Black Mirror Season 6 Episode 2 Loch Henry Explained- Some Stories Are Too Personal To Tell

The assault on Netflix, er, Streamberry, continues. True crime is all the rage. We can’t get enough. If we aren’t consuming it, we are making it. It seems everyone has a Youtube Channel or a podcast nowadays. What is the price of our morbid curiosity, though? What happens when we find more than we bargained for? Just ask journalist David Farrier who has a knack for finding trouble in the oddest places. His films about the bizarre world of competitive tickling and a strange, scary man named Mr. Organ landed him in a ton of trouble. He has been followed, sued, and had his house broken into. Black Mirror Season 6 Episode 2 Loch Henry follows that thread and cautions some stories come at too high a price.

Black Mirror has a habit of taking an uncomfortable truth and rubbing out noses in it. Humans are morbid, impatient, selfish people. We love to watch other people’s pain. There is a reason true crime has taken off like it has. Murder porn is addictive. What happens when we become the story, though? In Black Mirror Season 6 Episode 2, Loch Henry asks that question.

Pia and Davis arrive in his picturesque Scottish hometown to film a nature documentary but find themselves instead drawn to a decades-old crime story. While in town, they visit Davis’ friend Stuart who owns a pub. He laments that tourism has dried up since Iain Adair tortured and killed multiple people before killing his parents and himself. He also shot Davis’ father, Kenneth, in the shoulder during the takedown. Shortly after, Kenneth died. He didn’t die from the gunshot, but his mother has always blamed the subsequent illness that killed him on the wound. This chilling story is tailor-made for a true crime documentary. It had heroism, mystery, gore, and multiple victims.

This story piques Pia’s interest, who wants to make a documentary about the murders. Davis’ mother provides backstory, and when they take their preliminary footage to a production company, they are asked to pursue it. Pia, Davis, and Stuart head to Iain’s house, where they find evidence of massive amounts of blood on the floor and walls. On the way back to town, they get into a car accident landing Davis in the hospital where Stuart’s dad is also residing after a fall down the stairs.

Pia and Davis’ mother, Janet, enjoy dinner together at her house, and Pia takes some of their old Bergerac tapes to record additional footage. She watches one of the old tapes, and a home video begins as the Bergerac episode ends. At the same time, Stuart’s father, Richard, asks Davis to stop researching this story. He says he has always known a terrible truth about the Iain Adair story. He suspects that Davis’ parents were involved with the murders along with Adair.

Back at the house, Pia watches the tape, horrified, as Davis’ father, Kenny, comes from behind the camera to say they are going to have some fun with the couple of tourists that went missing and was later found dead. If that’s not bad enough, Pia sees a much younger woman wearing a red mask and holding a power drill. She dances around and laughs maniacally before she takes the drill to the victims, and they begin screaming. Janet walks in just then to tell Pia it is time to eat. During dinner, Pia sees the red mask the young woman in the nurse’s costume was wearing.

Pia now knows she is in grave danger and makes an excuse to leave the house. Janet becomes suspicious and finds the tapes, and realizes that Pia knows she is a sadistic killer. Janet chases her down in her car, and Pia runs and hides. Unable to get a cell signal, Pia tries to cross the stream and instead falls into the water and hits her head. We next see her body floating down the river. Back at Janet’s house, she pulls out a box with polaroids and keepsakes from their kills. She places the tapes and the box on a table with a note confessing everything. She then puts the red mask on and hangs herself.

The signs were all there. Janet was obsessed with Bergerac not because she had a crush on the star but because she used it as research material to avoid getting caught. They may have also used it to hone their skills and get ideas for kills. His parents and Iain Adair were killers who enjoyed mutilating people. Davis thought his mother kept every news story and clipping from that time because she couldn’t let go of her husband’s memory, but in reality, it was because they were involved in all the crimes, and she was keeping a scrapbook of their kills.

She did blame Iain for her husband’s death, but not because he was innocent. Janet blames Iain because he is one part of the murderous trio who couldn’t keep his act together. This is why she says, “Such a stupid man. Just the waste of it.” Janet doesn’t care about the loss of life. Just the loss of her husband and killing partner.

The camera pulls back, and we are now watching a trailer for a Streamberry documentary Loch Henry Truth Will Out which is the story of Davis and Pia. Davis is onstage with the filmmakers behind the documentary at an awards ceremony but looks miserable. Stuart’s bar is jam-packed with people, and he is thrilled, but his father looks on sadly. In the trailer, Richard explains that he once spent a sex-fueled night with Davis’ parents, and things got scary. Although no one was killed that night, their behavior made him think they were involved in the Adair murders. Davis lost his girlfriend and discovered his parents were killers. The truth he thought he knew was a lie. His father wasn’t shot trying to catch a murderer. He was a monster who was covering up his crimes.

Kenneth and Janet controlled Iain Adair, and all three worked together to kill people until Kenneth shot him and his parents before shooting himself in the shoulder to cover it all up. In the final moments of Loch Henry Davis pulls out the note his mother left him, and we realize he chose to give all of the footage to the filmmaker for Streamberry. He sold his happiness for this story. In an incredibly cheeky twist, we also learn the account will be dramatized, capitalizing on his pain further.

Black Mirror Season 6 Episode 2 Loch Henry is a searing indictment of our consumption of pain and need for glory. Find all our Black Mirror coverage here.