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“This episode of Black Mirror is terrifying,” goes a variation of a recurring joke on social media. This is usually followed by a link to a dystopian-sounding news article – on eerie robots, say, or mass surveillance.

Since its inception in 2011, the sci-fi TV show Black Mirror has come to embody our collective disquiet about technology and the inescapable ways in which it shapes our lives. So far, the show’s range has been considerable: from the spectacle of reality television and the invisible algorithms that determine what we see and choose to the paradoxes of surveillance and the digital versions of ourselves we leave behind when we die.

Netflix has distributed the show since 2016, and will release its upcoming fifth season on June 5. The trailer doesn’t reveal much in terms of storylines, but gives a peek of what the next season has to offer – “three new stories” with turns from Fleabag’s Andrew Scott, Topher Grace and Miley Cyrus.

Why Black Mirror

Created by British screenwriter Charlie Brooker, Black Mirror is named for the ubiquitous screens that surround us, from smartphones to smart TVs. The series pushes technology to its extremes, examining the often nightmarish consequences. Tech is claimed to improve our lives, but what happens, the show asks, when it creates intractable problems?

Black Mirror episodes aren’t contiguous: each has a different setting, a different cast, a different technological premise, often dystopian, and almost always fraught. Binge-watching is taxing, best undertaken only if you want to be left intellectually sated but emotionally bereft.

Going interactive

The show’s latest episode was released last December, a standalone called “Bandersnatch”, which marked Netflix’s first interactive film targeted at adults. Set in 1984, “Bandersnatch” centres on a programmer who gradually loses touch with reality as he adapts a choose-your-own-adventure novel into a video game.

The premise parallels the episode’s interactivity, forming an engaging exercise in freedom of choice, or at least the illusion of it. As a viewer, you’re presented with two choices onscreen at certain points in the plot, and given ten seconds to decide which action you would have the protagonist take.

The decisions can be mundane or momentous: what music should the character listen to? How should – and a potential spoiler here – he dispose of a body? All are equally stressful, fed by an uncertainty about whether your choice irrevocably alters the progression of events. The episode has no official run length – it reportedly takes around 90 minutes, but can be finished in as little as 40.

The show’s tone differs unpredictably and enjoyably between episodes. “Nosedive” (season 3, episode 1), a comedy of errors, is set in a world whose inhabitants’ every interaction is rated on a five-point scale. There are parallels with China’s far-reaching social credit system, in which each citizen’s reputation score determines their access to or exclusion from services including flights and private schools. Yet the world of “Nosedive” appears to be a pastel-coloured utopia, albeit because nearly all interactions are disingenuous, and online personalities skin-deep.

The joke is on us

The show’s debut episode, “The National Anthem”, is set in a world that most resembles ours. It features a male UK prime minister who is blackmailed into having sex with a pig on camera to save a beloved royal. Predictably, the news cycle, punters and online chatterati are sent into overdrive. The premise is perverse and absurd, but the fickle beast of public opinion is sickeningly familiar.

Another highlight is “Metalhead” (Season 4, Episode 5), a beautifully shot episode in black in white. Set in a post-apocalyptic world, the protagonist flees from killer robotic dogs that can operate cars and recharge their batteries using solar power. They were inspired by – and closely resemble – quadrupedal Boston Dynamics robots.

But the joke, ultimately, is on us. Technology has changed our lives in every way imaginable. If our reality devolves into dystopia, Black Mirror warns, it will be through our own doing.