Dropped rather unceremoniously on a Wednesday, Netflix’s science fiction anthology series added three more episodes to their canon with their fifth season. With each episode a little more than an hour with a star-studded cast, it makes for a faster watch that the previous longer season did. Add to the fact that these three episodes aren’t nearly as grim in comparison, this season is even more enjoyable than the others I’ve seen.  Even with a lackluster middle offering, series creator Charlie Brooker returns with a season that is worth the watch.

Season five begins with “Striking Vipers”, starring Anthony Mackie (Captain America: The Winter Soldier, The Hurt Locker) and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (Us, Aquaman). Abdul-Mateen’s Karl gifts Mackie’s Danny with the newest edition of the Street Fighter-esqe video game, which uses virtual reality to make the players feel the action in the game. While playing, it becomes an exploration of sexuality that frankly I didn’t see coming but fully enjoyed. Not quite on the level of “San Junipero” in quality and wholesomeness, “Striking Vipers” is still an interesting exploration of how virtual reality could allow people to explore things they otherwise wouldn’t be comfortable enough with themselves to do in the real world. It’s great to see Black Mirror shed it’s grimdark ‘technology is the root of evil’ stance once in a while to deliver great stories like this.

Following that is “Smithereens”, starring Andrew Scott (Sherlock, Spectre) and Topher Grace (The Hot Zone, That 70’s Show). Scott plays Chris, a taxi driver who takes an intern of Facebook or Twitter analog company, the eponymous Smithereen, hostage. The only demand is that he gets to talk to the founder and inventor of the app, Grace’s Billy Bauer. Yet another social media is bad or has bad effects on the populace episode, this story doesn’t do anything that hasn’t been seen before, and is a let down in comparison to the previous and following episodes. Furthermore, and though this is a point of personal taste, I’m not the biggest fan of Andrew Scott generally speaking, though his acting isn’t bad at all in the story told, it’s just an unoriginal story. “Hated in the Nation”, “Nosedive”, and “Be Right Back” all handle the pitfalls of social media better.

Lastly is “Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too”, starring Miley Cyrus (Hannah Montana, The Voice), Angourie Rice (Spider-Man: Homecoming, The Nice Guys), and Madison Davenport (Sharp Objects, From Dusk till Dawn: The Series). It follows Cyrus as Ashley O, a thinly veiled allusion to herself as a musician who is forced to be a giddy and bubbly pop star by an abusive circle of handlers, as well as Rachel and Jack, played by Rice and Davenport respectively, young girls whose mother had recently passed. While Jack becomes obsessed with the punk bands her mother loved, Rachel is a fan of the optimistic and empowering pop music Ashley releases, and asks her father to buy her an Ashley Too, a robotic friend with an A.I version of Ashley’s personality. While the story is disjointed, trying to spend as much time with the girls as it does with Ashley’s not so glamorous life behind the scenes, I enjoyed it as a crazy tale that bridges the gap between ridiculousness and that grim darkness that Black Mirror is known for. While the episode does drag on heavily with Ashley’s life as a controlled pop star instead of delving deeper into the spooky tech that allows her handlers to take music and lyrics directly out of her mind while she’s infirm, I still had a great time watching it.

After the strangeness that was last year’s ‘choose your own adventure’ movie Bandersnatch, it’s good to see a return to form with season five. Was it perfect? Of course not. Nothing is, but it did try to do some things that were interesting for the most part. I would love it if Brooker could move away from using video games and social media as the backing tech for his stories, however, as eventually there will be no more room for anything new there. That said, if you wanted to get your fix of anthology storytelling and tech-based Twilight Zone-style fiction, season five of Black Mirror is not one to miss.

All three episodes of Black Mirror’s fifth season are available for streaming on Netflix.

David Castro is a Puerto Rican writer from New York City. He has worked on the upcoming Undead supplement for Chill Third Edition and is working on launching a Patreon. You can find him on Twitter (@theinkedknight), on Tumblr (thedevilsyouknew), on Facebook (facebook.com/inkstainedstudios), and at davidrcastro.com.

A follow up to 2016’s X-Men: Apocalypse, despite having no callbacks to that film at all, Dark Phoenix loosely follows Jean Grey, played by Sophie Turner fresh off of Game of Thrones, as she is infected by the Phoenix Force and lays waste to the other characters in the film. While doing a convincing job with the roles all of the actors were given, what they were given is not so much a story or movie, but a series of scenes told in order with no story binding them. This is the recorded events of Grey’s experience with the Phoenix Force, and nothing more.

As this is the last of the mainline First Class series of X-Men films, and possibly the last Fox X-Men film in general as The New Mutants had been pushed back yet again to April 2020 and the Gambit movie was canceled, what we got was thoroughly disappointing. It not only failed to bring the series either to a close or into the next phase now that Marvel Studios owns them. Instead of doing that, it introduces a new alien race that are almost non-important to the film at all. Dark Phoenix marks nearly 20 years since the first film was released, and nothing about the film relates to the larger universe of the series. It doesn’t even reference the previous film, other than the team from the last film is roughly that of this new one.

As previously mentioned, the only shining light from this movie is the acting of the characters that get any screen time at all. Sophie Turner plays Jean Grey great with what limited characterization she receives, as does James McAvoy’s (Glass, Wanted) Xavier and Michael Fassbender’s (Assassin’s Creed, Alien: Covenant) Magneto. Jessica Chastain’s (Miss Sloane, Crimson Peak) Vuk barely has anything to do in the story, and tells us the motivations of her species, to trick someone on Earth to take in the Phoenix Force, and then try to control said person to bring about a return of their planet, which was destroyed by the same entity. Does any of this matter to the story that Dark Phoenix wants to tell? No, it doesn’t. Because the movie itself doesn’t want to think about that.

Instead, the film speeds through the Phoenix Saga much like it did in the original X-Men films. Xavier uses his power to partition off parts of Grey’s power and memories in a misguided attempt to help her. Gaining the power of the Phoenix Force breaks these walls, and thus makes her aware of them existing. She flees from Xavier to Magneto’s compound, only to be turned away as her uncontrolled abilities put his home at risk, turning him against her as well.

We’ve seen this before, during X-Men: The Last Stand, and while I am never one to say that something can’t be rebooted or rehashed, this version doesn’t do anything new with the story. I wish there was a new take on it, that the strange side plot between Mystique and Xavier, about the former calling the latter out on using the X-Men to grow his own ego, rather than what’s better for the group, had more time to develop. I wish that there was more static between Beast and Magneto when they team up.

Unless you care more about completing the series than you do about the actual quality of the film, there is not a lot of reason to go see this film. There is not enough good to overwhelm or balance out the bad, and with movies costing as much as they do, even if you do want to be a completionist about the series, you could easily wait until the film is on streaming or on DVD.

Dark Phoenix is open wide in theatres everywhere.

David Castro is a Puerto Rican writer from New York City. He has worked on the upcoming Undead supplement for Chill Third Edition and is working on launching a Patreon. You can find him on Twitter (@theinkedknight), on Tumblr (thedevilsyouknew), on Facebook (facebook.com/inkstainedstudios), and at davidrcastro.com.