Black Mirror — Charlie Brooker’s anthology show mining horrors from our wired, mediated, ever connectively disconnected culture — is about to make its premiere on that immersive, binge-inducing platform, Netflix. Soon you’ll be able to plug into the machine, disconnect from your reality, and watch six episodes of television about unsettling alternate, disconnected realities. Netflix has just released the first trailer for the upcoming season — which, like previous ones, sees a separate cast navigating varyingly creepy and alienating semi-futuristic scenarios in each episode.
In the trailer, there are glimpses of the Bryce Dallas Howard-starring episode (written by Rashida Jones (!), Michael Schur, and Brooker, and directed by Atonement‘s Joe Wright) “Nosedive,” where Howard plays someone consumed by social media who, per the Daily Beast, exhibits a “swiftly deteriorating grasp on sanity, in a world in which one’s self-value is intertwined with their social-networking status, that feels all too familiar.” You’ll also get snippets of the lauded Mackenzie Davis and Gugu Mbatha-Raw-starring episode “San Junipero,” a somewhat uncharacteristically romantic episode that Flavorwire TV critic Lara Zarum pointed out breaks form in seeming to be set in the ’80s — or is it? There’s also footage from the Malachi Kirby-starring episode Men Against Fire, which is a horror narrative wherein Kirby plays a soldier protecting villagers from some kind of mutant (according to /Film, Brooker has said one of the episode’s themes is the way drones are changing the nature of war.) The other three episodes — Shut Up and Dance, Playtest, and the 90-minute Hated in the Nation — are also teased. The season will be available to stream beginning October 21.
Watch the trailer: