Black Mirror, Season 7, Episode 1 Review

Black Mirror, Season 7, Episode 1

Original Air Date: 10th April 2025

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We’re familiar with the never-ending demands and dark patterns of subscription services: they’re hard to cancel, often have hidden fees, and their terms and conditions can change arbitrarily. Overall, this is the premise of Black Mirror’s opening episode in its seventh season. Written by showrunner Charlie Brooker and stand-up comedian Bisha K. Ali, Common People chronicles the lives of a couple trying to conceive. That is, until Amanda (played by Rashida Jones) suddenly collapses in the middle of teaching preschoolers. She’s diagnosed with an inoperable tumor and is comatose, but her husband (Mike, played by Chris O’Dowd) is given a choice: surgically remove the tumor and replace it with synthetic tissue that is hosted on a corporation’s servers. The surgery itself is free, but he’ll need to subscribe to, literally, her consciousness, for $300 a month.

What could go wrong? Nearly everything. Although women have longer life expectancies compared to men, their lives are riddled with illness and a declining quality of life. It also doesn’t help that women have been systematically understudied in medical contexts, with little research funding available for understanding how disease processes and treatments vary for women. Anyway, Amanda’s alive because of this service, but one day, she suddenly starts spewing advertisements in the middle of talking to her husband. This happens in the classroom, too. Concerned, the couple approaches the executive at Rivermind Technologies, who mentions that the basic plan they’re on now includes ads. Additionally, the service now requires Amanda to sleep much more and be in a constant state of fatigue (a condition that women are more familiar with). 

After upgrading to the “Plus” tier ($500/month), it takes a toll on the couple’s resources. Mike starts earning some extra cash on a trash streaming website called Dum Dummies, getting paid to perform humiliating tasks. I’d like to flip the script here and consider what would happen if Amanda were the one having to follow embarrassing requests from strangers online for money. She would probably be sexually harassed, trolled, and I would be surprised if she were requested for non-explicit tasks. But I digress.. The couple are at their wits’ end, and after Mike loses his job after a workplace incident with a colleague who chides him for being on Dum Dummies, things come crashing down.

They make an earnest plea to Rivermind to allow Amanda to stay on the Plus plan, which, surprise, surprise, has become the Basic plan. Mike mentions maybe using the “baby money” in the interim, and the executive catches on. Baby? Are you pregnant? Pregnancy costs extra when you’re on this service because of the additional computation load on your brain. Turns out, women cannot escape some form of the motherhood penalty, even in a dystopian narrative. 

The episode ends with an agreement to end Amanda’s life, after she’s had a moment of peace and clarity on an upgraded service for half an hour. After suffocating her in the middle of another ad, Mike enters his room with a box cutter, supposedly to create a final streaming video. In the end, Common People is about the gendered cost of survival, with Amanda’s consciousness being commodified. Her worth as a woman, as a potential mother, and as data is mediated through her husband and a corporation. Her eventual death was the final upgrade.

Hansika Kapoor is a researcher at the Department of Psychology, Monk Prayogshala, India. Her research focuses on creativity, socio-moral psychology, and behavioral science.