Black Mirror season six review: Charlie Brooker’s series is ‘a show that revels in its twists’

So, we have new five episodes, two more than the 2019 series, and there’s as much of a focus on old tech – videotapes, digital cameras, an enchanted rune – as there is on new. However, some familiar themes are also present, such as AI, data harvesting and deepfakes.

In Joan is Awful, the titular character is shocked to discover that a popular streaming platform is carrying a dramatised version of her life, starring Salma Hayek. The show becomes a smash hit, having a huge impact on Joan’s life.

Loch Henry sees a young couple, Davis and Pia, stopping off in Davis’s rundown Scottish Highlands hometown on their way to the island of Rùm, where they plan to make a nature film. They are sidetracked instead into making a true-crime documentary, with disastrous results.

In Beyond the Sea, the central episode and, at 80 minutes, the longest, a pair of astronauts two years into a six-year mission in deep space are able to download their consciousness into android replicas of themselves at home on Earth to reduce the burden of their isolation and keep their families happy. Naturally, things do not work out swimmingly.

Mazey Day revolves around a troubled young film star hounded by a determined paparazzo who seems to be having doubts about the morality of her job.

And finally, in Demon 79, a quiet British Asian woman who works in a department store accidentally enters into a very binding contract with a demon.

Over the whole season, there’s a very starry cast including, among others, Aaron Paul, Josh Hartnett, Salma Hayek Pinault, Kate Mara, Myha’la Herrold, Annie Murphy, Rob Delaney and Paapa Essiedu.

Everyone will have their own favourite performance but, for my money, Aaron Paul is the standout as one of the astronauts in what is also probably the best episode, the retro-future Beyond the Sea. It’s not easy to convey emotion when playing a buttoned-up character who, for professional reasons, tries not to convey much emotion. Joan is Awful has the most Black Mirror-esque, mindbending story and Annie Murphy, from Schitt’s Creek, is good comedy value as the beleaguered Joan. Loch Henry is, arguably, the most disturbing and features a particularly bleak and troubling sequence.