Black Mirror Season 6 Episode 4 Mazey Day Explained- A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words

If you were wondering what it would look like if Black Mirror turned its gaze on Britney Spears, Mazey Day is the result. A hungry photographer Bo(Zazie Beetz), with a knack for finding celebrities in compromising positions, and a young movie star reeling from a terrible accident collide in Black Mirror Season 6 Episode 4, Mazey Day. This is one of the rare Black Mirror episodes set in our current time. In fact, the year is 2006, and TomKat’s daughter Suri was just born. Just because there aren’t obvious future signposts doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty to be worried about.

Mazey Day is scary not for what happens in the end but for a look back at our recent past and how much further down the wrong path we have gone. Black Mirror is compelling because it is believable. Yeh, probably werewolves don’t exist, but paparazzi who will do anything to get a picture do exist, and advances in cameras and drones mean they have access like never before. What will twenty years from now look like? I’m afraid to ask.

In those days, there weren’t cameras in everyone’s hands, and there was very little accountability. Paparazzi could do almost anything to get a picture. There is a reason Britney fell apart. The pressure was too great, and her fame too invasive. Mazey Day starts with someone Bo took compromising pictures of killing himself just a few days after her photos were made public. Not long after, a young starlet is assaulted by a group of paparazzo, including Bo. She reacts poorly after smacking one of the photographers. This leads Bo to question her career choices, and she quits.

A few days later, Mazey begins filming her next movie in Czechoslovakia, and the wheels come off of her life. After a booze and drug-filled night, Clara Rugaard’s Mazey Day goes for a drunken drive and hits someone. She doesn’t stop and returns home, hoping to clean up any evidence of her drinking and get away with murder. Her guilt won’t let her forget, though, and she leaves the set and shuts herself away from the world.

Bo can’t pay her bills, and she becomes involved as everyone is scrambling for pictures of Mazey, and there is a massive bounty for whoever can get them. Bo and her friend Hector track Mazey down to a celebrity rehab clinic that her doctor bought out. Her team had hoped they could get Mazey inside and behind the walls and safely heal her mind and body. Unfortunately, Bo is good at her job and terrible at keeping her own secrets. Other photographers track her to rehab, and they all jockey for the best photos.

In the most unexpected of twists, when Bo and the other photographers find Mazie, she is chained to the bed, and as they begin to take pictures, she morphs into a werewolf. I don’t think anyone saw that coming. The prey becomes the predator, and Mazey begins wracking up dead bodies one after another. A flashback shows that Mazey was turned into a werewolf on the night she hit a person in Czechoslovakia. The man she hit was a werewolf, and when she stopped to check on him, he bit her, making her a werewolf too.

Mazey chases Bo and Hector to the diner and kills everyone except for Bo. Bo manages to shoot Mazey with the sheriff’s gun, and she turns back into a human. She begs Mazey to shoot her, but Bo hands Mazey the gun instead and readies her camera to capture the agonizing moment she kills herself. It is a pointed look at the role of the paparazzi and the public’s ravenous appetite for celebrity news, particularly tragedy. Bo’s most potent weapon is her camera, and she points unflinchingly at Mazey. In the end, even Mazey Day’s name, probably an invention of her stardom, betrays her. From this point forward, Mazey would only be able to be seen during the day during a full moon.

Although teeming with futuristic tech and worries, Black Mirror has always been about humanity and how flawed we are. If we weren’t so terrible, maybe the tech wouldn’t be used for awful things. In 2006 there is none of the nanny states, social media swarming nonsense appearing in earlier Black Mirror seasons. No one is dying and uploading their consciousness to a digital heaven, and no legal punishment is dooming criminals to fates worse than death. What 2006 does have, though, is opportunistic people and damaged souls doing damage to each other and themselves. What starts as a look at press gone wild becomes a creature feature about stalkers becoming the stalked. If Nightcrawler had a baby with The Howling, the result would be Black Mirror Season 6 Episode 4 Mazey Day. As usual, Charlie Brooker’s series surprises. Find all our Black Mirror coverage here.