Black Mirror Season 6 Features Twists The Creator Previously Swore He'd Never Use

One of the most notable aspects of "Black Mirror" is its ability to shock audiences by going to places few other shows would dare to go. Whether it be through the depraved bestiality of the show's first episode or the inevitable murder of an infant in "Crocodile," the series has a penchant for embracing taboos that other shows wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole.

Perhaps that's what makes it so surprising that "Black Mirror" creator Charlie Brooker has long had a list of plot twists or storytelling devices that even he swore he would never use. However, as the showrunner told Netflix, he's decided to throw caution to the wind more than ever before with Season 6 of the series.

While a hint of this can be found in the trailer for the latest season of "Black Mirror," when the screen glitches and changes to something called "Red Mirror" for its final episode, Brooker went into detail on how he wanted to change his approach with the upcoming batch of episodes. "Partly as a challenge, and partly to keep things fresh for both me and the viewer, I began this season by deliberately upending some of my own core assumptions about what to expect," Brooker explained.

As the seasons have gone on, "Black Mirror" has increasingly taken bigger swings than ever before, with plot lines that have seen an office worker enslaving digital versions of his co-workers and a dating service that is run by one of the hardest working algorithms you've ever seen. Still, Charlie Brooker strove to go further still with Season 6.

"I've always felt that 'Black Mirror' should feature stories that are entirely distinct from one another and keep surprising people — and myself — or else what's the point?" Brooker mused. "It should be a series that can't be easily defined and can keep reinventing itself."

Naturally, Brooker's reasoning makes a lot of sense for a show like "Black Mirror," particularly as the show is about the advancement of technology and how that factor comes to define our lives. Still, that hasn't stopped the generally bleak series from surprising viewers with the last thing they might expect in this kind of show: the rare happy ending of episodes like "San Junipero" and "Hang the DJ."

"This time, alongside some of the more familiar 'Black Mirror' tropes, we've also got a few new elements, including some I've previously sworn blind the show would never do," Brooker teased. Fans anxious to see the disparate new directions that Season 6 will go can check it out when all five episodes drop on June 15, 2023.