David Farnor | On 22, Apr 2025

What is truth in 2025? How do know what’s real and what’s not? How do we tell the difference between fact and fantasy? These are the most pressing questions facing humankind today. Surrounded by artificial intelligence being pushed by the technology industry as the answer to all our problems, we live in a world where images and text can be generated on a whim, re-piecing together fragments of our existence into things that seem realistic and accurate, but aren’t guaranteed to be either. With Google no longer showing cached versions of pages in its AI-tinted search results, it’s harder than ever to see the truth not only of our present but also our past.

What does that have to do with a chocolate bar company? That’s where Black Mirror’s fiendishly good Bête Noire comes in. The second episode of the tech anthology’s seventh season, it’s perhaps named after the confection creation that’s conjured up in the first 10 minutes: a chocolate bar with miso in it. Nobody really seems to like it – until they go back for a second taste and then it starts to grow on them.

The wizard behind such a concoction? Maria (Siena Kelly), a food genius with a penchant for science and ensnaring tastebuds. But into her focus group session for her latest invention walks Verity (Rose McEwen), an old classmate from school – and, quicker than you can say “Willy Wonka”, the episode title takes on a new meaning.

Maria, it swiftly becomes clear, doesn’t like Verity. At first, it’s not for any tangible reason: in fact, it’s due to intangible reasons, as Verity’s arrival brings with it an increasingly number of strange irregularities that start to unsettle Maria, then entirely upend her. What was the name of the chicken restaurant her boyfriend worked at? What happened to an email that she sent in which she specified a key ingredient to meet her boss’ strict dietary requirements?

It’s a brilliantly disorienting bit of creeping anxiety, and Brooker’s script drip-feeds it into what we see as well as what Maria knows – or thinks she knows. How much of these glitches in the Matrix are her simply misremembering? Is it stress? Is it something she’s making up? Or is Verity somehow gaslighting her?

Siena Kelly, who impressed in Domino Day, is fantastic as Maria, establishing her immediately as someone who is pedantic about every little detail – exactly the kind of person who would be correct at all times. Or, perhaps, exactly the kind of person who would be susceptible to reaching breaking point if put under too much pressure. Kelly’s certainty dissolves into panic in a beautifully nuanced way, her prickly demeanour subtly escalating to hostility – while our own knowledge of the truth is kept ambiguous enough so that we can only rely on Kelly’s sympathetic performance.

Rose McEwen is equally brilliant as the enigmatic Verity, who is charming, funny and vulnerable from the moment we meet her – but, under the surface, offers us a glimpse of some steely resilience. The more the two of them spar, both verbally and non-verbally, the more we struggle to reconcile the Verity that Maria recalls from school – anti-social and unliked – with the smart, qualified and softly spoken person we see today. In between the two of them, Ben Bailey Smith is excellent as Gabe, the exasperated but patient company head trying to reconcile the pair without knowing what’s going on between them.

What ensues is a wonderfully barbed examination of the difference between our true selves and the version of ourselves that we can curate and present to others – a potential disjunct that’s amplified and distorted further not just by social media, digital profiles or working from home policies, but by the lack of concrete evidence and truth that now surrounds our day-to-day lives. Even CCTV footage becomes something unreliable, a flourish that tips an intensely unpredictable thriller into full-on fantasy territory with the click of a button.

 

Through a glass darkly (spoilers)

– By the time Maria has snuck into Verity’s home, we know that we’re firmly on her side – testament to just how good both Kelly and McEwen are at playing on our sympathies and suspicions. But even then, the third act reveal is an enjoyably left-field surprise: Verity is a genius and has invented a super-computer that has effectively parsed every single possible variant of our universe, so that she can hop between them by holding down a button on her pendant. There’s one where, for example, she did go to university and get food qualifications to make her a perfect fit for Maria’s R&D department. Or a timeline in which Maria did pour her colleague’s non-dairy milk all over the floor in the office kitchen.

– The only person who’s aware of these changes, of course, is Verity, which explains the entirely disorienting effect of living inside a reality that someone else has constructed, where the rug is pulled out from under you without any warning or comprehension.

– Black Mirror’s real problem has always been human nature and how it’s enabled by technology – and that’s incisively observed here by the way that, having invented a computer that can shape the world as she wishes, Verity doesn’t cure hunger or solve homelessness. Instead, she pursues vengeance on her secondary school bullies.

– Maria, in one fatal swoop, grabs the pendant after shooting Verity, and immediately changes the power to control the computer to be hers – then stops the police from arresting her and instead gets them to worship her. Once again, the initial instinct isn’t to do something for others, but to do something for herself.

– There’s a gentle parallel before then, though, that hits the episode’s point home, as Maria has been changing the reality around Verity for many years before now – the rumours about Verity having an affair with a teacher were started by Maria, something that then followed Verity through her teenage years and into adulthood. It wasn’t true, but it was something that shaped Verity’s life without her having any control over it. From captions on photos and untagging people, how often do we do the same in our treatment of others, whether offline or online?

– If you had a pendant like Verity’s, what would you use it for?

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