Netflix’s “Black Mirror” is a provocative, imaginative, and often extremely disturbing sci-fi horror TV anthology that represents some of the best material on the streaming titan, and now a bold new Season 7 trailer has been unleashed with a callback to one of the finest episodes of Season 4 (and perhaps the entire series) titled “USS Callister.”
Crafted as an unsettling examination of some of humanity’s most repressed fears and anxieties, creator Charlie Brooker’s “Black Mirror” has unapologetically tapped directly into the vein of our deepest nightmares since its debut in 2017. Now the upcoming six-installment seventh season will revisit this “Star Trek”-inspired chapter from 2018 with a direct sequel to that critically-lauded sci-fi fantasy episode exploring the nature of identity in an addictive virtual reality environment.
Check out clips from all six stories in this enticing Season 7 preview:
In the original episode’s “Galaxy Quest”-like opening sequence, Captain Robert Daly (Jesse Plemons) and his valiant crew are aboard a retro-designed starship battling with a feral foe named Valdack (Billy Magnussen), who narrowly escapes with some valuable energy crystals after the cruel Daly obliterates his intimidating spacecraft.
We soon realize this is a next-generation VR simulation of a vintage TV show called “Space Fleet” and that Daly is actually the mild-mannered Chief Technical Officer of the immersive game’s corporation, Callister Inc.
Those fawning colleagues aboard the USS Callister are actually trapped employees and owners of the company. His genius is responsible for inventing the Infinity program in which the realistic simulation exists, but now he’s been relegated to the punchline of in-office jokes, sidelined by the brash CEO James Walton played by “Westworld’s” Jimmi Simpson.
When Nanette Cole, an alluring Callister new hire (Cristin Milioti), enters his life, Daly incorporates her character (by harvesting DNA from a coffee cup!) into the colorful “Space Fleet” simulation, imprisoned like the others as freshly-avatared “Tron”-style crew member while the outer space adventure plays out in Daly’s private bubble universe inside Infinity’s pixelated realm where he’s the sadistic overlord.
The near feature-length episode ends on an uplifting note despite the horrors of “Space Fleet’s” digital clone game grid. Milioti will reprise her role for the rare sequel episode after discovering a way to escape from Daly using an update patch from the real world interpreted in the game as a wormhole. She’ll be joined by original cast members Billy Magnussen, Milanka Brooks, Osy Ikhile, and Jimmi Simpson.
Netflix’s “Black Mirror” Season 7 arrives on April 10, 2025.
