Are Black Mirror Episodes Connected By The Same Shared Universe?

Wherever there are works of art with Easter eggs to other projects, there will be fans searching for meaning. It's fascinating how a shared prop can suggest dozens of TV series exist in the same universe. And even though "Black Mirror" is an anthology series where each episode focuses on different characters and ideas, it seems as though they're all within the same timeline.

There are plenty of "Black Mirror" Easter eggs referencing past episodes. For example, "The Waldo Moment" features a news chyron referring to the events of "The National Anthem." That same episode features an advertisement for the talent show included on "Fifteen Million Merits." In 2016, around the release of Season 3, series creator Charlie Brooker seemed adamant that he wasn't trying to connect every single episode to one another. He told Thrillist, "We had the Irma Thomas song come back in because it does sort of nest the whole thing together in some kind of artistic universe, to sound wanky for a moment. So it is deliberate, but it's not part of some grand unveiling that this is all set in the year 2030 or something."

A year later, Brooker's stance on the whole shared universe idea would soften. 

Part of the appeal of "Black Mirror" is how each episode can exist as its own thing, sometimes even in different genres. "Hated in the Nation" plays like a Nordic-inspired noir thriller, while "San Junipero" is more of a romance. It's unlikely "Black Mirror" will become serialized any time soon, but seeing the references to other episodes is fun for long-time fans to pay close attention to. And in 2017, Charlie Brooker finally relented and started making the connections more apparent.

In an interview with Digital Spy, Brooker was more open to tying "Black Mirror" episodes together. He said, "It does actually now seem to imply that it is all a shared universe." Nowhere is this more apparent in Season 4 than in the final outing, "Black Museum." This episode consists of various stories being told to Nish (Letitia Wright), who's visiting a crime-inspired museum. Viewers would be rewarded for pausing at various points to see what props from other "Black Mirror" episodes appear, including one of the bee drones from "Hated in the Nation" and the lollipop Daly uses to clone his associate's son in "USS Callister." The Atlantic's Sophie Gilbert even wrote in a dissection of the episode, "It seemed to definitively tie the Black Mirror universe together, pulling crime memorabilia from episodes past into one grisly desert attraction."

It all makes for one horrific timeline that inevitably ends with robot dogs hunting down the last vestiges of humanity.