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Black Mirror: Charlie Brooker Updates Season 7, "USS Callister" Sequel
Charlie Brooker offered an update on how Black Mirror Season 7 production is progressing and revisiting "USS Callister" with a sequel.
It's safe to say that April 2024 was a pretty good month for fans of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror. That was when they learned that the six-episode seventh season of the Netflix anthology series will arrive in 2025 – including a sequel to the Season 4 episode "USS Callister" (directed by Toby Haynes and written by Brooker and William Bridges). During an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Brooker offered an update on how things are going with filming and shared why "USS Callister" was the right episode to go the sequel route with.
In terms of how production on Season 7 is going, Brooker shared that they are "in mid-production," noting that they're at the point where the season's episodes are all in some level of production – with Brooker noting, "I'm about to start writing the last one, which actually is terrifying because I probably should have written it several weeks ago!" At the time of the interview, Brooker confirmed that they had wrapped the "USS Callister" sequel and had "just started on another one." In addition, the score and mix on one episode are being finished, while Brooker also teased, "We are doing something really cool right now that we've never done before — but I can't say what it is." One key point that Brooker drove home was the importance of having "a real mix of things" on both sides of the camera and how he believes they have it this season.
Speaking of the "USS Callister" sequel, Brooker explains how the episode lent itself to a continuation and how being able to write a character beyond one episode was a new experience that was "a lot of fun" for him. "This has been brewing for actually quite a long time. And it's partly because of the way that it ends. The first one ends like you could just carry that story on and follow where they go now. So it was always like, 'Hmm, I'm going to do that.' It was something we were looking at for quite a long time. There were various iterations it went through, various versions we wanted to do and were discussing on and off for several years."
Brooker continued, "But there are a lot of schedules to sort out, and then the pandemic got in the way. It was something that looked like it wasn't going to happen, and so I was delighted when it did. So, it's been a minute. But even writing the characters is a luxury I don't often get. I've never had it before on 'Black Mirror' to have a character that survives beyond one episode! So that's been a lot of fun, and then seeing them all on set has been fantastic," Brooker explained.
As for what viewers can expect, Brooker's response seems to indicate that viewers shouldn't necessarily assume anything – like assuming Jesse Plemons' Robert Daly wouldn't be appearing (in large part because he's no longer living). "You'll see. Yeah, you'll see [Laughs]. But we continue the story from where we left off. And there are some new characters as well. There is new stuff to do with where they've now ended up versus where they were."