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I'm sure you're familiar with Netflix's show Black Mirror, which just aired its seventh season. It's one of my all time favorite TV anthology shows, alongside Amazing Stories, Electric Dreams, Oats Studios, Cabinet of Curiosities, Extrapolations, and Love, Death & Robots. While I haven't re-watched many of these, so many episodes stick in my head, even years after having seen them. Given the degree to which so many of these episodes resonate, I thought it would be fun to list out my ten favorite episodes of the show.

Please let me apologize in advance for the awful formatting on this article. I know.

#10 - Beyond the Sea - Squeaking in at number ten, partially because Aaron Paul and Josh Hartnet are good actors, is Beyond the Sea. In a retro-futuristic 1969, these two astronauts project their consciousness back to Earth while away on a long space voyage. Then, of course, something awful happens to one of them, creating the situation that leads into the typical Black Mirror horror show.

#9 - Demon 79 - The primary appeal to this episode is its 1970s slock film styling. A demon appears to a woman and tells her that unless she kills three people in the next three days, the world will end. And the episode goes from there...

#8 - Fifteen Million Merits - My favorite episode from the first season. In a distant future, people live in small cubicles and spend their days earning credits by pedaling bicycles to produce electricity. They pay for everything via microtransactions, and hope for some miracle break to give them a better future. This episode was an early preview of a theme which appeared in many future Black Mirror episodes: financial desperation exploited by technology.

#7 - USS Callister - The always-great Breaking Bad alumnus Jesse Plemons stars in a role where he gets to let his psycho shine, as he so often does. He's digitally cloned a number of co-workers, inserting their personalities into a videogame where he is in complete control of everything. If they fail to play along, he's able to torture them virtually in any way he sees fit. How do you get by when your world is overseen by a man who's effectively a sadistic god?

#6 - Bête Noire - An entry from Black Mirror's most recent season, Bête Noire surprised me by going in a very unexpected direction. When a girl she knew in grade school gets hired into her department, things get weird. Then they get even weirder. It's hard to describe much without spoiling things, so I'll leave it at that.

#5 - Joan Is Awful - In the episode which introduced us to Black Mirror's fictional streaming service “Streamberry”, Joan comes home and parks in front of her TV, only to find that Streamberry's new show Joan Is Awful is about her. Moreover, the episode contains events from her life earlier the same day. This continues each day, and she decides to do something about it. I really liked how crazy this episode got, but I've only seen it once, and I really need to go back and rewatch it.

#4 - Nosedive - Likely inspired by China's social credit system, this bleak future has people rating each other, and those ratings affecting every aspect of life. A woman finds the perfect apartment, but it's a bit too pricy. If only her score were a bit higher, the place would be affordable. Thankfully, an upscale party is a chance for her to boost her score and secure her future. From the episode's title, you can likely tell how that goes.

#3 - White Bear - One of my early favorites, this episode begins with a woman waking up in a deserted town, and quickly learning that everyone is trying to kill her. What begins as a confusing slasher picture evolves into something very different. So dark.

#2 - Common People - This episode from the most recent season haunted me. Netflix has always put what they expect to be the best episode of the season first, and this one, starring Chris O'Dowd and Rashida Jones, was a good one. It took me a while to figure what I knew Chris O'Dowd from - it turns out that I knew him from Thor: The Dark World and This is 40.

In this episode, a young couple are trying to start a family, until a terrible car accident leaves her in a coma with terrible brain damage. Thankfully, a new miracle treatment can fix her like new, and it's free! They replace the destroyed part of her brain with cloud computing. The catch? You pay for those cloud servers with a subscription plan. You can imagine where this goes, but it's even darker than you'd initially think. It feels like something Cory Doctorow would write. When you pay a monthly subscription fee for life, life is effectively slavery. This kind of story is the reason Black Mirror exists. So good.

#1 - Metalhead - I've referenced metalhead so often. Filmed entirely in black and white, this episode shows us a future full of terminators who are not bipedal gun-toting humanoids, but rather the robodogs built by Boston Dynamics. The things are goddamn terrifying primarily because of the incredibly realistic way in which the scenario is presented.