Every episode of Black Mirror season 4 has a female protagonist

Last Updated on July 21, 2021

I have to make the same admission about the genre anthology series Black Mirror that I've made about most television shows I've written about here on Arrow in the Head: I have never seen a single episode of this series. I have heard a whole lot about certain episodes, but I've never actually sat down and watched it myself.

I'm going to change that one of these days, and this would seem to be an appropriate time to start getting around to it because Black Mirror season 4 was just released on Netflix on today.

Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, series creator Charlie Brooker and executive producer Annabel Jones revealed that all six episodes of the new season feature female protagonists – something they only recently realized. They weren't planning to have a female-led season and Brooker didn't write the episodes (a process that lasted from July 2016 through February 2017) with that thought in mind. It's just the way things turned out.

The season's episodes:

The Jodie Foster-directed "Arkangel" follows Brenna Harding through young adulthood after her mother (Rosemarie Dewitt) tested a parental tracking device on her when she was young.

"USS Callister" flings Cristin Milioti into space, where her fleet is run by a tyrant.

"Crocodile," led by Andrea Riseborough, explores how memory when advanced by technology can help to solve crimes. 

"Hang the DJ" is a commentary on online dating with one of the singles played by Georgina Campbell. 

"Metalhead" pits Maxine Peake against machine.

"Black Museum," starring Letitia Wright, contains a reference to perhaps every single Black Mirror episode within its museum of horrors ("We just opened up an Easter egg hose and fired away," Brooker said of the story, sure to be a thrill for dedicated viewers).

In the original script for the "Crocodile" episode the lead character was a man, but the gender was changed when Andrea Riseborough came in to audition.

Andrea read for one of the other parts and she really liked the journey of the protagonist and she challenged us and said, 'Do you think it could be a woman?'" Jones recalls of the episode, which was directed by John Hillcoat (Triple Nine, Lawless) and filmed in Iceland. "Then we sort of said, 'Oh, hold on.' We hadn’t quite thought about that. We questioned it and worked it. Apart from the physicality element of it — a requirement that plays out in the episode's first few minutes — we thought, 'How often do you see a mother reduced to this level of desperation?' Then we thought that was actually quite interesting, and that’s the result of Andrea’s role."

I don't know much about Black Mirror, but I'm interested in finding out more. With all episodes now available for viewing on Netflix, that shouldn't be hard to do.