“[Mazey Day] was a Red Mirror then a Black Mirror then a Red Mirror – I kept changing my mind. We even made a title sequence that was like the Red Mirror titles. We hemmed and hawed like ‘do we spoil this for people?’”
Ultimately, Brooker and company opted to keep Red Mirror away from Mazey Day. In the process, they created season 6’s most shocking ending by far – albeit an ending that caps a generally slight and inessential episode in the show’s impressive canon.
Mazey Day falls firmly in the middle of the pack of season 6’s offerings and maybe all of Black Mirror‘s offerings overall. There’s nothing tremendously offensive about it. It features a breezy running time of 40 minutes, some stellar mid-2000s vibes, a solid performance from Zazie Beetz, and that aforementioned shocking ending. All of those elements are appreciated but don’t quite add up to a classic Black Mirror. And that’s OK. They don’t have to all be San Junipero.
Faults aside, Mazey Day hits the ground running and respects its viewer’s time. We experience what will come to be the core of Beetz’ Bo’s internal struggle early on. She has all the appearances of an amoral paparazzo photographer working in 2006 Los Angeles (we know the exact date thanks to the birth announcement of Ms. Suri Cruise…who is now somehow 17 years old IRL), but the nature of the work clearly gets to her. After one of her candid expose subjects kills himself, Bo retires from a life of taking famous people’s pictures for something less exploitative.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world in the Czech Republic, uber famous actress Mazey Day goes on an ill-fated late night drive where she seemingly runs over and kills a civilian. Much of the tension throughout the episode derives from the question of how Bo and Mazey’s paths will eventually cross and if it will be the redemptive experience for each that you’d hope it would be. The answer, satisfyingly, turns out to be “yes, but not in the way you think.”
Mazey Day is the rare Black Mirror episode that probably plays better on a repeated viewing. The scenes in which Mazey appears to struggle with her guilt and addiction but is really grappling with her incoming lycanthropy are really fun. It turns out that pedestrian she ran over was actually a werewolf that passed along the curse to her. Slightly less fun is Bo and her paparazzi frenemies quest for the elusive $30,000 photo of their prey. Bo’s peers are properly slimy but also quite tiring. A trip to try the best pecan pie in California feels like an unnecessary discursion even if the diner does eventually end up as the site of a werewolf bloodbath.
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