon 79 – While I appreciate the episode as one with a good amount of humor in it, I’m not sure I liked this one overall as a young woman is tasked with killing three people after she summons a demon or else the apocalypse will happen. Unbreakable-style, the demon shows her which people are evil and worth killing, but she fails on the third attempt and surprise, the apocalypse actually happens. Weird episode, but not good-weird, I’d argue.

Black Mirror

3. Beyond the Sea – We arrive at some bigger name cast members, namely Aaron Paul, Josh Hartnett and Kate Mara. While I really appreciated the performances here, especially Paul’s, who has to act as two people, this felt like a very predictable episode for the most part besides its unnecessarily bleak ending. You know that Hartnett is going to start using Paul’s robot body to escape insanity on the ship after his body and family are destroyed. And you know he’s going to fall in love with Kate Mara. The ending where he slaughters Paul’s family because ultimately, he can’t have them, was a little too far for me. I thought there was a better way to do this, and this actually could have been the rare happy Black Mirror ending about dealing with grief and recovery. They did not do that, and really no episodes this season are our “San Junipero,” sadly.

Joan is Awful

2. Joan is Awful – This may be the episode you’ve heard the most about, where Annie Murphy’s Joan discovers Netflix, sorry “Streamberry,” has made a show following her life where she’s played by Salma Hayek. This leads to a spiral of Joan doing obscene things to try to get Hayek to stop portraying her, but this leads down a rabbit hole where because of “terms and conditions” both Joan and Hayek (who is literally playing herself) have signed their life and likeness right away with no legal recourse. Then we get into deeply, deeply, meta territory when the entire project is revealed to be some sort of AI-generated algorithm thing to produce tailored content for each Streamberry user. It’s of course poking fun at Netflix and reports that they design shows based on viewership interest data, but it is weird enough to work. Mostly.

Black Mirror

1. Loch Henry – This may be the only episode here I genuinely loved. It’s really just a True Crime-style murder mystery with a genuinely great twist near the end. For a long time I was wondering what the “dystopian technology” angle even was here, as it didn’t even feel like a Black Mirror episodes for 95% of it, just an interesting murder mystery. But they put something in about, you guessed it, Streamberry, about them making a documentary about the whole grisly affair, and one of the main characters winning a BAFTA for his role. Other than that tacked-on bit, it was very, very good.

Those are my picks, curious about everyone else’s ranking order.

Update (6/29): Given that these are my own personal ratings, I figured it would be interesting to go through and see what the “official” ratings were by a larger group than uh, just me. The way to do that best is to go to IMDB where you can rate not just overall shows, but individual episodes, and from that, yes, some clear patterns emerge. And I was pretty close to the general consensus, it seems.

5. Mazey Day (5.3)

4. Demon 79 (6.9)

3. Loch Henry (7.5)

2. Beyond the Sea (7.6)

1. Joan is Awful (7.6)

So, what do we make of this? The bottom two here and my bottom two are the same, with Mazey Day way lower than any of the other ones, which I find pretty accurate given that it really was very bad, and the werewolf twist was beyond stupid. And not even science fiction! The whole thing didn’t make sense for Black Mirror at all.

The top three are pretty close to tied with my favorite, Loch Henry, in third by just 0.1. While Joan and Beyond the Sea are technically tied, I have Joan in the top spot because it has more overall votes. Which is not super surprising given that it’s the first episode. I guess I didn’t like Beyond the Sea as much as everyone else, but that was mainly because I thought it was predictable, not because I didn’t like the story of the performances by what was certainly the most recognizable cast of the year. Well, other than Salma Hayek, I guess.

Joan appears to be the champion, I guess. As I said before, there is not anything this season at the level of San Junpiero. These ratings are overall better than season 5, but not as good as most of season 4. The highest rated episodes of the series are White Christmas (9.1), San Junipero (8.6) and Hang the DJ (8.7). I don’t think it’s a coincidence that two of the three of those are “happy ending” ones, something that season 6 really did not have at all here.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.