Black Mirror's Charlie Brooker on 'intense' episode inspired by COVID
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Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker came up with season 6 episode 'Beyond the Sea' during lockdown.
Headlined by Aaron Paul (Breaking Bad) and Josh Hartnett (Oppenheimer), this chapter of the twisted techno anthology show centres on two astronauts aboard a two-man vessel, who have the gift of a terrestrial 'replica' they can occupy during hyper-sleep.
"I don't know if you can tell, but it was written in lockdown," Brooker informed audience members at a BFI question and answer session this week.
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"It feels a bit pandemic-y. It's a bit Zoom, isn't it? It's a bit 'working from home'. It felt like the right time to do it... it was the ultimate working from home story."
Hartnett added of the isolation the characters felt in their replica pods was mirrored in the social distancing we experienced during the pandemic: "These [characters] haven't been touched in years but they get this sort of simulated touch. [David] has an obvious need, from the very first scene to connect with Cliff on a different level, and that doesn't ever come to fruition. I felt like I got it."
Despite that sense of isolation it was crafted within, Brooker caveated by suggesting he made sure the spectre of COVID-19 didn't explicitly jump off the screen.
"We'd just lived through that!" he said. "One of our other new episodes is set in the present day, and we made a conscious decision to pretend it was set in 2019. We don't ever say that, but we just didn't want to reference the pandemic or show people wearing masks, because I was slightly thinking that everybody was f**king sick of it.
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"This season is quite different in that we have quite a few of our episodes set in the past, and that was a conscious decision to try and shake up what Black Mirror was, partly because I was aware that there was a danger the show was becoming, 'let's look at the technology pages in the paper this week and turn that into a horror story,'" he added.
Black Mirror airs on Netflix.
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