Black Mirror Season 7's Common People Is The Bleakest Episode The Netflix Series Has Ever Produced

Do not upgrade your Rivermind subscription if you haven't watched episode 1 of season 7 of "Black Mirror," titled "Common People." You've been warned — spoilers lie ahead!

If you're a longtime fan of the disturbing anthology series "Black Mirror," you might be surprised when I tell you that the season 7 premiere of the show, "Common People" — written by showrunner and creator Charlie Brooker and directed by Ally Pankiw, who previously helmed the season 6 premiere "Joan is Awful" — is the single bleakest hour the show has ever produced. I also frankly don't mean that in a good way, but I'll circle back to that.

The episode features just three lead actors, starting with Rashida Jones and Chris O'Dowd as Amanda and Mike Waters, an everyday couple leading a quiet and simple life together. After celebrating their anniversary at their favorite hotel The Juniper out of town, they return home — and we learn that they're trying to have a baby — when suddenly, Amanda collapses in the middle of teaching at an elementary school. The script doesn't get specific, but it seems like Amanda has a tumor or otherwise malignant growth on, as her doctor tells Mike, her parietal lobe, and her chances of recovery are ... basically non-existent.

That's when Mike gets a literal lifeline from the doctor, who says that there's an "experimental procedure" he could try that could save Amanda's life (in a way). The representative from a company called Rivermind, named Gaynor (Tracee Ellis Ross, rounding out the main cast), comes to see Mike in the hospital and tells him that, eighteen months prior, she was in an accident and was all but dead until Rivermind, which fully revived her. The cost of Rivermind, though — both financial and personal — comes to light for Mike and Amanda pretty quickly.

Again, if you've been watching "Black Mirror" for a while now, you can probably see where "Common People" is heading. Gaynor does warn Amanda and Mike that there are side effects to Rivermind, which essentially revives Amanda from near death — like, Amanda sleeps almost constantly — and for the couple, the monthly cost of the subscription in the first place is almost prohibitive. Mike, who works on a construction site, picks up more and more overtime shifts, running himself ragged, but that's when things start to devolve. When the two try to go back to the Juniper for a vacation, Amanda briefly dies again ... and when they report this to Gaynor, she replies that because they were outside of the coverage area that's included for their plan level, which she calls "Rivermind Common." That's because the company is introducing a new tier, "Rivermind Plus," that expands the coverage area.

Amanda starts randomly reciting ads, including while she's speaking to students and during intimate moments with Mike. Even though Gaynor says that the "messages" ("Ads!" Amanda correctly yells) are "designed to be contextually relevant to the situation you're in [...] so they will stand out less in a conversation," Amanda is on the verge of losing her job because she's been delivering ads to her young students, and the only solution is to — you guessed it! — bite the bullet and upgrade to Rivermind Plus. They do so despite struggling to make ends meet at home, at which point Amanda starts sleeping even more but feels constantly tired. Naturally, Gaynor tells them that this is because while she's in "sleep mode," they use her to basically keep the entire system running, and this can be avoided if she upgrades to Rivermind Lux, which even includes complete mood controls. (Plus, Gaynor says, is now called Standard.) Also, if Amanda ever gets pregnant, that's an extra $90 a month, because it changes the brain ... destroying the couple's dreams of starting a family.

Mike and Amanda try to indulge in their temporary boosters, but even that bleeds them dry. Mike loses his job. Amanda becomes a shell of herself. They can't pay the Rivermind fees. The episode ends with the couple purchasing one final booster, "Serenity," and letting it end just as Mike smothers Amanda with a pillow.

This episode of "Black Mirror" is unbelievably bleak, but that would be a little easier to stomach if "Common People" had some sort of strong message or really, anything to say at all. We all know subscription tiers suck; we all deal with them literally every day, so what is the point of a story where a person is kept alive by steadily increasing subscriptions that introduce a poorer quality of life that forces you to upgrade constantly? "Common People" doesn't have an apparent critique of this besides "subscriptions tiers are bad" or, perhaps, "don't put a mousetrap on your tongue on a live online feed to make extra money" (something that Mike does while he's humiliating himself to pay for higher and higher Rivermind fees).

Perhaps the most egregious thing about "Common People" is that it's just a weak imitation of a standout season 1 episode titled "Be Right Back," which stars Hayley Atwell as Martha, a woman who loses her boyfriend Ash (Domhnall Gleeson) in a car accident. Using his online presence, a company creates a "new Ash," but as Martha comes to realize, he's just a hollow recreation, not the actual man she loved. "Be Right Back" communicates a message that you can't bring back the people you lose, no matter how much you want to or how painful that realization may be; "Common People" aims for the same message but falls unbelievably flat because it's so heavy-handed and seems to exist simply to say that companies that offer subscriptions are predatory (again, we all know that). With a stronger intention, "Common People" could have worked, but like the fake Ash in "Be Right Back," it's a flimsy shadow of a real and better thing.

"Black Mirror" season 7 is streaming on Netflix now.