At the intersection of technological fascination and the erosion of freedom, “Common People,” the opening episode of the new “Black Mirror” season, offers more than a warning: it presents an ontological unease. Under Ally Pankiw’s precise direction and Charlie Brooker’s sharp pen, the narrative sheds any utopian pretense and dives into what may be the rawest portrait yet of a humanity increasingly surrendered to the automated logic of profit and convenience. In this context, artificial intelligence is not a looming catastrophe — it is a miracle in disguise, whose unrestricted adoption now seems like a new rite of passage toward the irrelevance of the individual.
What unfolds in the episode is not merely a dystopian forecast, but the autopsy of a surrender already underway. Brooker understands that the threat of technology lies not only in its power, but in how readily we kneel before it. The creation begins to rule its creator — not through force, but through comfort. The promise of efficiency, personalization, and survival no longer merely seduces consumers — it hijacks consciousness. The company Rivermind, cloaked in a veneer of corporate benevolence, doesn’t enforce domination: it offers voluntary adhesion to a system where individuality becomes an exploitable asset and privacy is the currency required to stay alive.
The journey of the central couple, marked by seemingly rational choices during a health crisis, brutally illustrates how everyday decisions are co-opted by invisible yet relentless structures. What begins as a quest for protection gradually morphs into the total erosion of autonomy. The protagonist, upon realizing she has become a cog in an advertising machine fueled by her own identity, exposes the nightmare’s core: we’re no longer battling conscious machines, but systems that, though emotionless, have mastered control through simulated affection, fabricated intimacy, and the alluring promise of absolute comfort.
Brooker and Pankiw don’t satirize technology — they strip the human bare before it. The episode undermines the illusion that algorithms can comprehend emotion or that empathy is translatable into code. There is an unbridgeable chasm between mechanical gestures and human ones, and it is within that void that modern anxiety takes root: the coexistence with devices that manipulate us better than we understand ourselves. The critique, therefore, is not confined to the technical realm: it descends into the ethical-existential cellar where the question of what it still means to “be” someone is posed in an age of emotional surveillance and algorithmic colonization.
Ultimately, the episode questions the very notion of freedom. After all, what remains of free will when every desire is anticipated, every emotion replicated, and every decision statistically predicted? This dystopia doesn’t shout — it whispers, through subtle notifications, accommodating virtual assistants, and user agreements masquerading as choice. The pact with technology becomes a pact with the abdication of doubt, with the renunciation of the unexpected. And it is precisely here that the episode delivers its most piercing provocation: perhaps resistance lies in reclaiming the right to err, to feel without mediation, to choose without an algorithm.
The fierce brilliance of “Common People” lies in its refusal to comfort. Rather than reassure the viewer with illusions of control or redemption, it forces a confrontation with the loss of spontaneity as the cost of efficiency. And what if, in the end, the real danger doesn’t lie in the artificial intelligence we’ve built, but in how much of our own humanity we’re willing to forfeit so it can serve us? The answer, it seems, is not in the machines — but in the opaque mirror we’ve avoided facing.
Series: Black Mirror — Season 7
Creator: Charlie Brooker
Year: 2025
Genres: Sci-Fi/ Thriller
Rating: 8/10