The Best ‘Black Mirror’ Episodes Are The Happy Ones, And Season 7 Has A Banger

“Eulogy,” featuring Paul Giamatti, is a standout episode in the Netflix show’s newest season.

This article contains light spoilers for “Black Mirror” Season 7, Episode 5, “Eulogy.”

When you fire up an episode of “Black Mirror,” you generally know what to expect: dystopian technology, great acting, a disturbing prediction of the future that will probably come true and a devastating ending that will leave you with a lingering bad feeling for at least a few hours. But ever since “Black Mirror” creator Charlie Brooker brought his feel-bad sci-fi series to Netflix, the show hasn’t been quite as consistently gloomy.

Episodes like “San Junipero” (a love story set in cloud storage), “Hang the DJ” (another upbeat love story with a clever twist) and even “USS Callister” (basically a “Star Trek” spinoff) have been downright uplifting. Maybe it’s because they’re less depressing than usual — or maybe it’s because Brooker finally has a chance to try something new — but these episodes have quickly become standout entries in the show’s uneven last few seasons.

“To be honest, it’s probably a consequence of us going from three episodes a season to six,” Brooker told GQ in 2017 when asked about the show’s shift into less demoralizing territory. “You’ve gotta have a soft center in the chocolate box.”

At the time, he pointed to “Hang the DJ” as a new entry that felt out of place on “Black Mirror.” The episode is lighter and funnier than usual, which Brooker worried would be a turnoff for fans. Instead, it was one of the most popular stories of the batch. “It’s interesting when we confound our own expectations of what the show is,” he said.