Black Mirror Season 6 Episode 1 Joan Is Awful Explained- Free Will And Fictive Levels Of Reality

Black Mirror Season 6 begins with a profoundly meta episode that feels like the hilarious combination of The Truman Show and the South Park iTunes terms and conditions episode HUMANCENTiPAD. Black Mirror has always pushed boundaries and poked fun at the streamers who show their content and the consumers who lap it up. Season 6 opens strong with Joan Is Awful, a multilayered indictment on the future of content creation that is especially prescient considering the ongoing writer’s strike.

Joan, Schitt’s Creek’s Annie Murphy is unhappy. Joan’s life sucks. Not sucks in an I can’t pay my bills, my husband divorced me, my dog just died, and I’m sick and getting evicted kind of way. Just an oh woah is me; how boring is life kind of way. She has a decent-paying job as management for a tech firm, but her first act of the morning is firing someone. She has a boyfriend, Krish, who makes her breakfast each morning, and she isn’t sick or dying.

She’s just bored. Krish is dull. His food is bland. She hates her job because it’s drudgery. She’s over it and too stuck to do anything about it. She is insufferable and miserable. When she meets up with an old boyfriend, Mac(Rob Delaney), one particularly boring night, she does the right thing and heads back home for some Netflix and chill with Krish, Streamberry and chill for the purposes of Joan Is Awful.

That’s when things get very meta. They find a series called Joan Is Awful, and Salma Hayek is playing Joan. I wouldn’t be thrilled about my life being coopted, but if anyone is going to play me, Salma Hayek is a flattering choice. Hayek’s Joan has the same streaks in her hair and the same life she leads every morning. Pretty soon, everyone she knows is watching every minute detail of her life. They are on screen for all to see just hours after things happen. Understandably she panics. She probably should have thought about the implications of Krish seeing her day. He even sees her therapy session, where she confesses that Krish is boring and that she is still in contact with her ex-boyfriend.

If that’s not bad enough, it turns out Joan didn’t do the right thing and slept with Mac. While Joan is scrambling, the Streamberry series goes another layer deeper when the episode shows Salma Hayek’s Joan watching herself, now played by Cate Blanchett’s Joan. Somehow everything that happens in her day appears in the following episodes moments after it happens. The next day, everyone has seen the series and knows she is a trash person.

If that’s not enough, she has been fired for breaking her NDA at work through the series. She goes to a lawyer to inquire about suing, but she finds through the terms and conditions that we all blithely sign, she has given away the rights to her life being used as content. There’s nothing she can do, and that small rectangle none of us can be without is being used to compile her story. A computer-generated version of Hayek speeds up the process making it seamless between actual events happening and appearing on screen.

Girl can’t catch a break. When she goes to Mac for solace, he isn’t able to have sex with her because it is all too public now, and the pressure to perform is too much. Joan decides to get even by drinking laxatives, eating a ton of burgers, drawing a penis on her forehead, and dressing up in a cheerleader costume before heading to a wedding and interrupting the ceremony to sh*t herself. Understandably Salma is pissed that her computer-generated self is humiliating Her. Hilariously her lawyer tells her the same thing Joan did. She signed the terms and conditions, and there is nothing she can do.

After firing her lawyer, Salma heads to Joan’s house. She is livid, but the two realize they are both in this together. They devise a plan to destroy the Streamberry server, and off they go. Salma gets inside and lets Joan in. They sneak into the CEO’s office and overhear Mona Javadi talking about how their quamputer is basically a suped-up ChatGPT. It can create infinite amounts of content almost instantly. An endless supply of “We are all awful” series based on real people’s lives. Joan Is Awful was just a test run.

If all of that isn’t enough to make your head spin while trying to destroy the quamputer, they meet Michael Cera as, a computer tech, who explains that they aren’t the source, Joan and Salma. There is another Joan and Salma a level below theirs, which is the real Joan. He’s not the real tech either, just a computer-generated tech with Cera’s likeness. The Joan we have been following is the Salma Hayek version of Joan as seen by our Joan. The real Joan sees Annie Murphy’s Joan on level one when she watches Joan Is Awful. Salma Hayek, on Joan’s level, thinks she is the Source Salma because she is coded to believe that.

Our Joan snaps and bashes Michael Cera’s head in, but Mona begs her to stop before Joan can destroy the quamputer. If she destroys the quamputer, all levels are also destroyed, meaning all the other Joans and Salmas die. In fact, everyone that populates that level or fictive ceases to exist. Our Annie Murphy Joan says she can’t stop herself from destroying the quamputer because the real Joan has already done it. Our Joan is not in control. As the quamputer dies, all the versions of Joan flit through the real Joan’s mind.

As Black Mirror Season 6 Episode 1 ends, we see the real Joan, who is much happier. She isn’t miserable and finally doesn’t take her life for granted. Joan still meets with a therapist, but she is healthier now. She owns a coffee shop, and in one last surprising twist Annie Murphy walks in, and the two are friends. They also both sport matching ankle monitors. What does that mean?

Source Joan and Annie Murphy were arrested for destroying the quamputer. Despite Annie Murphy not being responsible, she was held accountable for some reason. Joan Is Awful asks some philosophical questions about free will. Source Joan did all of the things our Joan did first. She was an awful, entitled person who did nothing to change her life. She also pooped at the wedding and destroyed the quamputer at Streamberry.

What did Annie Murphy do that was illegal at the end of Black Mirror Joan Is Awful?

Suppose Annie Murphy’s Joan was a computer-generated version of Joan. In that case, Salma Hayek’s character in our Joan’s world is Annie Murphy in the real world which means Source Annie is being punished for helping Source Joan break into Streamberry. The two met in the same way that our Joan and her Salma Hayek bonded over their shared predicament after Joan pooped in the church. This means that Source Annie is a hero like Source Salma was. Although Fictive Level 1 Salma wasn’t so keen on having her fake life ended, but whatever, you get the point. Find all our Black Mirror coverage here.