Season 7 of Black Mirror opens not with a bang, but with a shudder. Common People, a quiet, devastating tale of love, commerce, and technological rot, is the show at its most emotionally effective since the heights of San Junipero or Be Right Back. It doesn't push the bounds of speculative horror with sweeping dystopias or shiny gadgets. Instead, it does what Black Mirror has always done best: it makes the future feel horribly, painfully plausible.
Chris O'Dowd and Rashida Jones lead this harrowing opener as Mike and Amanda, a working-class couple trying to hold on to love while the weight of the world, and of one tech company in particular, crushes them bit by bit. O'Dowd, best known for his comedic warmth, delivers a performance full of ache and repression. Jones is extraordinary, turning Amanda into something increasingly artificial while maintaining a tragic spark of her former self.
The premise unfolds gently. Amanda collapses at school, and doctors discover a terminal brain tumour. Enter Tracee Ellis Ross as Gaynor, a smooth-talking rep from Rivermind Technologies. She offers the couple a miracle wrapped in fine print: replace Amanda's damaged brain tissue with synthetic tissue connected to Rivermind's servers. It's free, but there’s a catch—a subscription service that comes with tiers. It's tech's favourite lie: the cure is free, but the healing costs extra.
Initially, Amanda seems better. But soon, restrictions become apparent. She starts speaking in ad copy, seamlessly but disturbingly, like a TikTok algorithm infected her consciousness. Her job, their life, begins to slip. The horror isn’t in the technology itself, but in how it reveals and amplifies the grim logic of late capitalism: you don’t own your health. You rent it.
Mike's solution is as darkly comic as it is tragic. He signs up to Dum Dummies, a livestreaming site where people perform humiliating tasks for viewer donations. Initially masked, he eventually reveals his face, sacrificing dignity for survival. It's less OnlyFans, more Jackass meets Black Mirror, and it's soul-crushing. O'Dowd plays it with a flat, exhausted dignity, a man caught between desperation and futility.
Their wedding anniversary is the breaking point. Mike surprises Amanda with a 12-hour "Lux" pass—an upgrade that allows users to manipulate their emotional settings. It begins as a gift, but morphs into a tragedy. Amanda turns up her pleasure dial, and their sex becomes unsettlingly detached. Then, her behaviour spirals. She's no longer just herself; she's a cocktail of outsourced feelings, manufactured highs, and flickering awareness.
Everything unravels. A coworker discovers Mike's streams and shares them around. An altercation leads to an accident. Mike is fired. Their financial support collapses, and with it, the last threads of hope. They return to Rivermind to plead for help, only to face the most brutal revelation: if Amanda becomes pregnant, their costs will increase. The cruelty of it lands like a punch. The company, represented in Ross's chillingly calm Gaynor, offers no empathy. Just policy.
By the final act, the future has caught up with them.
Amanda is back on the basic tier, which means 16 hours of sleep and intermittent ad placements whenever she's awake. She glitches through each waking moment, a vessel for slogans and product recommendations, her humanity now a paywalled feature.
Mike, at the end of himself, purchases 30 minutes of Lux. He uses it not for pleasure or escape, but for serenity. Amanda, momentarily lucid, asks him to end it—to do it while she's "not here." And so he does. As an ad begins to run, he smothers her.
It would be enough to end there. But Black Mirror goes one step further. Mike walks into the next room. His laptop is open. Dum Dummies is live. He picks up a box cutter.
It’s not the spectacle of that image that lands. It’s the hopelessness. The episode doesn’t need to show us what comes next. We know. Mike has become content.
Common People is not one of Black Mirror’s flashier instalments. There are no deepfakes, no robot dogs, no alternate realities. But what it does is far more disturbing: it shows us a world that is just one or two steps ahead of our own, where grief is monetised, love is tiered, and survival comes at the cost of humiliation. It shows us people made small, then hollow, then nothing.
What makes this episode sing is its restraint. Director Ally Pankiw allows the sadness to bloom slowly. There are no dramatic outbursts. Just the slow, grinding reality of capitalism as cancer. The performances are never melodramatic, even when the story is. Jones’s Amanda is especially moving, a woman becoming increasingly absent, even as she tries to hold on to herself.
And O'Dowd—god, O'Dowd. His Mike isn’t a hero. He’s not a martyr. He’s a man with nowhere left to go. And that, in the end, is the most chilling part of Common People. The idea that the worst thing about the future isn’t that it changes us. It’s that it simply erodes us until there’s nothing left to sell.
Welcome back, Black Mirror. You’ve still got it. And we’re still not ready.
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