Spoilers for Black Mirror season four ahead.

There's no doubt the world in 2018 is a very different place than when Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones started the series. You could say we're basically living through a Black Mirror episode. We're more addicted to smartphones than ever. Social media companies have a tremendous sway on how we consume news, making it harder to discern fact from fiction. And, of course, there's a reality show star sitting in the White House who could start a nuclear war while tweeting from the toilet. Compared to that, a story simply telling us that we should be wary of child surveillance technology doesn't seem as compelling. We know.

It could be that we're just holding Black Mirror to high standards, given just how trenchant it's been over its first three seasons. Fifteen Million Merits (my personal favorite) thrust us into a futuristic world where people live in rooms surrounded by screens, are forced to exercise for money and their only respite is a vapid reality TV show. Be Right Back is a somber tale of romantic loss that explores the creation of a digital consciousness and the value of an android's life. And White Christmas, the show's Netflix debut special starring Jon Hamm, explored the existential horror of forcing AI to live through months of isolation at the turn of a dial. Sure, every episode isn't a slam dunk -- the voyeuristic punishment of White Bear and the bee drones (yup) for Hated in the Nation come to mind. But the show's dramatic highs overshadowed those pitfalls.

In season four, it's as if Brooker is struggling to find something truly new to say. Or perhaps it's just becoming easier to see the mechanics of his allegorical tales. New technology might seem useful at first, but it eventually reveals itself to be something that controls our lives or strips us of our humanity. (Much like the Twilight Zone episode The Man in the Bottle, they typically lean on the downsides of something you've wished for.) And when he's not exploring that, he ponders the sentience of digital life. There's certainly room to mine for more stories around these topics, but they don't feel as fresh as they used to. And at times, the predictability of Brooker's storytelling begins to feel didactic and laughable to the point of self-parody.

The key to good parenting. pic.twitter.com/1eLks4754S — Black Mirror (@blackmirror) January 3, 2018

Arkangel, for example, tells the story of a mother who implants a surveillance device in her young daughter after almost losing her at a park. She can track the child's location through a tablet, an obvious extrapolation from the increasing popularity of today's GPS trackers for kids. Going further, though, she can see and hear everything her daughter does. And, just to take things into true dystopian territory, she can also block her child from seeing disturbing imagery -- in her eyes, it just ends up looking like amorphous blobs. (That's similar to how people could choose to "block" themselves from your vision in White Christmas.) Naturally, that leads to emotional development issues and bigger problems when she's a teenager.

While the episode brings up some interesting ideas, it doesn't really say anything new. We can see the pitfalls from the beginning, especially since we've seen similar scenarios before in Black Mirror. There isn't much room for the story to surprise us. And it doesn't help that the episode ends with a flash of violence that feels as if it's there for shock value, instead of exploring what the technology means to the characters or the predicting dangers of extreme surveillance.