Maria is unnerved when her former schoolmate Verity joins the company she works at and she starts to have problems with her memory.

The set-up is intriguing enough. Maria (Siena Kelly), who designs new confectionary products for a food company, is immediately wary when she sees her old schoolmate at a taste testing focus group. Verity (Rosy McEwen) wasn’t a popular kid, but she seems to have turned her life around in the intervening decade. When things start going wrong for Maria in the office it’s pretty easy to work out what the backstory is, and also more or less where the episode is going.

Bête Noir is at its most interesting when it seems to be a sort of darkly comic gaslighting drama. It’s in its tonally uneven reveals that it starts to disappoint. It relies on a sort of fairy tale ‘magic thing’ explanation, which it would get away with, if the logic of it made sense. Unfortunately any genre fans watching are like to ask themselves: ‘If the all-powerful gizmo can really do x, then she could solve this by doing y’ and ‘if it can change this why can’t it change that?’.

Perhaps if I hadn’t been so moved and affected by the season 7 opener I would have had more time for Bête Noir.

Verdict: Black Mirror at its best says something memorable about our relationship to tech and social change. Bête Noir is reasonably entertaining, but appropriately enough considering its story, it’s ultimately a bit forgettable. 6/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com