Netflix
The following story contains spoilers for Black Mirror season 7’s “Common People.”
THERE ARE A few different types of Black Mirror episode. While the show’s main concept is rooted in standalone stories rooted in our own contemporary fears and anxieties about technology and all that surrounds it (the title, “Black Mirror,” refers to our phone screens when they aren’t powered on), sometimes the show uses that concept to dive into other subjects. Black Mirror isn’t afraid to get satirical about any number of issues, and often finds ways to use that contemporary technology and cultural framing as a way to make a point and dive in.
That is precisely what the first episode of Black Mirror‘s seventh season, titled “Common People,” is doing—but with a fun bit of misdirection along the way. “Common People” draws viewers in with a couple familiar faces and leads them to believe, initially, that this could be a different kind of episode. The episode centers on a couple, Mike and Amanda, who are played by Chris O’Dowd and Rashida Jones. These are faces and names that just about anyone who’s watched a comedy movie or show in the last 20 years is familiar with; O’Dowd won everyone’s hearts over with his role in Bridesmaids, and Jones has been ubiquitous in comedy ever since her guest role on The Office and regular role on Parks and Recreation. These are people who we expect to see, and go home at the end of the episode with a smile on our face.
And, well, while there are certainly some of those moments in “Common People,” that’s not what the episode is. In fact, while you’ll laugh a couple times, you’ll probably spend more of your time feeling exactly how the creative powers behind Black Mirror want you to feel: incredibly frustrated. And while some of the episode’s satire isn’t exactly subtle, with a topic like the one they’re tackling, that’s actually A-OK.
Let’s dive into the episode a little, shall we?
What was the Black Mirror episode “Common People” really all about?
Netflix
The episode opens with Mike (O’Dowd) and Amanda (Jones) in the kind of setting you’d normally expect from these two comedic actors: Mike is a welder, Amanda is a teacher, and they life a modest but comfortable life. They celebrate their anniversary at the Inn where they had their first vacation, they’re trying for a baby, and they make just enough money to get by.
That is, until Amanda has an unexpected medical episode with her brain, and winds up in the hospital. Mike runs to meet her, where he finds out that she may never regain consciousness; There was nothing anyone could’ve done.
But this is Black Mirror, and so there’s always something (and, of course, that something always has a catch). Mike meets a woman named Gaynor (Tracee Ellis Ross) from a new company called Rivermind, which uses an advanced technology to basically copy people’s brains, fix them on a satellite server, and “stream” them back to their minds. As a result, the person is good as new (as long as they remain in “coverage areas.” The initial surgery is free, and the service is only $300 a month. Low price to stay alive, right?
And so Mike and Amanda subscribe to Rivermind, and she returns to consciousness. One catch? She’s going to sleep more, Gaynor said. Again, not a bad trade off all things considered.
The money in Mike and Amanda’s life is getting tighter and tighter, and those trade-offs just keep coming. Amanda goes unconscious at one point leaving their county on their annual honeymoon trip. She starts reading ads for products against her will (and without her brain even knowing). The couple meets with Gaynor, and she lets them know—for an additional $500 a month, they can subscribe to Rivermind+, where they’ll be able to travel anywhere and have no more ads. They see it as basically the only option, despite the fact that it will hamstring them financially.
You can see where this is all going. The money gets tighter, and Rivermind just keeps squeezing Mike and Amanda until they reach the point where they literally cannot afford it anymore. Their service plans get more expensive, and their features just keep diminishing. Mike is led to sign up for a service he learned of earlier called “DumDummies,” where truly desperate people go on live streams and do demented things (like drink their own urine or pull their own teeth) in exchange for the money of sociopaths.
“Common People” continues this road to the end that you know is coming: Mike and Amanda can’t afford to do much of anything with any level of consistency, and their lives are more or less ruined. The crib they once bought is sold off to young people making a music video for the change they can recoup for it.
The episode is taking a rather blunt satirical take on the way our medical system will try to find a way to save people, but with the bottom-line receipt total only getting higher and higher and higher and higher. This kind of system isn’t meant to benefit the Mike and Amandas who are comfortably getting by—it’s meant to chew them up and spit them out, and only benefit the mega-wealthy who can afford what is essentially constant price-gouging.
In depicting Rivermind’s constant changing of its service plans and levels—similar to what many streaming viewers constantly deal with when deciding if they want ads to interrupt their favorite movies and shows on their streaming services of choice—Black Mirror picks a blunt and clear metaphor for its satire to really drive an important point home. The show has some better stories overall, but “Common People” makes what might be the show’s most important point.
Why did Mike kill Amanda?
Eventually, Mike and Amanda have had enough of Rivermind—and Amanda tells Mike that she’s ready, and, essentially, to put her out of her misery. She specifically tells him to “do it” when she’s not aware, which we later see to mean smother her to death with a pillow when she goes into ad copy mode.
It’s a heartbreaking ending for a couple who, as we keep mentioning, were doing just fine when the episode began. But the system these people were subjected to was not tenable, and by the end they decided they’d had enough.
What happened to Mike at the very end of “Common People”?
Netflix
After being forced to kill Amanda, we see Mike entering into a room in their home with a box cutter in his hand and DumDummies on his screen. We can’t be for certain, but the insinuation is that Mike is about to do something truly terrible on that screen with that box cutter—and livestream his own death.
“It’s probably the hardest thing he’s ever done, to have to do that at my request, but then to not live without me and to go through what he’s been through, the humiliation and the frustration and just the overwhelming [nature] of being left with no choice,” Rashida Jones said in an interview with TV Insider.” I think he probably does the same.”
But not only does he kill himself—he puts it on DumDummies for all the paying customers to see.
“That is what he did,” Jones continued in the same interview. “He says, ‘I’m doing a specialty thing later,’ which is pretty dark.”
How does “Common People” connect to the rest of Black Mirror season 7?
Netflix
While Black Mirror remains an episodic anthology show at its core—and each episode tells its own (usually very dark) story, there are always some easter eggs that remind us that this stuff all connects a little bit here and there.
When Amanda is teaching her students about bees and honey, and launches into her first unintentional advertisement, it’s for a product called HoneyNugs, made by a brand called Ditta. For anyone who continued watching Black Mirror season 7, that probably sounds familiar—because Ditta is the food company that Maria (Siena Kelly) works for in the season’s trippy second episode, “Bête Noire.”
In that perfectly Black Mirror way, it all manages to fit together. Of course.
Evan is the culture editor for Men’s Health, with bylines in The New York Times, MTV News, Brooklyn Magazine, and VICE. He loves weird movies, watches too much TV, and listens to music more often than he doesn’t.
