Some critics have noted Black Mirror becoming darker this season, but to me at least, the characterization has become ever more humane, as if to provide balance. After all, what is unrelieved horror but a form of boredom? What is dystopia unrelieved by humor or some contrasting element but a slog through wastelands that only differ by degrees and, perhaps, the weight of a particular baseball bat applied to a particular head?

In season three we discover that even in the midst of technological forces beyond our control, the individual is still free—to strive to reject the oppressive, to stop being a hamster on a wheel as in “Nosedive,” or to break on through to the other side as in “San Junipero.” And most importantly, succeed or fail, the individual still has the choice to pursue an ethical path over giving in to darkness. “Hated in the Nation,” may be “dark”—as if somehow the real world right now is a continual laugh riot—but it features characters with a strong moral compass who possess a dogged endurance in the face of unspeakable bee-drone horrors.

Or consider episode three, “Shut Up and Dance,” in which every character is in trouble for failing to pursue a moral path, and each of them has been reduced down to a riveting quest that still allows a terrible chance at survival. We are riveted because we believe in the idea of empathy and the ability to atone for our sins. Even if it turns out someone we’ve expressed empathy for has sinned in a way too terrible to be redeemed, we often still give the benefit of the doubt to the next person.

What the best of these episodes share is a dislocation caused by opening up the context, as if experiencing a telephoto lens that keeps widening our perspective far beyond expectation. With an eerie precision, our sense of the context and characters changes because the scriptwriters keep pushing inexorably outward, often past the point where a lesser show would end.

In that context, it’s striking to examine why the worst episodes don’t work, while still being superior to similar examples from shows like Night Gallery back in the day. Episode two, “Playtest,” shares the season’s common thread of introducing a sympathetic or ultimately sympathetic character, Cooper (Wyatt Russell), someone not embedded in the power structures of the world. Black Mirror spends several minutes letting us see how likeable he is—even though careful viewers will deduce he’s probably a day-friend, not a week-friend, or a many-years-friend. So far so good.

But “Playtest” as an episode doesn’t share the quality of opening up, in a literal or thematic sense, that Black Mirror often excels at, where you can think of the opening up as a form of generosity. When you push past the expected point, you’re not just hopefully creating something more interesting, you’re also saying you trust the viewer. “Playtest,” on the other hand, tends to close things down into a personal context that’s less interesting.