‘Black Mirror’ Best Episodes, Ranked

“Black Mirror” has grown larger-hearted since its earliest, acridly ironic days, so Season 7’s wickedly funny “Bête Noire” is a welcome reminder: This show can still be mean. Maria (Siena Kelly) is confronted by an old classmate Verity (Rosy McEwen) whom she remembers well, and not fondly: Verity was an outcast, although now, vividly accomplished and taking a position at Maria’s job at a confectionery company, she’s on top of the world. Maria hasn’t changed much at all — while we’re sympathetic to what she’s going through as Verity’s rapid rise destabilizes her, we can also sense that she’s a bit of a bully. The mean-girl dynamic between the pair reverses, and reverses again, as Verity seems to take control of every aspect of Maria’s life, building up to an all-timer of an episode ending. 

The surveillance all of us live under is a persistent and rich theme for “Black Mirror,” and this episode’s strongest element may be its suggestion of an entire world, underlying ours, in which people are held captive by those watching them. Here, young man Kenny (Alex Lawther) finds his computer hacked and the hackers demanding his fealty in order to avoid sharing his dark secret. The connection Kenny forms with fellow blackmail victim Hector (Jerome Flynn) is one of shared desperation, and the pace and cascading volume of plot makes this a memorably propulsive installment. 

The standout of Season 6, “Beyond the Sea” is buoyed by two stellar, melancholic lead performances by Aaron Paul and Josh Hartnett. The episode is split between an isolated spaceship, where two astronauts work not-so-harmoniously on a mission, and a small country town, where they can beam their consciousnesses into identical replicas of themselves to visit their loved ones. After David’s (Hartnett) artificial body is destroyed and his family is killed, he uses Cliff’s (Paul) replica to return to Earth and grows uncomfortably close to Cliff’s wife Lana (Kate Mara). Paul gives two quietly striking performances as Cliff and David share one body: Cliff is inattentive and distant toward his wife, while David’s devastation at the loss of his family turns into obsession with Cliff and Lana’s life. The ending is a gut-punch, when Cliff realizes that David killed Lana while in his replica’s body, that only works thanks to Paul and Hartnett’s strong dynamic.

The final “it was all a dream” twist in “Playtest” is the cherry on top of a deliciously twisted “Black Mirror” sundae. Wyatt Russell plays Cooper, who accepts an offer to test out an advanced, virtual-reality horror video game but gets much more trauma than he signed up for. The game taps into Cooper’s darkest fears, such as inheriting his late father’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, and delivers enough Dan Trachtenberg-directed jump scares to leave you unsure of what’s really going on until the final seconds.

“Bandersnatch” is remarkable not only for “Black Mirror,” but for being Netflix’s first interactive movie aimed at adults. It gave viewers the chance to make decisions in the story that majorly altered how the story played out – a ground-breaking achievement at the time (and still is). A video game programmer named Stefan (Fionn Whitehead) is making a choose-your-own-adventure game while battling demons from his past. By the conclusion, there are five completely different endings, some bloody and others fourth-wall-breaking, and more than one trillion unique paths to take.

Set in a near future where a large percentage of the population has adopted a form of social-media eye implant that ranks people like Yelp reviews, this pastel meditation shows what happens when we allow fictional clout to dictate societal norms. Bryce Dallas Howard plays Lacie, an amiable citizen with an above-average social media ranking. But after a series of unfortunate incidents, her rank starts to slip. What starts off an an annoyance (can’t open certain doors) spirals into something more ominous and even life-threatening for others. Plus, the angrier Lacie gets about her situation, the lower she’s ranked by those she interacts with, creating a self-fulfilling spiral of social media exile. “Nosedive” brought in big name Hollywood talent to kick off its first season on Netflix. The episode was penned by Michael Schur (“The Good Place”) and Rashida Jones (“The Office”) and directed by Joe Wright (“Pride & Prejudice”). Shot with soft light and draped in Millennial pink, the world projects a bubblegum vibe, sweetly smiling while stripping citizens of their autonomy.

Season 7 delivers an emotional wallop with “Eulogy,” one of the rare episodes where technology isn’t wholly nefarious. Paul Giamatti stars as a man asked to share positive memories about a woman from his past for a multimedia tribute to be played at her funeral. Although he tried to wipe her out of his life completely, a go-getter AI assistant helps him piece his youth back together — and her place in it — by revisiting decidedly old media, like cassette tapes and Polaroids. Giamatti shines as a lonely soul wrestling with nostalgia, and the story ends on an eerie note, erasing any saccharine to fit snugly in the “Black Mirror” universe.

“White Bear” is a masterwork of tension that drops viewers into a true nightmare. A woman (Lenora Crichlow) wakes up, not knowing her name or where she is. Things turn bad quickly, as she’s chased by a masked executioner shooting at her, while hordes of people follow with cell phone cameras to film the wild scene. This handsomely shot episode starts out eerie, like a zombie film, and then escalates to all-out mayhem, dropping clues to our protagonist’s true identity along the way. The key twist reveals one of the series’ most nihilistic world views, a bleak meditation on crime and punishment that considers humanity at its worst. The final scene — a group of men calmly cleaning a house, soundtracked by the desperate shrieks of Crichlow — is a haunting reminder that “Black Mirror” can easily toggle into flat-out horror.

The closest “Black Mirror” has been to a genre-bending, sci-fi adventure episode, “USS Callister” is an expert spoof of “Star Trek” with a classic, grim twist that’s typical of the series. Jesse Plemons is the perfect star to play Captain Robert Daly, the heroic, dashing captain of the USS Callister spaceship who, unsurprisingly, has a grimy secret. Robert is actually a disgruntled employee at a video game company who uses digital clones of his co-workers to belittle them and seduce new programmer Nanette (Cristin Milioti). Instead of hinging on twists, “USS Callister” is an uncharacteristically colorful and fun “Black Mirror” excursion that ends with the villain getting what he deserves.

“Black Mirror” is often associated with its dark social commentary, but some of its best moments tell pure love stories caught in the middle of all the noise: case in point, Season 1’s “Fifteen Million Merits.” Years before his breakout in “Get Out,” Daniel Kaluuya plays Bing Madsen, a lonely man doomed to peddle a stationary bike to generate electricity for society. He regains his purpose in life after hearing the shy Abi Khan (Jessica Brown Findlay) sing to herself. It wouldn’t be “Black Mirror” without a demented twist, though, which comes after Abi achieves her dream of impressing the judges of a coveted talent show — a dream that comes at a cost. The commentary on women getting sexualized in the digital age isn’t exactly subtle, but seeing Bing and Abi get torn apart and forced into submission over the course of 62 minutes keeps this early episode heartbreaking and relevant more than a decade later.

This feature-length “Black Mirror” episode was one of the series’ first to use a major star as its lead, and Jon Hamm, at the peak of his “Mad Men” fame, was perfect to play Matt, a sleazy pickup-artist turned prisoner and social outcast. The extra-long Christmas “special” is broken into several meaty, interconnected vignettes with devastating moments of their own that could make for good standalone stories. There are plenty of gut-punch twists to love, like the true reason why Matt’s pickup protege is stuck in a cabin on Christmas and the speed at which time can fly by there.

“Black Mirror” starts with a bang (pun, unfortunately, intended) as its first episode has a premise repulsive enough to make a viewer going into the series blind second-guess their decision. Instead of focusing on some futuristic technology gone bad, the idea behind “The National Anthem” is simple: What if the Prime Minister (played by Rory Kinnear) was forced to have sex with a pig on TV? Instead of sci-fi, the episode is more of a dark thriller that plays out the stomach-churning social implications of the deed. Love it or hate it for how different it is from the rest of “Black Mirror,” the episode is sure to stick with you.

A pre-“Succession” Jesse Armstrong wrote the only “Black Mirror” episode without creator Charlie Brooker – and it’s one of the most emotionally devastating of the series. A “grain” implant allows people to record their every memory, which turns into a recipe for disaster for jealous Liam and his wife Ffion (Toby Kebbell and Jodie Whitaker). After an awkward dinner party where Ffion gets a little too close with her ex, Liam spirals and demands to review her grain for evidence of infidelity. When Liam learns the truth, it’s a gut punch in this intimate relationship story.

There might be panic on the streets of London and Birmingham, but this is one of the few “Black Mirror” episodes that ends with a sigh of relief. This episode takes place in a world where people are paired up by a dating system that predicts to the minute how long they will last as a couple. When Frank (Joe Cole) and Amy (Georgina Campbell) have an instant connection on their algorithm-induced first date, only to find out that not only are they not meant to be together forever — but aren’t even meant to be together beyond that night — they both go through multiple unsatisfying relationships while pining for each other and still trying to accept that the system knows what’s best. In the end, they decide to buck the system and escape their world, with the final scene showing this was all taking place inside an app that was determining if a real-world Frank and Amy were a match. Spoiler alert: They are, and it’s adorable. 

Besides “Hang the DJ,” “San Junipero” is pretty much the only other “Black Mirror” episode with a happy ending, and this one will have you reaching for the tissues by the end. In a 1980s nightclub, Yorkie (Mackenzie Davis) and Kelly (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) meet and have instant chemistry. After they hit it off, however, it’s revealed they’re inside a simulated reality for elders and people who have died, and Yorkie and Kelly are actually older women living out their dreams of being young and free to be their authentic selves. But the question looms: Do they die naturally or live together forever in San Junipero? With this emotional masterpiece, “Black Mirror” tackles themes of death, afterlife and love in a way that no other episode of TV has before.