I feel like every time a new Black Mirror series comes out, it starts with a total gut punch, as if to announce its ruthlessness. That trend began with the very first episode in 2011, "National Anthem," where somebody is blackmailed into having sex with a pig. Welp, guess I won't be showing Black Mirror to the kids! Or to the missus on a romantic evening!

So too with "Common People," which puts us in the shoes of a young, struggling married couple (Chris O'Dowd and Rashida Jones) who just want to start a family and live a modest, happy life in the modern world. Since both actors are almost always likeable in everything they do (O'Dowd should just put "sympathetic good guy underdog" on the top his resume), you just know they're gonna suffer.

How dare these two decent people believe that their hard-working jobs as a construction foreman and a school teacher are a credible basis for fulfilling lives? Or that their dreams of taking a vacation at a bed-and-breakfast and counting on the healthcare system when things go wrong are the least bit justified? Or that a private startup that can restore their lives isn't going to exploit them into parasitical oblivion?

"Common People" is one of the bleakest Black Mirror episodes yet, but it feels oh-so-real. Don't get me started about how pissed I am that everything these days is a subscription service. I remember being able to buy software outright -- one and done: You buy it, you own it. Now companies hook you in, get you on a credit-card IV drip, and you're stuck having to get the latest updates, month after month.

Or worse, you get a streaming service -- like Amazon Prime -- and first you get to watch movies uninterrupted. Then, one day, they're like, "Sorry! You gotta watch commercials, sucker!" But the woman's voice announcing it tells you that after the commercial, you "get" to watch the rest "uninterrupted"....like they're doing you a favor. Those insidious bastards.

Anybody who ever had a gym membership they couldn't shut down, or a cable service they couldn't turn off, or whose insurance coverage was denied, or whose premiums were inexplicably jacked up... Or who has read about Nestle trying to gain the rights to tap water... You get the idea... All of these frustrations become the focus of "Common People," whose lead characters discover they can barely live at all without their day-to-day essentials being "monetized."

The episode also cuts into the logical extension of the "gig economy," and its alignment with webcam pay-to-see sites like Pornhub, or Cameo. People are increasingly willing to sell themselves, and the first thing to go is dignity. Somehow, the episode manages to squeeze in mini-commentaries on mood-enhancing drugs; dependance on cloud computing and how it tethers us to online connectivity coverage; and the worldwide loss of natural pollinators, primarily bees.

O'Dowd and Jones are terrific (Rashida Jones previously made her mark in Black Mirror as co-writer of "Nosedive"). But special honor goes to the performance by Tracee Ellis Ross, who embodies the corporate face of subscription services, where they nonchalantly act like they're doing you a favor while bait-and-switching you into oblivion.

After the first episode's massive kick in the nuts, the second episode brings us actual nuts -- the yummy kind covered in chocolate. Yummy, that is, unless you're allergic, like lead character Siena Kelly.

The story starts off feeling like Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, only the chapters with close-ups of candy treats are confusingly combined with blaring pipe organs that sound like Hans Zimmer pulling out the stops next to a black hole for Interstellar.

Siena Kelly is a key confectioneer, I guess you'd call it, in the Research and Development department of a high-end, snack-dessert company. The episode puts us in the modern offices and kitchens and you're thinking, "What, is the Black Mirror the foil on a piece of dark chocolate now? I thought 'black mirror' referred to the screen of a TV or smartphone?"

Soon there's a fly in the ointment, only the "fly" is a new employee, played by Rosy McEwen, and the "ointment" is mallow cream. It turns out the new, up-and-coming employee is an old high-school alum of Siena Kelly's character, and there's some sort of vicious rivalry at play.

At first it merely seems awkward, but "Bête Noire" metes out levels of competition and revelation with tantalizing progress, like eating one delicious mini-cookie after another. You know there's a twist coming but what is it? The first hint is that Kelly's character begins to have memory problems, of the sort that people refer to as the Mandela Effect: Like when you think the tycoon on the Monopoly board game has a monocle (he doesn't).

Eventually the episode turns into a high-tech version of Gaslight! by way of Teen Witch. What it reminded me of most was The Gift, the 2015 film that slowly reveals a cruel backstory between Jason Bateman and Joel Edgerton. Only "Bête Noire" has way more chocolate. And as creepy as it is, it's fun to savor the subtle, backstabbing, under-the-surface bitchiness between Siena Kelly and Rosy McEwen.

And I have to say, Black Mirror does something that no longer gets talked about, which is good, but I'm going to mention it anyway: The show frequently casts black actors (and other ethnicities) without it ever feeling anything other than natural and beyond question. Perhaps it's just that United Kingdom audiences are more up-to-speed with social progress. Perhaps it's just that whiny, stilted-racist, politically head-up-their-keistered U.S. audiences make more obnoxious noise in online communities. Which is what they've done with various Disney releases that have the audacity -- the audacity! -- to cast non-white actors in key roles.

That is, Siena Kelly and Rosy McEwen are outstanding. The episode is worth watching a second time, both to pick up on the clues it dropped leading to its wild ending, and just to see the actresses' wonderfully subtle glances and reactions, which have much more meaning once you know what's coming.

Also, it has one of the most memorable ending shots of any Black Mirror episode, like a flashback to Evil Dead 2 or something. Not only is the ending an utter surprise, because who thought a story about a chocolate developer would go where it goes? but it also changes one's interpretation of whether everything else that happened was justified.

The previous episode, which centers on the close interplay between two women (with the unstated contrast of their ethnicities), leads into a completely different kind of story with very similar casting.

"Hotel Reverie" is part of a trend particular to this season: Situations based in the generative power from huge banks of computers. Okay, that's something in many earlier episodes, but it's key to Series 7.

For this story, the banks of computers are doing something I've often fantasized about: Altering the outcome of beloved movies. Many a time I've re-watched No Country for Old Men and wondered, "What if Llewelyn Moss scrutinized the money and found the tracking device?" I'd love to see a movie that was just Llewelyn Moss and his wife Carla Jean living large, traveling the world to swill beer next to swimming pools, while Anton Chiguhr wanders the Southwest making convenience-store clerks flip coins.

That's not quite what happens in "Hotel Reverie," though. Instead, Awkwafina leads a team that licenses classic movies to get updated with modern-day actors, who use some sort of high-tech voodoo (it's better not to ask too many questions on this one), along with Virtual Reality equipment, to enter the augmented space of the actual movie -- and then replace one of the actors to give a real performance alongside the long-ago recorded other roles and scenes of the movie.

So basically, to do what I mention for No Country for Old Men, we'd have to ask Timothee Chalamet to replace Josh Brolin, then go in and run away from Javier Bardem until he shows up at a hotel in El Paso and then is abruptly snuffed in a way that haunts Tommy Lee Jones and the rest of us forever.

Anyway, Issa Rae plays a fading Hollywood star who is looking for a juicy role, and Harriet Walter (in a terrific small role) is the head of a near-bankrupt movie studio hoping to eke some revenue out of its back catalog of old movies. Awkwafina, adept at whimsically brittle confidence, is head of a tech company that can stick Issa Rae into a vintage, Casablanca-like crime/romance/drama in the hopes of striking box office gold.

You know how when a character tells another character not to spill soda on a computer, that means later on a character is going to spill soda on their computer? Yeah, that happens.

Soon Issa Rae is stuck inside the movie, acting in scene spaces that are just black, dead space outside of their boundaries. Also, as in previous Black Mirror stories, this "virtual place" has an element of time compression, as well as alternative-reality or parallel-universe creation. And whenever the real-world person goes into the virtual world, their eyes glaze over. Black Mirror has invented its own visual langage, where "milk eyes" translates to "do not disturb."

The story could go in any direction, but fans of "San Junipero" will be pleased to find that it becomes a love story between two women. (Black Mirror's homosexual pairing tend to be female, but I haven't heard anybody complain about that, and I won't buck that trend.) Issae Rae finds that the virtual movie performance of Emma Corrin's character develops sentience. The movie goes well off-plot and the classic movie character starts gaining conscious layers linked to the tragic life of the movie star who played her.

Emma Corrin's performance here is lovely. She maintains the studied, crisp mannerisms of a performer from the 1940s, never breaking that spell for a second. She really seems like someone out of a classic black-and-white movie. Meanwhile the toothsome Issa Rae maintains a loose, modern-day style. The episode's careful use of acting styles and ranges feels like a fanfiction romance between Michelle Obama and Princess Diana. The bizarre love story also felt a little bit like the pairing of human and replicant in Blade Runner, or the dreamy and ephemeral fulfillment when Haley Joel Osment finally connects with his mother (Frances O'Connor) at the end of A.I. Artificial Intelligence.

This episode is among Black Mirror's trippiest. It's also one of the most autobiographical for the series creator Charlie Booker, who used to work as a videogame reviewer for PC Zone magazine.

The story takes us back to the videogame company introduced in the Black Mirror standalone film Black Mirror: Bandersnatch from 2018. That "episode" was one of Netflix's forays into "Choose Your Own Adventure"-style interactive shows, which give the viewer choices at various decision points throughout the storyline. It was a cool idea until Netflix got sued by the book series' rights holders, who are protective and litigious about their intellectual property. Choose your own path to an undisclosed settlement!

"Plaything" is set at the same fictional gaming company as Bandersnatch, and Poulter briefly reprises his role as a genius programmer. "Plaything" also explores the mental state achieved (or for some, suffered) when using LSD -- a topic you don't often see in movies and shows, and especially not seen portrayed accurately or without some sort of moralizing. Further, it taps into the parallel worlds of advanced programming and drug-minded thought processes, where you find yourself thinking about everything as a set of patterns and systems, and where you feel like you're seeing every tiny detail and "the big picture" all at the same time.

Lewis Gribben plays a young, highly twitchy and nervous game reviewer during the 1990s (cue the period specific ambient-techno music). Gribben's latest assignment is to write a review in advance of the release of a game called Thronglets. He starts to play a very primitive, 8-bit game with little, blinking, bunny-like creatures that you can feed and protect from environmental hazards. If you keep feeding them, they reproduce. More important, the game is designed to learn from its past experiences, and as the Thronglets reproduce and react to input, they require more and more processing power. The programmer begins jerry-rigging additional motherboards, RAM, storage memory and whatever else he can cobble together to keep the game alive and learning. As Booker has described it, the game is like a Tamagotchi mixed with The Sims or SimCity. Apparently Netflix now offers videogames (an early attempt to compete with Steam?) and there's a Thronglets game available. Maybe I'll try playing it next time I take LSD. Might be a while.

Anyway, "Plaything" has a framing device that shows a much older version of the programmer, played by Peter Capaldi. Capaldi is one of those amazing, accomplished actors whom everyone in the UK probably knows but who hasn't "crossed the pond" much to appear in U.S. shows When we see him in "Playthings," he's a bespectacled, rail-thin, stringy-haired, homeless-looking guy who has been arrested by the police and charged with murder. He tells the police quite a yarn. Capaldi is such a captivating performer -- particularly the succinct, every-syllable-counts way he talks -- that by the end of the episode, his disheveled appearance is irrelevant.

This is a story where you couldn't possibly guess the ending, not even during the final minute. I kinda hope what happens, really happens. Maybe I'll start playing Thronglets.

Earlier I mentioned that an episode was reminiscent of a scene in Blade Runner. This epside is too, in a different way.

There's a technique at play throughout "Eulogy" that reminded me of the Esper machine Harrison Ford uses to track replicants. The Esper machinie was a sort of photo-analysis forensic tool that turned 2D pictures into 3D holographic environments. It never really made sense, but it was cool -- one of those things you wish you could do, going inside a photo world and looking around corners, seeing all the stuff the picture doesn't show.

Paul Giamatti gets to do this in "Eulogy," but not for a fun reason. His ex-girlfriend, from many years ago, has died. Those in charge of the funeral contact him and ask him to take part in a new form of eulogy, in which people who knew the deceased can take part in the memorial service via a kind of online, "living photograph" technique.

The story turns into an exploration of a failed relationship and a lifetime of regret, and Paul Giamatti is certainly the actor for this role. The character feels like a reprisal of a similar role he played in Sideways, only now he's older and more steeped in sorrow, and there's no Virginia Madsen beauty around the corner to offer him redemption and a fresh glass of Pinot Noir.

Giamatti, always a superlative actor, has the most affecting grimace ever filmed. When the man inhales, his mouth turns into a barrel shape like Wallace from Wallce & Gromit. You can almost feel him choking up inside. Sadness seems to be emanating like radiation from his grapefruit-ball cheeks. If you could go inside movies using a virtual-reality computer, you'd want to go in "Eulogy" to give the poor guy a hug.

Basically, "Eulogy" is like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind if Jim Carrey's character had an even more tragically misunderstood relationship with Kate Winslet. "Eulogy" does offer some redemption and acceptance at the end, though. It's a fine little episode that makes you wanna listen to cello music while sipping some good wine. But not fucking Merlot. This brings us to the final episode in Series 7...

This is "the fun episode" of Series 7. Many of the previous seasons had a "fun episode," going back to Series 4, which in 2017 gave us "USS Callister."

"USS Callister" is many viewers' favorite Black Mirror episode, so a sequel is most welcome, even if it took eight years. The 2017 episode starts off appearing to be a Star Trek-like show from the late 1960s, with a handful of uniformed crew members in the bridge of a galaxy-exploring starship. They rally around their captain, played by Jesse Plemons, and after he makes some tough decisions about a Klingon-like adversary, they overpraise him and sing "For he's a jolly good fellow!" until you think, "What the hell is going on here?"

Then you find out the sci-fi "show" is a virtual environment created by Plemons, who is actually a socially stunted techie at a major interactive-gaming company. Somehow his success has only made him more isolated, partly due to existing in the shadow of his business partner, a schmoozing snotty control freak egotist (Jimmi Simpson) who dominates every interaction. You might sympathize with Plemons' character if you didn't realize he has created a whole world to act out his own revenge power fantasies. Worse, he uses a DNA sampler to make sentient copies of coworkers on his petty shit list. These "virtual clones" are as real as the flesh-and-blood humans they were built from: They think and suffer. The only difference is they lack genitalia, which leads to one of my favorite lines from that episode, as delivered by Cristin Milioti: "Stealing my pussy is a red fucking line."

This episode is clearly well beyond the "speculative fiction" realm into all-out fantasy, but the situations are so well-explained, with such sharp actors, that you're more than happy to roll with it. This was one of the performances that made me love Plemons's understated, slow-molassses demeanor (another one is Game Night), and it sealed my affection for Cristin Milioti (the eventual "mother" from How I Met Your Mother, and Leonardo DiCaprio's long-suffering first wife from The Wolf of Wall Street.

Whatever Netflix paid Plemons and Milioti to reprise their role for "USS Callister: Into Infinity," it was worth it.

Milioti is again the hero, but this time both the "virtual clone" starship commander and the flesh-and-blood gaming coder are in play. (Previously, her human equivalent was merely a useful extortion victim). As this story begins, Office Milioti becomes aware of the little Galaxy Milioti roaming around in the game universe and attempts to help. Jimmi Simpson, whose character(s) previously had been clownish, becomes the story's chief antagonist as he tries to erase the crew before a New York Times reporter gets wind of the CEOs' prior abuses of the now-outlawed DNA-cloning box from the original episode.

Yeah, it's complicated. The whole thing is so complicated I can't believe it ever made it from a screenplay to a screen. But the nimble directing, by Toby Haynes, holds it all together. (Turns out Haynes is a veteran of Doctor Who, the Benedict Cumberbatch Sherlock show, and Disney's Andor -- which tracks with how well he holds "USS Callister: Into Infinity" together.)

Every little development of the story is justified and explained by the plot in neat little strokes. Why isn't Michaela Coel around to reprise her role as one of the crew members? We get an answer. Why is Milanka Brooks's sultry Slavic crewmate/receptionist still blue-skinned even though the virtual clones have become more human? That's explained. (Incidentally, somebody please sign Brooks up to be a future Bond Girl.)

They even find a way to bring back Jesse Plemons and somehow make him look younger than he did eight years ago. He made a superb villain last time, but this time we learn more of his troubled backstory and feel a little sorry for him. In spite of that, it proves true: Character is destiny.

The really fun aspect of "USS Callister: Into Infinity" is the way it both parodies Star Trek, in its crazy meta way, while giving you some of the joys of an actual Star Trek movie. In that sense it's a little like getting another kickass Galaxy Quest satire. Then, as an additional ironic twist, it somehow manages to combine elements of Being John Malkovich with The Real Housewives of Atlanta.

No, really. Only Black Mirror could have pulled off anything remotely this weird -- and made it the best streaming program I've seen all year. By Grabthar's Hammer, what a show.