SPOILER-FREE: The following review contains no substantial spoilers for any of the new episodes of Black Mirror.

The fourth season of Black Mirror is shocking, twisted, amusing, melancholic, and occasionally – very occasionally – hopeful. It's also pretty great.

Once again, each of its six episodes presents a standalone tale set in the near future, where some aspect of contemporary culture has been allowed to develop in a nightmarish way.

In the past, the show has often drawn inspiration from technology – more specifically the way in which it distorts our social lives and daily interactions. Twitter, reality television, virtual reality: they’ve all provided jumping-off points for the show’s dystopian dreaming. A good Black Mirror episode has always felt not only feasible but depressingly inevitable.

Black Mirror Season 4 Posters 5 IMAGES

Season four turns its cynical gaze to dating apps, online gaming, and personalised surveillance tools. But some of the season’s very best episodes are less fixated on exploring the ethics of a single idea dramatically; more interestingly, they simply exist as stories set within Black Mirror’s warped reality. Episodes like Crocodile and Black Museum take advantage of previous entries, trading upon ideas we’ve encountered before – digitised consciousness is a recurring element in several of these tales – to make the storytelling more economical. Yes, bleak futuristic technology often lies at the heart of these stories – driving forward plot, enabling unique dramatic situations – but it’s not their sole focus. These episodes aren’t polemics coded up as drama; they’re compelling works of soft sci-fi first, ones that allow multiple interpretations.

Crocodile, for instance, is a tense and harrowing thriller featuring a device can be used to access a person’s raw impressions of past events. Although originally developed by the police, these devices are now used by insurance brokers to check the validity of claims. While this device may create some of the episode's more interesting and tense scenes it never feels like the entire point of the story.

Black Mirror Season 4 Gallery 9 IMAGES

As with Season 3 – the first to be made for Netflix – creator and writer Charlie Brooker uses the series to explore different tones, genres, and formats. Arkangel is a powerful coming-of-age drama that centres on a young woman growing up in a single-parent family. It takes places in a nondescript American town, and has the feel of an indie movie. USS Callister is part-comedic Star Trek pastiche, part-something much more sinister. Crocodile is a bleak psychological thriller set against the unforgiving landscape of Iceland. Metalhead is a beautifully shot black-and-white survival story, told almost entirely without dialogue. It’s an interesting curiosity, but probably the weakest of the bunch, as its thin plot barely stretches to cover its relative short 40-minute runtime. And then there’s Black Museum – well, Black Museum is just full-on, bonkers, portmanteau horror. Set in a roadside museum, which morbidly displays artefacts of gruesome crimes, it weaves together three darkly-comic stories with unhinged relish. It's definitely one of the best episodes.

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My favourite, however, was Hang the DJ – a melancholic modern love story. Its two lead characters use an advanced dating system that maps out every relationship for them, right down to how many hours you will spend together. The episode follows two characters as they wrestle with this inhuman approach to finding love. It’s bittersweet and unusually uplifting.

Brooker again heads up writing duties, with help with a few collaborators, and has recruited an impressive group of collaborators – from talented and interesting directors, including Jodie Foster, John Hillcoat, and David Slade, to well-known actors Rosemarie Dewitt, Jesse Plemons, and Jimmi Simpson. Each episode of Black Mirror feels like a distinct production, rich with ideas and talent.