Common People (Black Mirror)
Based on Wikipedia: Common People (Black Mirror)
What If Your Wife's Brain Came with a Monthly Fee?
Imagine your spouse collapses at work. Doctors find an inoperable brain tumor. You're devastated, preparing to say goodbye. Then someone offers you a miracle: they can remove the tumor and replace the damaged tissue with synthetic material powered by remote servers. The surgery is free.
There's just one catch. You'll need to pay three hundred dollars a month. Forever.
This is the premise of "Common People," the opening episode of Black Mirror's seventh season. It premiered on Netflix in April 2025, and it landed at a peculiar moment in history—right as artificial intelligence companies began openly discussing putting advertisements into chatbots. The timing, whether intentional or not, made the episode feel less like science fiction and more like a preview of coming attractions.
The Subscription Trap
The story follows Mike Waters, a welder played by Chris O'Dowd, and his wife Amanda, a schoolteacher portrayed by Rashida Jones. They've been married three years. They're trying to have a baby. Life seems ordinary until Amanda's brain betrays her.
After the surgery, Amanda seems fine. Better than fine, actually. The synthetic brain tissue works. She can teach again. She can laugh again. She can live.
But the fine print starts revealing itself.
First, they discover the service has a limited geographical range. Amanda can't travel beyond a certain distance from Rivermind's servers without her brain essentially going offline. Want to visit your parents two states away? That's going to require an upgrade to the Plus tier. Five hundred dollars extra per month.
Then something stranger happens. Amanda starts inserting brief advertisements into her everyday speech. She doesn't notice she's doing it. Mid-conversation, she'll suddenly mention a product or service, then continue talking as if nothing happened. Her brain has become a billboard, and she's not even collecting the rent.
The Desperation Economy
Here's where Black Mirror does what Black Mirror does best: it takes a recognizable human emotion and twists it until something breaks.
Mike can't afford the upgrades on a welder's salary. So he turns to Dum Dummies, a streaming platform where people perform humiliating tasks for money. Think of it as a darker version of those "challenge" videos that dominate social media, except the challenges are specifically designed to degrade the performer, and the audience pays to watch.
At first, Mike wears a mask. He has some dignity left. But dignity doesn't pay the bills, and the premium tiers don't get cheaper. Eventually, he reveals his face during a stunt because the payout is bigger. The audience wants to see who they're humiliating. Anonymity has a cost too.
This detail stuck with me because it captures something true about how economic desperation works. Privacy, dignity, self-respect—these aren't luxuries exactly, but they become negotiable when someone you love needs something you can't otherwise afford. Mike doesn't sell his dignity all at once. He sells it in pieces, each piece a little larger than the last, each transaction feeling necessary in the moment.
The Anniversary Gift
For their anniversary, Mike buys Amanda a twelve-hour pass to the Lux tier. This is the premium experience—not just functional brain tissue, but emotional control. Through a connected app, Mike can adjust Amanda's sensations and feelings. He can make her happy. He can make her calm. He can give her the experience of a normal life, at least for half a day.
The scene is simultaneously romantic and horrifying. Mike has worked so hard, degraded himself so thoroughly, just to give his wife twelve hours of feeling fully human. And yet those twelve hours exist because someone figured out how to monetize consciousness itself, how to gate emotional experience behind a paywall.
Everything Falls Apart
A co-worker discovers Mike's Dum Dummies streams. In a workplace that probably already looked down on blue-collar labor, this revelation is social death. Mike attacks the colleague. There's an accident. The colleague is severely injured. Mike is fired.
Without income, the premium tiers become impossible. Mike and Amanda visit Rivermind's offices, pleading with Gaynor—the company representative played by Tracee Ellis Ross—for extra time. Just until Mike can find new work. They're trying to have a baby, they explain, hoping this detail might humanize them to the corporation.
Gaynor's response is instructive. She explains, with what sounds like genuine helpfulness, that pregnancy would incur an additional fee. The synthetic brain tissue would need to support two consciousnesses during gestation. That's a premium feature.
The scene works because Ross plays it without malice. Gaynor isn't a villain twirling a mustache. She's a professional explaining company policy. The cruelty isn't personal. It's structural. It's in the terms of service.
One Year Later
The episode jumps forward. Amanda is back on the Common tier, the basic service. She sleeps sixteen hours a day now. When she's awake, she speaks in advertisements. The woman Mike fell in love with exists somewhere inside that skull, behind the synthetic tissue and the subscription limits, but she can't get out.
Mike buys thirty minutes of Lux access. Not twelve hours this time—he can't afford that anymore. Just half an hour of premium consciousness for his wife.
He uses the app to boost her serenity. In that window of clarity, Amanda makes a request. She asks Mike to end her life when she's "not here." When she's back in the fog of the Common tier, running ads instead of thoughts.
The time runs out. Amanda begins to black out, her brain preparing to run another advertisement. Mike suffocates her as she goes.
Then he walks into another room. His laptop is streaming on Dum Dummies. He's holding a box cutter.
The episode ends.
The Origin of the Idea
Charlie Brooker, who created Black Mirror and co-wrote this episode with Bisha K. Ali, said he originally conceived of it as something lighter. A comedy, even. Someone needs a subscription service to stay alive—there's dark humor in that premise if you squint at it right.
The specific inspiration came from podcasts. Brooker was listening to a show where the host broke mid-story to deliver an advertisement, then resumed the narrative as if nothing had happened. That jarring transition—emotional engagement interrupted by commercial obligation—became the seed of Amanda's condition.
What's interesting is how the episode evolved from that comedic premise into what Brooker himself called one of the "bleakest" endings Black Mirror has produced. And this is a show that once ended with a prime minister forced to have sex with a pig on live television. The competition for bleakest is stiff.
The Actors' Perspectives
Rashida Jones, who plays Amanda, said her first reaction to the ending was that it felt "mean." This is an understandable response. The episode offers no escape, no clever hack, no moment where the protagonists outsmart the system. They just lose, slowly and completely.
But Jones came to see the ending differently. She described Mike's final act as love—the decision that providing death with dignity is preferable to watching someone you love exist in pain, their consciousness commercialized and rationed.
Jones wasn't new to Black Mirror. She had co-written "Nosedive," a season three episode about a world where people rate every social interaction and your aggregate score determines your access to housing, transportation, and basic services. That episode was also about how systems designed to improve life can become prisons. "Common People" extends the logic further: what happens when the system controls not just your social standing but your ability to think?
Tracee Ellis Ross, who plays the Rivermind representative, is a fascinating casting choice. Ross is best known for comedic roles, including her long run on the sitcom Black-ish. Casting her as the corporate face of commodified consciousness adds an unsettling layer. She's warm, professional, helpful in her mannerisms—and completely indifferent to the human cost of what she's selling.
The Connections
Black Mirror episodes exist in a shared universe, though the connections are usually subtle. "Common People" references several other installments. The streaming platform Dum Dummies might share DNA with the degradation-entertainment of earlier episodes. The subscription model for synthetic brain tissue echoes the cloud-based afterlife of "San Junipero," another episode where consciousness became a service.
But where "San Junipero" offered something almost hopeful—a digital heaven where the dying could live forever in simulated bliss—"Common People" shows the same technology filtered through aggressive capitalism. San Junipero's afterlife was a destination. Amanda's synthetic consciousness is a rental.
Why This Feels Different
Black Mirror has always been about technology reflecting humanity's worst impulses back at us. But "Common People" landed differently because of when it arrived.
In the months before the episode premiered, major artificial intelligence companies began seriously discussing advertisement-supported models for their chatbots. The logic was familiar: make the service free, monetize the user's attention, insert commercial messages into the interaction. Nothing sinister. Just business.
But chatbots aren't podcasts or social media feeds. People form relationships with them. They ask for advice. They process emotions. They think through problems. Inserting advertisements into that process isn't like showing a banner ad on a website. It's like having a friend who occasionally, mid-conversation, tries to sell you something. And doesn't acknowledge they're doing it.
Amanda's condition—speaking ads she doesn't remember, her consciousness interrupted by commercial obligations—suddenly seemed less like dystopian fiction and more like a product roadmap.
The Tiered Experience
The subscription model in "Common People" uses familiar language. Common tier. Plus tier. Lux tier. These are terms we recognize from streaming services, software licenses, airline seating.
The genius of the episode is applying this language to consciousness itself. At the Common tier, Amanda can exist but not fully live. She sleeps most of the day. When awake, her attention is hijacked for advertising. At Plus, she can travel and avoid ads. At Lux, she can feel emotions fully.
This tiered model mirrors how many digital services work today. The free version is functional but degraded. Premium unlocks features that perhaps should have been included from the start. The company isn't depriving you of anything—they're just offering you the opportunity to upgrade.
The language of upgrades is important. An upgrade sounds positive. It sounds like improvement, like progress. But an upgrade from what? In Amanda's case, an upgrade from a bare existence where her brain runs advertisements. The baseline isn't neutral—it's deliberately crippled to make the premium more attractive.
The Response
Critics generally praised the episode, though with reservations. Some found it too heavy-handed, the satire too obvious. Others felt the tonal shifts between dark comedy and genuine tragedy didn't quite cohere.
One reviewer for Vulture described it as "jumbled on a tonal, narrative, and thematic level." Another, writing for Mashable, called it "a nightmare that seems terrifyingly possible" and rated it the second most pessimistic episode in Black Mirror's history, behind only "The Waldo Moment"—an episode about a cartoon character who accidentally becomes a fascist political movement.
The episode earned Emmy nominations for Jones's performance and for the screenplay by Brooker and Ali. Whether you find it brilliant or heavy-handed might depend on how you feel about the current trajectory of technology companies and the services they provide.
The Question It Leaves
The title "Common People" has multiple meanings. It's the name of the lowest subscription tier, the baseline service for those who can't afford better. It's also a reference to ordinary people, the masses, the ones who bear the cost when technology advances faster than regulation.
And it might be a reference to the Pulp song of the same name, which is about class tourism—a wealthy person wanting to experience poverty as an aesthetic choice, not understanding that poverty isn't a lifestyle but a trap. Mike and Amanda aren't tourists. They can't go home to somewhere better. This is their life now, measured in monthly payments and tiered access.
The episode doesn't answer the question it raises. It doesn't offer a solution to subscription-based existence or a way to escape the logic of monetized consciousness. It just shows where that logic leads, given enough time and enough desperation.
Mike's final act—whatever happens after he picks up that box cutter—isn't defiance. It isn't victory. It's just the end of what he's willing to endure.
Sometimes that's all there is.