Warning: This review contains spoilers for Black Mirror season 6, episode 4, “Mazey Day.”
Any anthology series is bound to be hit-and-miss, and Black Mirror season 6 reaches its low point – and possibly the low point of the entire series – with its fourth episode, “Mazey Day.” “Mazey Day” starts out as a cat-and-mouse caper in which the cat is a cash-strapped paparazzo in need of a big scoop and the mouse is a celebrity who went off the grid following a hit-and-run incident. Throughout most of the episode, “Mazey Day” keeps viewers interested enough in the mystery of who Mazey ran over and what will happen when the paparazzi catch up with her. But in its final act, it takes a bizarre left turn that feels really out of place in a Black Mirror episode.
Compared to the other entries in season 6, “Mazey Day” is by far the most half-baked. It’s as if series creator Charlie Brooker had a semblance of a concept about paparazzi and also wanted to do something with werewolves, and decided to just cram the two ideas together. Whereas “Loch Henry” and “Beyond the Sea” had plenty of room to breathe, “Mazey Day” races through its plot without bothering to give its characters any depth or personality. Zazie Beetz is terrific as usual in the role of the sympathetic paparazzo, but the episode gives her a razor-thin motivation: she needs money. She grapples with the morality of her sleazy vocation, but it’s all too brief. Mazey Day herself, a troubled Hollywood starlet played by Clara Rugaard, is even more one-dimensional. She’s seen running someone over with her car, then going into hiding and having a couple of bad dreams about the hit-and-run to show she hasn’t forgotten about it, and then, all of a sudden, she’s turning into a werewolf.
“Mazey Day” continues the season’s exploration of outdated technologies. Black Mirror usually imagines futuristic tech that doesn’t exist yet, but season 6 has told a couple of stories about the impact that obsolete tech had on society when it was around. After “Loch Henry” examined the power of videotape, “Mazey Day” focuses on the shutterbug paparazzi who snapped shots of celebrities long before everyone had a camera in their pocket. But, unsurprisingly for a storyline covering antiquated tech, this episode doesn’t have anything to say that hasn’t already been said. All “Mazey Day” has to say is that paparazzi are amoral vultures, but that’s hardly a revelation; it’s been covered many times before.
An American Werewolf In Hollywood
Any promise that “Mazey Day” might have had to be a decent episode of Black Mirror goes out the window when Mazey turns into a werewolf. The werewolf twist is completely out of the blue. Despite the lack of character development, it’s easy to go along with the story as the paparazzi follow Mazey to a celebrity wellness retreat, literally crawl through the dirt to sneak in (a great sight gag spoiled by on-the-nose dialogue pointing out the irony), and follow Mazey to her cabin. After that, all the episode needed was an exciting or terrifying payoff. However, when the clouds clear and a full moon shines through and Mazey starts to transform, this episode officially loses the plot. The werewolf transformation sequence includes some familiar framing as an homage to An American Werewolf in London, but the CGI has got nothing on Rick Baker’s Oscar-winning practical effects.
Revealing that Mazey Day ran over a werewolf and now she’s a werewolf herself is one of Black Mirror’s laziest twists. Mazey turns into a werewolf for the shock value alone. It’s not a metaphor for any of the themes the episode touches on and it doesn’t stem organically from anything else in the story. Like a latter-day M. Night Shyamalan film, it has a twist purely because fans expect a twist. The genius of Black Mirror is its ability to show audiences how they’re destroying themselves with technology, but werewolves are magic – they have nothing to do with technology. This doesn’t feel like a Black Mirror episode; it feels like a run-of-the-mill installment in a standard horror anthology series.
“Mazey Day” will probably go down as the notorious “werewolf episode” and live in infamy alongside other underwhelming Black Mirror installments like “The Waldo Moment.” In a season full of fascinating, fleshed-out, lovable characters like Joan from “Joan is Awful” and Pia from “Loch Henry,” Beetz unfortunately drew the short straw with the role of a werewolf-fighting paparazzo. On one hand, Brooker should be praised for trying to break free of the formula, but on the other hand, this isn’t the way to go about it. Paparazzism is a juicy satirical target, werewolves are a beloved horror trope, and Beetz and Rugaard lead a great cast, but “Mazey Day” lets them all down with cheap thrills and a massively underdeveloped script.