Black Mirror season 6: All episodes reviewed and explained
By Daniel Roman
Episode 4: “Mazey Day”
The fourth episode of Black Mirror season 6 is a tight, expedient affair that’s barely over 40 minutes long. It has the opposite problem of “Beyond the Sea”: the twists and turns don’t land as well as they might had the episodes given them more time to breathe.
This one’s all about the paparazzi! Bo (Zazie Beetz) is a struggling photographer taking pictures of celebrities to help make ends meet. She begins having second thoughts about her chosen profession after she photographs a soap opera star having a scandalous gay love affair; he takes his own life when the photos get out.
We then skip over to the Czech Republic, where we’re introduced to the other main character of the episode: Mazey Day (Clara Rugaard). Like Bo, Mazey is struggling with what she’s doing in life. She also causes a death of an innocent person after she takes a bunch of magic mushrooms to stave off anxiety about a script she’s shooting and hits them with her car. She takes off from the scene.
The episode then cruises along at mach speed, with weeks passing from one scene to the next until we get to the climax. Bo’s out of the paparazzi game following her experience with the soap opera star, but she’s late on rent and tempted back in by a huge payday offered for the first photo of Mazey Day, who has disappeared from the public eye shortly after her secret car accident.
The episode feels choppy. We see Mazey kill someone, and then find out through second-hand through Bo that Mazey stopped showing up to set, started acting more erratic, and was eventually fired from the production she was working on before flying home to Los Angeles. It’s coherent if you’re paying close attention, but it would be more clear if the characters were given more attention.
Surprise, it’s a werewolf!
What follows is one of the weirdest twists I’ve ever seen on Black Mirror. Bo eventually gets a lucky tip that leads to Mazey’s trailer. Unbeknownst to the paparazzi, Mazey has been taken to a special retreat in the woods by a shady “doctor” to help her detox. Bo and the other paparazzi eventually follow her there, and when they break in, things get real strange real fast.
Bo notices that Mazey is chained to a bed, and decides to free the suffering actress. The paparazzi with Bo snap photos while she shouts at them to help her. The editing in this scene is terrific; the blinding flashes assault the eye, selling how awful it is that these tabloid photographers are snapping photos of someone who is literally in chains and struggling through a bad detox.
Or, at least, that’s what the show wants you to think Mazey is doing…but we soon find out Mazey has a different problem altogether when she gets a glimpse of the full moon through her skylight. We then find out that Mazey didn’t hit any old person in the Czech Republic; she hit a werewolf, which bit her when she got out of the car to investigate. All the erratic behavior that led to her getting fired wasn’t just coping with killing someone, it was coping with becoming a werewolf.
Yes, it’s a pretty bonkers twist, but Black Mirror goes all in on it. The last third of the episode is a wild monster chase, as Mazey wolfs out and mauls several paparazzi (who continue taking pictures right through to the end) before chasing after Bo. It all culminates with Mazey attacking a nearby restaurant and killing everyone inside. At the last moment, Bo manages to get an abandoned gun dropped by a police officer and shoots Mazey.
She then takes the camera from one of her dying friends. Mazey begs for Bo to kill her, but Bo doesn’t want the blood on her hands. Instead, she gives Mazey the gun and prepares to take some photos. The camera pulls out of the restaurant as a shot breaks the night.
“Mazey Day” is easily the strangest episode of Black Mirror season 6. It doesn’t quite hold together as well as the other episodes; werewolves are pretty far outside the sort of things the show normally covers. Even with the small bits of foreshadowing the show does for the twist, it still feels like it comes completely out of nowhere. Both Zazie Beetz and Clara Rugaard turn in solid performances as Bo and Mazey, but without enough screen time to really let their characters shine, “Mazey Day” ends up feeling like a wild, campy romp. It’s fun, but left me wanting more depth.
Verdict
While “Mazey Day” has some strong ideas about celebrity and privacy, it’s the most uneven episode of the season. The shift into gozno monster movie is too abrupt, and it doesn’t give the actors enough time to show off their talents. Not a bad episode of television by any stretch, but the weakest one here.