Black Mirror season 6: All episodes reviewed and explained
By Daniel Roman
Episode 2: “Loch Henry”
“Loch Henry” ditches the sci-fi ideas for a more down-to-Earth true-crime story about a pair of indie filmmakers who discover a dark secret in an idyllic Scottish town.
The set up for this one is relatively straightforward: boyfriend-girlfriend filmmaking team Davis (Samuel Blenkin) and Pia (Myha’la Herrold) go to Davis’ hometown of Loch Henry in order to make a documentary. Once there, they decide to focus on a dark story from the town’s past: the tale of local serial killer Iain Adair. Dare murdered a slew of tourists (including Davis’ police officer father, who succumbed to his injuries later) before taking his own life.
Davis is initially reluctant to dredge up such painful memories. The rest of the Loch Henry residents are similarly divided about it; Davis’ childhood friend Stuart (Game of Thrones alum Daniel Portman) hopes it will bring more tourists to the fading village. Stuart’s father Richard (John Hannah) is upset at having to relive it all, and Davis’ mother Janet (Monica Dolan) hopes it will give her dead husband the closure his story deserves.
At the heart of the episode is the idea of exploiting horrific crimes for profit. “Loch Henry” is a nerve-wracking tonal shift after “Joan Is Awful;” while that episode leaned heavily into comedy, this one is like a slowly unraveling murder mystery.
The cast, writing and cinematography continue to stand out. Blenkin and Herrold have great chemistry, and Portman is terrific. As much as “Loch Henry” is a cautionary tale about the danger of using human suffering to create content, it also feels like a love letter to indie filmmaking. The episode balances things well, pulling the viewer back and forth between empathizing with the characters and reacting in horror to what they uncover.
Following a pitch meeting where Pia and Davis try to sell their documentary to Streamberry, they go to actually investigate the house where Dare’s murders took place. It’s deeply unsettling. While they try to make light of the horrific things they discovered in the basement on their drive back to Davis’ house, they get into a car accident. Davis has to spend the night at the local hospital, where Hannah’s Richard also happens to be spending some time thanks to tripping down some stairs earlier in the episode. At the same time, Pia makes a horrific discovery: some of the video tapes they’d been using to film their documentary, which were labeled as old Bergerac episodes, actually contain footage of the murders. And Iain Adair wasn’t the person behind many of the murders: it was Davis’ parents.
Things spiral quickly from there. Pia is accidentally killed while wading across a river in an attempt to escape Davis’ mother Monica. Monica, believing Pia got away knowing the truth, takes her own life. Streamberry produces a truecrime documentary about Davis and Pia’s experience which hits harder since it’s about deaths which just occurred rather than several that happened decades earlier. While “Loch Henry: Truth Will Out” wins a BAFTA and brings tourists flooding into the town, Davis is left to suffer.
Black Mirror Bullet Points
- The script remains razor sharp. There are a lot of standout lines, especially in Stuart’s jokes. “Total wipeout. Farmicide,” was one of my favorites.
- Tourists in Stuart’s bar at the end of the episode are wearing masks similar to the one Davis’ mother used in the murders. The way the episode juxtaposes that with Stuart, staring at a mask-shaped BAFTA statue as he breaks down into tears, is a powerful note to end on.
- When Stuart and Davis are first telling the story of Iain Adair, they say that there were eight murders. But when Monica is taking out the tapes at the end to leave for Davis, there are a lot more than eight tapes. So they killed even more people, and some were covered up so well they were never even on the cops’ radar.
- Monica Dolan turns in an incredible performance as Janet. Especially during some of the later scenes when the truth comes out, her acting is terrifying.
- Streamberry basically sidelines Davis at the end; when someone comes up to meet him at the BAFTA party, the Streamberry producer literally steps in front of him to pitch the person on starring as Pia in a dramatic adaptation of the story. As horrific as the murders in this episode are, the leering nature of the documentary and how it’s handled by Streamberry are equally terrible in their own way.
- The episode does a great job setting up Pia’s eventual fate. Davis mentions early on that hikers die in accidents due to the unforgiving wilderness of the area, and we get multiple scenes establishing that Pia is out of her element there. When she slips and dies in the river, it’s completely believable, not some cruel coincidence meant to twist the knife.
- When Pia, Davis, and Stuart go to the room where the murders took place, they bring lemon juice to squirt all over the crime scene so that it looks like there’s blood everywhere under a black light. However, when they turn on the light there already is actual blood all over the room. While Davis and Pia are ultimately victims, they too were exploiting the situation.
Verdict
“Loch Henry” feels like a very different episode for Black Mirror, almost so much that it could have been part of a different show altogether. It isn’t quite the instant classic that is “Joan Is Awful,” but it’s still a top tier episode of Black Mirror.