'Black Mirror' creator Charlie Brooker reveals if all episodes belong to the same universe
The Netflix original series 'Black Mirror' has been able to raise quite a few eyebrows ever since it started streaming on the website, and if there's one thing that fans and followers of the show can unanimously agree on, it's the show's capability to blow minds and birth fan theories with ease episode it comes up with.
Along the same lines, one such popular fan theory has finally been addressed to by the show's creator, Charlie Brooker, during a recent guest appearance on a podcast.
In the said podcast, Brooker discusses the theory that suggests all of the episodes of the dystopian science fiction related thriller could take place in the same universe. This arose specifically in relation to the final episode of the latest fourth season of 'Black Mirror', titled 'Black Museum', where Letitia Wright's character Nish is seen to encounter several items that had recurred from past episodes of the series.
This lead to a discussion on the subject of an interconnectivity between the four seasons of the show that initially aired on Channel 4 from 2011 to 2014, before it switched to Netflix in 2016. Treading on the topic, Brooker's guest appearance on the podcast, The Watch, finally offered fans some insight into how their theory could actually be correct and not just a mere speculation.
“I think we have malleable rules on that. Sometimes it’s useful,” he said. “So in ‘Black Museum’, Rollo Haynes works for TCKR – which is the same company that we see in ‘San Junipero’ – and he’s going into a hospital called St Juniper’s Hospital. There’s a clear sort of through-line there that we don’t bother to explain.”
But Brooker didn't offer any confirmation or a hardcore green signal to the prospect of everything happening within the same universe; he merely just suggested that rather than intention, this interconnection or reference between different episodes throughout the series was done mostly based on the matter of convenience.
“But on the other hand, we sometimes have used the logic [of another episode] – often it is to do with the gadget,” he continued. “We did The ‘Entire History of You’, which is the episode where everyone can rewind memories, and they use a little thumb controller thing to access the UI in their eyes.
“And then we came to do ‘White Christmas’ – which also had a sort of in-retina system – we went round the houses trying to invent different modes of technology, and then thought: ‘Why don’t we just use the one [we already came up with]?’ [It was] laziness. We’ve cleared the company name for that, and we’ve designed the thing.”
As for every fan eagerly awaiting the return of a fifth season, good news comes in the form of the show being spotted to be filming near Kent, England. No release date has been announced yet by Netflix though.