There will be spoilers ahead!
Joan Is Awful, the opening episode of Black Mirror season six, delivered a surprise twist in the style of Charlie Brooker.
It follows ‘ordinary lady’ Joan, played by Annie Murphy, whose life is turned upside down when her activities are mirrored in a massive TV dramatisation of streaming behemoth Streamberry.
Not only does she view herself through the eyes of her coworkers, but her boyfriend learns about her romance with an ex-lover, Mac, played by Rob Delaney.
Throughout, Salma Hayek plays Joan, but the Streamberry version, which includes some pretty crazy moments, such as when Joan chaotically tries to take matters into her own hands and conduct an act so terrible she believes it will never be shown on TV.
But it happens, and Salma, disguised as a cheerleader, gets caught in a church, disrupting a wedding, and s**ting herself. Yes, indeed.
When that doesn’t stop Joan Is Awful from streaming, Annie’s Joan attempts to figure out what’s going on, while Salma watches Cate Blanchett play her on television in the TV version.
But there are more than three Joans, as Joan realises she isn’t even the ‘source’ version, but rather a computerised image of Annie Murphy.
Michael Cera’s character Beppe explains: ‘You’re not the original Joan. That’s Source Joan. You’re just a Joan.’
He continues: ‘You’re just a version of Joan played by a digital likeness of Annie Murphy.’
As if it wasn’t perplexing enough, it’s soon revealed that all of the Joans are made by a ‘infinite content producer’ machine.
The true ‘source’ Joan is significantly more ‘ordinary,’ and Annie is simply programmed to play Joan.
To top it all off, none of this is happening in reality; it’s all happening on fictive level 1 in Joan’s fiction.
Trying to regain control of everything, Annie eventually destroys the quamputer, which kills all the digital souls that think themselves real.
What happens at the end of Joan Is Awful?
Annie and source Joan are jailed when Annie destroys the machine, claiming that she couldn’t have stopped herself because it was never her decision because source Joan would have already destroyed the quamputer in reality.
The last scene has them both wearing ankle tags, although unlike other of the season’s worse episodes, it ends on a little more positive note.
Source Joan is dating again, has started her own coffee shop, and is ‘proud’ of her life and what she does, telling her therapist that she feels like the’main character’ in her own life after befriending Annie.
Despite being under house arrest, she says: ‘There’s good days and bad days, I guess that’s to be expected.’
Black Mirror is available to watch on Netflix.
