After dozens of mind-bending, thought-provoking escapades across time and space, Black Mirror’s seventh season is tackling something new: its first-ever sequel episode.
The Emmy-winning Netflix series dropped its entire six-episode seventh season on Thursday, April 10, closing with the finale “USS Callister: Into Infinity.” The sprawling 90-minute episode rounds up many of the actors from Black Mirror’s season 4 episode “USS Callister” — including Cristin Milioti, Jimmi Simpson, Billy Magnussen, Osy Ikhile, Milanka Brooks and Paul G. Raymond — for another adrenaline-pumping adventure.
The USS Callister’s crew, still trapped in the Infinity company’s space-faring virtual reality MMORPG, are barely scraping by, robbing other players of their credits to simply survive. In the real world, the crew’s in-game robberies become problematic for Infinity’s greedy CEO James Walton (Jimmi Simpson) when a tenacious investigative reporter starts to ask questions, threatening to implicate the company and its former founder Robert Daly.
Sequels are generally difficult to pull off well, but “USS Callister: Into Infinity” is a rare exception, thanks to years of development by Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker, who worked on the script on-and-off for years after “USS Callister” aired in December 2017 and became one of the show’s most popular episodes.
Simpson told Engadget he first learned he would revisit the Black Mirror universe in 2021. The 49-year-old actor holds credits in shows like Westworld, Dark Matter and Pachinko — and yet, Simpson is still “surprised” when projects come together.
“When people say it’s happening, I don’t believe them, ever, until it’s definitely happening,” he said. Beyond his hesitation about gigs panning out in general, Simpson also had reservations that the original episode could successfully be iterated on. “It’s a one-piece film. I was a little bit cynical,” he said, “How are you going to top [the first episode].”
“They found not just the reason to spend more time with these characters, but the reason why the story wasn’t done yet,” he continued. “That was my favorite part, that they made this sequel kind of essential.”
Revisiting Walton after seven years wasn’t as difficult as he thought it might be. “It was pretty natural. It was kind of like putting on an old suit that had ketchup stains all over it. So it’s familiar, but smells weird,” Simpson mused. “And so I just dropped into that guy.”
It also helped that many of Simpson’s scenes this time were with Milioti, who reprises her role as an Infinity programmer, now turned captain of the USS Callister. For Simpson, she was the ideal acting partner.
“[Milioti] takes pauses like a jazz musician,” he explained, adding, “She’s always making something alive, and so I think our work together was some of my favorite stuff.”
Brooker previously described season 7 as a “little bit OG Black Mirror” and “back to basics in many ways,” which bodes well for the beloved show. It left an indelible impression on viewers since premiering in 2011 by weaving heady speculative fiction premises with a deep sense of humanity.
Simpson hopes that longtime Black Mirror viewers — and fans of “USS Callister” in particular — find the show’s first “expansion” episode worth the long wait, and that they’re “beyond entertained” by what the cast and crew took time to painstakingly and lovingly create.
“Entertainment, you know, what we do, it’s about giving you a nice time, because the world sucks sometimes,” he admits. “So let’s spend some time together. We’ve got that in spades. I think we also have a little commentary on the power of loneliness and the power of togetherness, and it shows you both of those things perfectly.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/jimmi-simpson-worried-black-mirrors-return-to-the-uss-callister-wouldnt-be-essential-070050250.html?src=rss
