The scariest episode of Black Mirror season 7 is the one that’s the most real

Black Mirror’s strain of science fiction is known primarily for three things: a bleak tone, twist endings, and a point to make about the current moment. 

How creator Charlie Brooker checks those boxes isn’t always unpredictable; with a freshly released seventh season on Netflix, Black Mirror fans certainly know there’s something coming, and part of the trick to a good Mirror episode is how it feels like it boxes a central character in. That’s what makes “Common People,” the first episode of season 7, feel like one of the show’s best installments in years: While it goes exactly where you’d expect, where it winds up is worse than anything you could possibly imagine. 

“Common People” starts simple: Mike (Chris O’Dowd) and Amanda (Rashida Jones) are just regular people living an uncomplicated life. He’s a welder, she’s a teacher, and they’ve been married for three years; the biggest thing in their life is trying for a baby and their annual anniversary trip to a shitty lodge in a different county. At least until Amanda collapses and gets diagnosed with a brain tumor. Mike, totally unmoored, gets approached by Gaynor (Tracee Ellis Ross). She works for Rivermind, a company that offers to host cancer-infected parts of the brain in the cloud so a patient can go on living life with “synthetic receiver tissue.” 

Only this is Black Mirror, not Happy Miraculous Cures Mirror. So as you might expect, Mike’s choice to sign Amanda up for Rivermind’s treatment comes at a cost. The thing is, the cost is only barely science fiction: It costs the couple a shit ton of money. 

“Common People” is pure sci-fi, but is far more upsetting for just how plausible it all feels. The way Tracee Ellis Ross’ Rivermind character greets Amanda and Mike isn’t that far off from an insurance representative cheerfully informing me in an email that they’ve approved a prescription my doctor gave me for coverage. The company’s copywriters might feel like they’ve dialed in the perfect degree of pep, but it rings hollow; I don’t really want to have to think about why my doctor’s assessment of my needs might not be enough for them to cover me under the insurance plan I already pay for. 

It’s not that far off of what Mike and Amanda deal with in “Common People.” The basics are always shifting; the “Plus” program is now the “Standard,” as they’re constantly reminded — but don’t worry, that’s still better than the inferior “Common level of treatment.” Just not as good as “Lux.” After all, only one lets Amanda travel where she wants, actually rest, and not just speak ads into everyday life. Slowly but surely, their quality of life gets peeled back. They may not be dealing with health issues, but the health care coverage issues are just as bad. 

Obviously this isn’t a problem confined to either just Amanda and Mike or me and my insurance company. Health care costs continue to be a major concern for most Americans, and resentment that the system feels irreparably broken is boiling over. While Black Mirror often aims to feel topical, it rarely taps into consensus this well. 

That seems to be what makes “Common People” feel so effortlessly chilling in a way Black Mirror hasn’t in a while. Even before moving to Netflix from Channel 4, Black Mirror put a high premium on feeling “topical.” In order to achieve that, it looked for some sort of twist it could put on pressing issues of the moment: social media dogpiling, racism, sexism, or just the general frenzy technology stirs up in humanity. Black Mirror hasn’t felt as buzzworthy lately, often because its aims have felt a little more mechanical — if it’s all leading up to that big Black Mirror gut punch, it’s a lot easier to steel yourself for the blow. 

“Common People,” by contrast, is made of sterner stuff. Its tragedy is laid bare, meaning all it has to do is let us follow it down. It doesn’t have to worry about the same concerns as a typical episode. Black Mirror characters are often a bit flimsy, more in service of episodic ideas with a twist than as nuanced personalities in their own right. “Common People” — as the name implies — makes that a feature, not a bug. We don’t know much about Mike and Amanda beyond the fact that they had a happy, normal life before a random health incident caught them blindsided. There’s not much more to them or their story; they could be anyone. That’s the really scary part.

Black Mirror season 7 is now streaming on Netflix.