Jean Paul Sartre’s play No Exit, famous for the line “Hell is other people,” is titled Huis Clos in French. That phrase is the equivalent of the English legal term “in camera,” which is Latin for “in the chamber”—in a closed room, away from the media. In No Exit, three sinners are locked in a room together. Each is surprised that eternal damnation is like this. They had expected flames.



In a 1946 review, Stark Young wrote in The New Republic that No Exit “should be seen whether you like it or not.” If that description of a locked-room confession plot reminds you of a certain episode of a certain contemporary television show, you are on the money. Press harder on the words “in camera” and you’ll get there for sure: What might it mean to be a camera, to be locked inside a machine that sees?

In December Black Mirror plunked season four down on Netflix. (This review contains many spoilers.) The show started its life on U.K.’s Channel 4, but after Netflix acquired it in 2016 it pitched toward international interests by casting Americans and reducing the allusions to British politics. This season has also reduced and clarified the themes under the show’s microscope, and therefore focused Black Mirror into a more coherent work. Those themes, incidentally, are the same as Jean Paul Sartre’s. What is hell, and are we in it?

Christos Kalohoridis / Netflix

Unlike the previous seasons, no episode in season four explicitly refers to governmental politics, state surveillance, or law enforcement and the military. Instead, almost every episode runs with the major theme introduced in “White Christmas,” the special extra episode that followed season two.

In “White Christmas,” a man named Matt (played by John Hamm) sells a device to a fussy, wealthy woman that replicates her consciousness. He then traps that second consciousness in a device where her only task is to control the original-self’s household: toasting the toast, opening the curtains, and so on. The second-self is appalled and traumatized by her detention, since she still feels herself to be normal. But Matt, as the device controller, gives her six months in solitary with nothing to do until she is “broken.” The second-self submits to her task and toasts the toast.