Given Black Mirror's particularly condensed Season 5 (it's only three episodes, compared to its usual six), fans of the mind-bending series will be itching to know if Black Mirror will return for Season 6 in record time. The bad news: Netflix has yet to officially renew the show. The good news: considering how successful and widely popular Black Mirror has become, Season 6 seems all but inevitable — so long as creator Charlie Brooker is up to the task.
Figuring out when it might return, however, is a bit trickier. The show has been all over the map with previous premiere dates, thus making it hard to nail down any sort of pattern. When to expect new Black Mirror seasons is just about as unpredictable as its storylines. But clearly, Brooker has been busy dreaming up new directions for the series: the reason why it took so long for Season 5 to come out was because he was busy creating the franchise's very first interactive film, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. Released in December, it allowed viewers to choose what they wanted the character to do next, with each decision resulting in a different outcome. Black Mirror has always been about uncovering both the benefits and dangers of technology, so it feels appropriate the show would be the one to introduce us to this new way of streaming. As for what all this could mean for the show's future, though, it's unclear.
Brooker once shared in an interview with the Express that all Black Mirror episodes are part of a shared reality, which means that not only can new stories and characters be created, but Brooker can revisit them and connect them to one another down the line. "We always used to say it's [connected] to a shared universe but then I started to say it's a psychologically shared universe," he told the outlet in December 2017. "Now, some of the episodes are definitely connected because there's specific references within that story to things we've seen in other episodes."
This opens up a ton of opportunities for future seasons, which seems to indicate the series (and its creator) don't intend on slowing down anytime soon. One of Season 4's most popular episodes, "U.S.S. Callister," which served as a Star Trek parody, could even end up getting a potential spinoff. Episode director Toby Haynes told The Hollywood Reporter in an interview that he would love to work on an entire TV series based on those characters, and hinted that Brooker "might revisit" the episode in a future Black Mirror season.
Granted, none of this confirms that a sixth season will for sure happen, but it certainly bodes well for the show's future. It may take a little while to churn out more episodes, but odds are that Season 5 won't be the last fans see of this sci-fi series. Much like technology itself, now that it's here, Black Mirror will never go away — and it has the potential to just keep getting more elaborate.
