Sometimes all an episode of Black Mirror needs is a great lead performance to anchor the ridiculousness surrounding it. “Bête Noire” isn’t a much better episode than “Common People,” and it goes off the rails in more over-the-top fashion. But it does benefit from Siena Kelly’s flawed yet stubbornly likable protagonist, Maria.
Maria is an ambitious young woman working in research and development at Ditta, a confectionary company. One Monday, while focus grouping her new miso-jam twist on their classic Hucklebuck candy, she runs into Verity Greene (Rosy McEwen), whom she remembers from high school. Verity’s positive words in the focus group singlehandedly shift the opinions of the other participants, who originally didn’t take to the new flavor. Afterward in the restroom, the two women acknowledge their prior acquaintance, and Verity mentions applying for a Ditta research assistant position that Maria didn’t know about.
That night, Maria explains to her boyfriend, Kae, that there was always something off about Verity, who used to spend all her time in the computer lab. At one point, a rumor went around that she wanked off Mr. Kendrick in there, and a girl named Natalie Caine started calling her Milkmaid, which caught on.
The next day, Verity’s interview with Maria’s boss, Gabe, goes well, and she gets the job immediately. None of this sits right with Maria, and McEwen’s creepy affect makes it clear she’s right to be suspicious even without a particular reason to distrust her. But it does seem like there’s something personal about this to Maria, who denies having beef with Verity but keeps fixating on her. Later, Kae also makes an accurate but rude comment about how his girlfriend loves being top dog, which is important to remember for where this is all heading.
Wednesday is when the episode’s main idea starts coming into focus. Maria gets into an argument with Verity and their irritating coworker Nick about a chain called Bernie’s Chicken, though Maria remembers it as Barnie’s. Her boyfriend used to work there and still wears the hat, so she sees the name every day — but Googling only vindicates Nick and Verity, and when she returns home the hat has the new name on it. If you weren’t already thinking about the Mandela effect (my go-to example is the Berenstain Bears), Kae brings it up by name, and it quickly becomes clear this is all leading to bigger and bigger discrepancies in reality.
On Thursday, Mr. Ditta visits the office and tries out Maria’s latest creations, inviting her along for the international launch of her new mallow-based candy, the Doubloon. But it turns out the mallow uses beef gelatin rather than the seaweed-based carrageenan, a problem considering Mr. Ditta’s Hinduism. We saw Maria specify carrageenan in an email to Verity, but when Gabe and the others take a look, it only says “non-pork.” People were already beginning to side with Verity over Maria, even Kae, and now it’s getting much worse. And the stakes escalate to potentially life-or-death when Maria gets a text from the husband of her old friend Natalie who bullied Verity back in the day. Apparently Nat took her own life a few days ago after weeks of extreme paranoia and instability.
The choice to cast a Black woman to play Maria and a blonde white woman to play Verity feels intentional, especially during the workplace conflicts where Maria’s opinion is trusted least. And that peaks on Friday, after Verity earnestly opens up about what the kind Mr. Kendrick meant to her and how much it hurt to lose him when he was transferred to another school. It’s a nice moment, and Maria shows real empathy — but then Verity takes their coworker Luisa’s almond milk from the fridge and chugs it while making full eye contact, discarding the carton on the floor and blaming it all on Maria when everyone returns from the meeting. Even the security camera shows Maria doing it, and eventually she gets fired.
Verity’s reality-bending abilities are taking over Maria’s life, so what option does she have but to sneak into Verity’s house and steal her magical pendant while she’s taking a shower? The pendant has finger ID, unfortunately, as Verity explains after discovering Maria’s hiding place under the bed. Besides, it’s actually just a remote that connects to the “quantum compiler” downstairs, something similar to the “quamputer” from “Joan Is Afraid.” Apparently Verity’s computer-whiz brilliance is so strong that she can completely alter reality at will, or at least “retune our corporal frequency” to a parallel reality where anything she chooses to be true is true. She demonstrates by changing Maria’s shirt color and spoken language on the spot.
So here’s what’s really going on: Verity is doing all this to punish Maria for making the initial joke about Mr. Kendrick that Natalie then ran with. She’s not just wasting the quantum compiler on all feuds, of course; she took full advantage of it by living for a while as empress of the universe, with everyone at her beck and call. But when it comes down to it, none of that stuff is truly real, and she can’t let go of her high school traumas. All she wants now is for Maria to suffer like Nat did.
Luckily, Maria is scrappy. It’s a thrill to watch her fight back against a frustratingly all-powerful foe, first with some head-bashing, then with an arm bite. Verity summons the police with the pendant, shifting to a reality where the cops think Maria broke into the house with a knife, and there’s a brief standoff that ends with Maria pulling the gun from a cop’s holster and shooting Verity in the head before she can alter reality again. That doesn’t mean Maria is in the clear yet, but she manages to gain control of the pendant using Verity’s finger, enabling her to enlist the cops as her new loyal acolytes and declare herself empress of the universe.
Wait, what? I mean, I’m happy for Maria; as I mentioned, Siena Kelly is great, perfectly calibrating the character’s increasing unease alongside her natural talent for office socializing and corporate bullshit, and I cheered when she bested her adversary. If I squint, I can see the way this resolution plays off Maria’s high school popularity and Kae’s earlier comments about how she likes being revered. But would she really want all this power? If this ending is meant to contain some cynicism, I needed to see more of Maria’s ego and capacity for cruelty, perhaps with Kae. Instead, most of those scenes just made me dislike him for never having her back.
Really, the problem might be the technology, which is almost too powerful and reality-breaking to base a simple story around; as with “Common People,” it’s hard to avoid the sense of missed opportunities here, or the sense that this isn’t really about anything in particular, setting aside the half-baked critique of office dynamics. “Bête Noire” makes for a fun enough little thriller with a decent grasp on tone for a while, though. I just hope Brooker finds something interesting to say soon.
Final Reflections
• “She can conduit? Conduit’s not a verb.”
• Probably my favorite Mandela-effect instance is the sudden inability of anyone to understand what the phrase “nut allergy” means. “What’s ‘nutallergy’?” In a funny touch, Maria’s Google search only turns up “not allegory” as the closest suggestion.
• Appropriately for an episode concerned with shifting realities, the Barnies/Bernies switcheroo goes both ways depending on which version of “Bête Noire” Netflix served you.
• Again, as with the cop pinning a Black woman to the floor in “Mazey Day” last season, the script isn’t really interested in unpacking the loaded imagery of Verity siccing the police on Maria.