Joan Is Awful | Loch Henry | Beyond the Sea | Mazey Day | Demon 79
"Can't handle the consequences, don't enter the game."
Hector: Nick's offering 30K for the first photo of her.
Bo: 30K?
Hector: 30K. 40K if you can make her look like a junkie.
Bo: 30K?
Hector: 30K. 40K if you can make her look like a junkie.
In 2006, Hollywood actress Mazey Day (Clara Rugaard) vanishes from her European film set after a hit-and-run. Bo (Zazie Beetz), a former paparazza, tries to find her in hopes of a big payday, only to learn that the reason for her disappearance is anything but mundane.
Co-starring Danny Ramirez as Hector, Robbie Tann as Whitty, James P Rhees as Duke, and David Rysdahl as Nathan.
Tropes:
- 20 Minutes into the Past: Released in 2023, the episode is set in 2006.
- Almost Dead Guy: Bo's colleague lives long enough to hand her the camera.
- Ambiguous Ending: The story ends with someone getting shot in the diner. We never learn what the ultimate fallout of the whole situation was nor what Bo's motivation was (or if she managed to cash in on all the photos). Hell, there is even a solid chance she might end up being sued, as everything that happens in the finale is the direct result of her misguided attempt to Always Save the Girl, performed by breaking and entering, while indirectly getting nine people killed.
- Ambiguous Situation: Why did Bo end up photographing Mazey killing herself? Was it to demonstrate that she had always been as bad as the other paparazzi? Or was it to honor her colleague's dying wish, given that he was the one who handed her the camera just moments before?
- Became Their Own Antithesis: Bo is repeatedly shown to be the most sympathetic pap. She temporarily quits after they slutshame Sydney and tries to stop the others from taking pics after they find Mazey chained up in a room. After Mazey kills the other paps and then some in her werewolf rampage, she shoots herself in the head...and Bo takes a picture of the act.
- Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Bo, maybe. It's unclear whether her early displays of sympathy for Mazey were a ruse to hide the fact that she's just as scumbag as her fellow paps, or if she eventually turned on Mazey because the latter had lost her sympathy due to the number of people she killed.
- Chairman of the Brawl: There is a random couple in the diner when Mazey starts her rampage there. After she attacks the man and gnaws on his neck, the woman takes the nearby chair and smashes it over the beast. All she achieves is becoming the new target of attack.
- Character Title: Mazey Day, after the actress Bo and the other paparazzi are chasing after.
- Death by Materialism: Bo's pap colleague Whitty is killed because, in his desire to break the Mazey Day story, he can't stop taking pictures of her transforming into a werewolf. And then...*chomp*
- Downer Ending: After butchering multiple people in the diner, Mazey asks Bo to put her out of her misery. However, Bo instead opts to give her the gun so she can kill herself instead, taking a photo of the act as she does.
- Driven to Suicide:
- TV star Justin Camley kills himself after his affair with another man is exposed by the protagonist.
- After she detransforms in the diner, Mazey sees that she has killed multiple people and shoots herself. Possibly.
- Ethnic Menial Labor: The producer hosting Mazey has a Hispanic maid.
- Foreshadowing:
- The use of a signature song from the Twilight (2005) movie, a famous franchise with vampires and werewolves, is a sign of the Genre Shift we're about to experience.
- The Exact Words of Mazey's doctor make more sense after The Reveal. He says he will be with her night after night.
- Garlic Is Abhorrent: He tries to be nice about it, but Bo's roommate Nathan is affected by the acrid smell of her cooking with garlic and ginger.
- Genre Shift: It's an Urban Fantasy horror story in a series known for 20 Minutes into the Future sci-fi thrillers heavy on technology. And unlike Demon 79, this one doesn't show its true colours until the third act.
- Glass Cannon: Werewolf!Mazey is fast and easily tears the throats out of 9 people after inadvertently being set free by Bo. However, Bo manages to down her by blindly firing at her with a pistol when Mazey lunges at her.
- I Am Very British: In-Universe. American actress Mazey is shooting a Period Piece and is seen practicing her RP.
- I Cannot Self-Terminate: The badly wounded Mazy asks Bo to put her out of her misery. Bo doesn't comply but hands Mazy a handgun to kill herself.
- Impairment Shot: An intoxicated Mazey's vision starts swimming when she looks at her finger. And then she runs over someone...
- Ironic Name: Mazey Day, a newly turned werewolf struggling through the full moon, shares her name with a very daylight-centric event: the central celebration day of Cornish midsummer festivities.
- Mistaken for Junkie: This being Hollywood, everyone assumes Mazey's erratic behavior is due to a Descent into Addiction. This is supported by Bo and her fellow paps tracking her to an exclusive rehab facility; when they break into her room they assume she's sweaty and chained up due to being forced to go cold turkey. The truth is much more supernatural: she's chained up to avoid causing damage during the full moon.
- "Mister Sandman" Sequence: The setting of 2006 is established right at the beginning by a radio station talking about the birth of Suri, the daughter of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. The opening minutes also feature a CompactFlash memory card, Windows XP on a laptop, an iPod Shuffle playing Amerie's "1 Thing", while we can hear news about the Iraq War.
- My God, What Have I Done?:
- Bo takes a bunch of photos that out a B-lister actor as gay and ruin what's left of his career and personal life. He is found dead a few weeks later, having committed suicide. And Bo did that for a mere 900 bucks. She is in such a shaken state afterwards, another paparazzi stint makes her quit the job.
- After realizing that she killed a bunch of people in her lycanthropy, a horrified Mazey asks Bo to kill her, and kills herself after Bo hands her the gun. Probably.
- Mythology Gag: Justin Camley, the actor that kills himself, is mentioned to have been in Sea of Tranquility, a fictional series in the Black Mirror universe that has already been featured on other episodes.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Bo freeing Mazey from her chains despite Mazey's own protests ends up getting 9 people killed when the full moon arrives and turns Mazey into a now-unrestrained feral monster.
- Once More, with Clarity: Towards the end we see Macy's hit-and-run accident once again but this time we get to see that the body she ran over was a werewolf who then bites her.
- One Last Job: Bo quit her job as a pap and became a minimal-pay barista. Once she starts to struggle with money, she is lured by Hector back into the job, since there is a large paycheck for tracking down Mazey Day and a bonus to that if finding any sort of dirt on her.
- Our Werewolves Are Different: The twist is that starlet Mazey Day didn't vanish due to a juicy addiction story; she was turned into a werewolf by a man turned werewolf she ran over.
- It's somewhat difficult to make out due to Mazey's werewolf form never being fully in frame, but the official full renders of her werewolf form
reveal it to be a full quadruped but with noticeably elongated limbs and only a vestigial tail. - Werewolves in this universe are evidently just as easy to kill as ordinary humans. The one Mazey hit with her car died of his injuries after biting her; Mazey herself is left bleeding out after a handful of regular gunshots, and subsequently finishes herself off with a bullet to the head. Silver and wolfsbane not required.
- It's somewhat difficult to make out due to Mazey's werewolf form never being fully in frame, but the official full renders of her werewolf form
- Out-of-Genre Experience: The first Black Mirror episode to have a supernatural premise rather than a futuristic technology or sci-fi one.
- Painful Transformation: It wouldn't be a werewolf horror story if Mazey's full moon transformation didn't involve bone breaking and moaning.
- Paparazzi: Paps are established as grimy and exploitative. Bo feels guilt and is further disgusted by how her "colleagues" loudly slutshame Sydney in order to get footage of her eventual outrage and are gleeful about it. She tries to quit afterward.
- Police Are Useless: Bo begs the officer in the diner for help after being chased by Werewolf!Mazey through the forest. He instead detains Bo and is swiftly killed by Werewolf!Mazey when she gets to the diner.
- Poor Communication Kills: The police officer tries to get Bo and her colleague to explain what the emergency is. The pair is understandably panicked and fails to tell him anything useful until it's too late. While it wouldn't have guaranteed a different outcome, the situation could have been summarized as, "Some kind of large, dangerous, rabid animal is chasing us and it's already killed two people".
- Slut-Shaming: Happens to Sydney Alberti, a celebrity Bo and her colleagues photograph. After a sex tape of hers is made public, the paparazzi, in particular Whitty, harass and slut-shame her, in part because they have no consideration for her as a person, and in part to obtain a reaction out of her.
- Sound-Only Death: Mazy killing herself is only seen and heard from outside the diner.
- Shout-Out: The transformation sequence is the one from An American Werewolf in London.
- Too Dumb to Live: Whitty's devotion to exposing Mazey proves to be downright suicidal when he decides to stick around when Mazey is in the finishing stages of turning into a snarling monster just so he can photograph the whole thing.
- Tracking Device: The two rivaling paparazzi followed Bo's colleague via a tracking device they hid on his bike.
- Twist Ending: In both the usual and the meta senses, as this is the first episode in the series with a supernatural element, something that is only revealed in the final scenes. Up until that point, it's the sort of realistic media satire that we've seen before in Black Mirror.
- Urban Fantasy: A Hollywood starlet becoming a werewolf is apparently a normal enough occurrence that a "specialty doctor to the stars" knows how to handle it, or, at the very least, roll with the situation, business-as-usual style.
