Black Mirror: Rashida Jones Imagines An Even Bleaker “Common People” Ending

This article contains spoilers for the Black Mirror episode “Common People.”

Season 7 opener “Common People” is one of the darkest episodes of Black Mirror…and that’s a high bar to clear. Previous installments of Charlie Brooker’s long-running sci-fi anthology have plumbed the depths of technodystopia – featuring temporal torture, infanticide, and several actual apocalypses. Still, Common People does something those other puny Black Mirrors would never dream of: It kills America’s sweetheart Rashida Jones.

Jones stars as Amanda who, along with her husband Mike (Chris O’Dowd), is leading one of those peaceful “first act of a Black Mirror episode” lives. While money is tight and some fertility issues bubble up for the working class family, they nevertheless remain happily in love. And then story writers Brooker and Bisha K. Ali go ahead and throw an inoperable tumor into Amanda’s parietal lobe, sending her into a coma she’ll likely never wake up from.

Thankfully, tech company Rivermind has a solution. The surgery to repair Amanda’s brain is free but the streaming model to keep it online will cost $300 a month. That, of course, is the ad model. The ad-free costs more. And then keeping up with the evolving servers and cell towers costs even more than that. Staying awake longer than a few hours a day? That’s extra. Feeling serene? That’s extra. Getting pregnant? Buddy, you best believe that’s extra. The financial burden of keeping Amanda operational grows so dire that she and Mike opt to unplug entirely, making “Common People” only the second Black Mirror episode by my count to conclude with euthanasia (following in the footsteps of the far more hopeful “San Junipero”).

Having co-written the teleplay for Black Mirror season 3 opener “Nosedive” alongside Michael Schur, Rashida Jones is no stranger to the franchise’s bleak satirical approach. Jones discussed what it was like to re-enter the Black Mirror universe when she and Gaynor actress Tracee Ellis Ross spoke to Den of Geek and other journalists at a pre-release roundtable.

“I’m never saying no to Black Mirror. Charlie knows that,” Jones says. “But this felt like it really had that classic Black Mirror flavor. Tonally, it reminds me of the first time I ever watched Black Mirror in its first season – that bleakness and ability to straddle comedy and darkness. I would do anything to be in this universe. But this episode in particular, I felt well suited for this part.”

According to the duo, the process for receiving a Black Mirror script and learning of its premise is something straight out of a Black Mirror episode itself.

“I said yes before knowing what the episode was,” Ross says. “Then, when I read the script, I was like ‘oh, even better!’ You get a script that is digitally imprinted for you so no one can read it but you, not even your representatives. It’s kind of cool. You feel like you’re in an alternate reality.”

Once aboard, the biggest challenge for Jones wasn’t the episode’s brutal ending but the seemingly more mundane issue of ad copy that Rivermind requires Amanda to deliver.

“I was the most excited by that and also the most nervous about it being right. Ally Pankiw, the director, was so great. She let me experiment and try variety of things that were really subtle, and then really over the top. We ended up somewhere in the middle where it feels like the ads are using my personality to sell, as opposed to the ad kind of taking over in a way that just doesn’t feel like me.”

Still, the ending looms large as Common People’s most defining feature. Though Amanda’s weakened state by the story’s conclusion calls into question how much autonomy she has over the decision to end her life, Jones is confident it’s something that she and Mike came to together.

“I bet it’ll be debated whether or not she actually had the agency to make that decision, and how much of it was her,” Jones says. “But I kind of chose that it was like the best version of herself. I push up the serenity button at the end and I think it’s still me, just in a clearer mindset where I’m not distraught with pain and fatigue. As far as Mike is concerned, my interpretation is that he is doing the same thing.”

Though the story ends here for both Amanda and Mike, it might just be only the beginning for Rivermind’s malign influence on the world. Building upon her experience in writing for the show and living up to its speculative fiction nature, Jones imagines an even darker eventual reality for future Rivermind subscribers.

“That’s the trajectory of capitalism. Things are out of reach and then they’re made accessible while these people’s lives are at stake. You can imagine a future of Rivermind where there are all these tiers for things that are possible: living forever, being young forever, while the base thing remains keeping people alive in any kind of coverage zone. That’s probably where they’re headed to. It’s so dark.”

That’s the thing about Black Mirror‘s bad endings. They often leave something even worse up to the viewers’ imagination…if they can dare to imagine it.

All six episodes of Black Mirror season 7 are available to stream on Netflix now.

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