Netflix has dropped the trailer for season five of Black Mirror seemingly out of nowhere.
The dark, prescient show about the dangers of technology has been gaining audience members ever since its first season in 2011. The release of the interactive Bandersnatch last year pushed the forward-thinking show even further in terms of technology, audience participation and the possibilities for its – and our – future.
Now, the streaming service has released the trailer for the fifth season which should, to an extent, be a return to the ‘usual’ format of the drama – in other words, there won’t be any more choices given to the audience to decide the fate of the characters (as far as we can tell).
Check out the trailer here, you may even recognise a few familiar faces:
First up, we see Andrew Scott – he of Sherlock, Spectre and Fleabag fame – looking particularly shifty as mobile phones bleep and buzz around him. He’s then seen surrounded by armed police, before he fires a gun into the air.
Cutting to, presumably, a clip from another episode, we see Anthony Mackie, known for his role as Falcon in the Avengers films. Again, mobile devices feature heavily, though this time it seems he’s using them to keep some secrets to himself.
In a third section, we see a young girl with a computerised device, similar to Amazon’s Alexa or a Google home assistant. However, this one seems much more creepy, with big light-up eyes and hair and interacting with the girl, saying things like ‘you look incredible’.
Then, we see Miley Cyrus. It seems, in a role somewhat familiar to her, she’s playing a popstar. After seeing her alone in a room, we see her onstage performing some perfectly choreographed dance moves.
Not being able to resist the temptation of a good pun, Netflix also tweeted the trailer with the caption: ‘we can’t stop (the future)’.
Relive the terror of Bandersnatch below:
As the trailer progresses, the intensity heats up as the segments of separate episodes become blurred, the stories mingle together and it becomes hard to discern where one clip ends and the other begins. That is until we see a weird, almost IRL/almost video game scene from something like Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat.
As we’ve come to expect from Black Mirror, it’s an unnerving watch, but exciting nonetheless.
Season five of Black Mirror will be available on Netflix from June 5.
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Charlie Cocksedge is a journalist and sub-editor at UNILAD. He graduated from the University of Manchester with an MA in Creative Writing, where he learnt how to write in the third person, before getting his NCTJ. His work has also appeared in such places as The Guardian, PN Review and the bin.