Is Black Mirror Feminist? Breaking It Down by Each Episode

"USS Callister" is a parable about power that works on many levels, whether you're referring to the gaming world, the workplace, or society.

Jesse Plemmons (not Matt Damon) plays an unsavory villain named Robert Daly, who, by day, is a meek CTO of a VR gaming company. By night, he takes revenge upon coworkers who have scorned him by replicating their consciousness and making them his subordinates in his video game.

The episode features a delightfully clever and capable heroine. Basically, the female crew members in the game are reduced to sycophantic fangirls for the captain. Portrayed by How I Met Your Mother alumnus Cristin Milioti, Nanette, the doe-eyed newbie at the gaming company, gets duplicated into Daly's fantasy.

At first, copy Nanette rejects her boss's twisted role-playing. But she soon complies to trap Robert at his own game and triumphs with a resistance effort. We should also give a shout-out to Michaela Coel, who plays Shania, a coworker who is fiercely protective of Nanette. Coel's character represents a female solidarity that's needed in sci-fi, where women are often standalone characters within a group of men.

Aside from its terribly misguided portrayal of emergency contraception, this Jodie Foster-directed episode delves into a mother-daughter relationship with the sensibilities of a dark Gilmore Girls plot.

In "Arkangel," single mother Marie uses a sketchy app that installs a chip inside her daughter Sara's brain. The app allows Marie to see everything that her daughter sees, filter out graphic images, and monitor various chemical levels. The mother avoids the app for a while but starts spying on her daughter again after worrying about her whereabouts one night. Overwhelmed with paranoia, Marie begins abusing the app and even terminates Sara's pregnancy.

This episode reveals the nefariousness of controlling a young woman's experiences. Showing the dangers of helicopter parenting, it also portrays a flawed, dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship, a connection that is rosy and warm in conventional portrayals. Last but not least, it offers a lead female character a sense of agency, though in a rather dark way — by the end of the episode, Sara flees from home after brutally hurting her mother.

With characters like Star Wars's Captain Phasma and Marvel's Hela, it's been a year for female baddies. This intense Black Mirror episode is no exception, elevated by Andrea Riseborough's leading performance.

It revolves around Mia, a woman who is involved in an accidental murder with her friend Rob. Fifteen years later, she meets with Rob, who's overwrought with guilt. Not wanting to destroy the life she's built for herself, she goes on a killing spree to cover up her tracks. It's refreshing to see a female villain at the center of the episode, especially since women are often cast aside as victims or mere love interests in the thriller genre.

Listen, "Hang the DJ" is no "San Junipero," but I did enjoy how much depth the female protagonist Amy has — er, at least this AI simulation of her.

This Black Mirror installment imagines a world where a dating app puts people through relationships for varying intervals of time in order to help them find their perfect match. Enter Amy and Frank on an awkward first date. They have instant chemistry, but their time together expires within a fleeting 12 hours. Several bad relationships later, the system sets them up again.

Amy is a subtly feminist character, but feminist nonetheless. She's a rom-com female protagonist who's in tune with her sexual and emotional satisfaction. The episode is not developed through a male gaze — we get many shots of Amy's face in the love scenes throughout the episode that let us know how she is feeling. We're aware that most of the time, she's dissatisfied with the emotionally distant men the dating app pairs her with. Amy's also smart — let us not forget that she cleverly proposes to Frank that they should defy the dating system.

The genre of man vs. wild has predominantly been, well, led by men (think Cast Away and The Revenant). Taking a refreshing spin on this traditional trope, the black-and-white styled "Metalhead" puts a woman at the center of a struggle for survival.

Portrayed by Maxine Peake, a woman named Bella leads two men on a mission to retrieve a special item from a warehouse for her dying nephew. A shrapnel-blasting mechanical dog kills her comrades, and Bella is left alone to fend it off.

Bella's not just a nonchalant and physically strong character. She's smart and resourceful, observing the dog's patterns and reactions in order to stay alive. Emotionally rich, she cares deeply about her loved ones, constantly checking in with her family to remind them that she loves them and risking her life to retrieve a gift for her ailing nephew. Peake absorbs us into her stark and moving performance so well that it's only when we take a step back that we remember that her character has traditionally been a man.

"Black Museum" has one of the more tenuous plots in this season of Black Mirror, but it redeems itself with a solid lead.

Letitia Wright, who stars in the much-anticipated Black Panther movie, plays a young black woman named Nish who "stumbles" upon a black museum in the middle of nowhere. While waiting for her car to charge, she chats with the skeezy owner of the museum, Rolo Haynes. The collector of criminal oddities tells her about all the sketchy things he has done in the past, including involvements with corrupt brain experiments.

Eventually, we learn that Nish isn't a harmless passerby — she's the daughter of an incarcerated man whose consciousness Haynes has exploited for personal gain. Haynes has been inviting tourists to simulate her father's execution repeatedly, to the point where he has lost most of his mental capacity. To avenge her father, Nish punishes Haynes.

It's exciting to see a female lead who exists outside of a conventional moral spectrum. Nish is not quite good, but she's not quite bad. She takes morality into her own hands outside of a legal system that has wronged her father, much like how Frank Castle destroys criminals as the Punisher.