Episode two of Black Mirror Season 7, Bête Noire, is a venomous slow-burn that drips with paranoia, humiliation, and quantum vindictiveness. Where Common People lacerated the soul with tender cruelty, Bête Noire opts for acidic escalation, turning the everyday mundanity of office politics into a timeline-hopping horror show. Directed with chilly precision by Toby Haynes, and carried by Siena Kelly’s intense performance as Maria, it plays like a psychological thriller simmering under the fluorescent lights of a corporate kitchen.
At first glance, this episode feels like it might go down the path of awkward comedy. Maria, a reserved and exacting R&D developer at a chocolate company, is pitching her latest innovation: a miso-filled chocolate bar. It’s a disaster. The focus group, predictably revolted, reacts with audible distaste—until one tester, Verity (Rosy McEwen), arrives late, tastes it, and calmly declares it delicious. Just like that, the room shifts. The mood changes. Everyone else nods along. A moment that should feel triumphant instead feels off. Something is wrong.
That feeling curdles as Verity begins to insinuate herself into Maria's world. She appears outside the focus group, casually reintroducing herself as a former schoolmate. She applies for a position that, to Maria’s knowledge, doesn’t exist. And then, she’s hired. Not just hired—absorbed. The office loves her. She fits in. But Maria, increasingly, does not.
What unfolds over the next 40 minutes is a deft, anxiety-inducing deconstruction of gaslighting and memory erosion. Maria starts to find her work altered, her authority undermined, and her reputation quietly corroded. Meetings she doesn't remember attending, decisions she didn't make, words she doesn't recall saying. She’s either losing her grip or someone’s got a hand on the wheel.
Kelly's performance is the episode’s anchor, capturing Maria’s growing disquiet with a brittleness that never tips into hysteria. McEwen’s Verity, meanwhile, is disarmingly opaque—part socially awkward office climber, part cryptic puppeteer. It’s only halfway through that the episode lets us fully in on the shared history. Verity wasn’t just a weird girl from school. She was the victim of malicious bullying. And Maria, popular and bright, had started a rumour that Verity performed sexual favours for a teacher, a lie that clung to her for years under the nickname "Milkmaid."
By the time Maria figures out that her sense of reality is being rewritten, it's far too late. A crucial confrontation occurs after Verity drinks a colleague's almond milk, a petty crime that Maria is blamed for. In a twist that feels like pure Black Mirror, she protests by citing her nut allergy—only to discover that the term “nutallergy” no longer exists. Not in the minds of her coworkers. Not on Google.
Her breakdown is inevitable. She attacks Verity in front of the team and is fired. But the horror doesn’t end there. Maria breaks into Verity’s flat that night and discovers the truth: Verity has built a quantum computer capable of manipulating reality through a pendant. She’s been using it to exact an elaborate revenge—each timeline tweak making Maria’s life marginally worse, each humiliation another brushstroke in Verity’s masterpiece of retribution.
Verity, now fully revealed as the architect of Maria’s undoing, delivers her monologue with cold serenity. It’s a chilling speech, not just for what she’s done, but for how casually she justifies it. She didn’t just want Maria to suffer. She wanted her to understand, to feel her way into the margins of powerlessness that Verity once inhabited.
But Black Mirror never settles for one twist when two will do. As the police arrive—summoned by Verity through her reality-bending tech—Maria grabs a gun and kills her. The moment is shocking, but not framed as victory. It’s desperate. And it doesn’t feel final.
Because the pendant still works.
Maria, hands trembling, forces the tech to respond to her fingerprint. It does. And what begins as a survival tactic quickly escalates into power fantasy. She resets the police, adjusts reality so that Verity was the aggressor, and starts hopping timelines like a god swiping through apps. Eventually, she lands on one where she is empress of the universe.
The tone, here, shifts from psychological horror to something more absurd and cosmic. But it’s the logical endpoint of the show’s core question: what happens when someone who’s been wronged is given control? Maria doesn’t find catharsis. She finds dominance. And in doing so, she becomes just as twisted as the person who made her suffer.
Bête Noire is sleekly constructed, but it’s the performance work that makes it sing. Kelly and McEwen turn a warped rivalry into something painfully intimate. The episode balances its tech premise on the knife-edge of believability, never overexplaining the mechanics of the quantum computer—it just is, and that’s enough.
Like the best Black Mirror episodes, Bête Noire isn’t really about technology. It’s about cruelty, memory, and the horror of being gaslit by the universe. It turns an office drama into a multiverse parable and ends not with catharsis, but with something darker: satisfaction.
And maybe, that’s the most terrifying outcome of all.
This isn’t a tale of justice. It’s a tale of control. And by the end, you’re not sure who to fear more—the bullied, or the bully who finally got her turn at the switch.
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