Black Mirror’s “Bête Noire”: A deliciously dark tale of revenge, reality, and rewrites

While many critics have gone to the lengths of considering “Bête Noire” as a critique of technology, Brooker’s overarching message still stands undisputable: it’s not technology that is the problem.

Rather, It is we, as humans, who are the root cause. “Bête Noire” portrays uneasiness through a blend of psychological drama with absurdist humor and science fiction: a workplace comedy with a moral to tell us why rewiring our past or controlling our present can have dire consequences.

Supported by a cast of excellent performers, Toby Haynes with USS Callister and Demon 79, unfolds a narrative driven by characters’ performances that builds up slowly, only to culminate in an explosion of speculative chaos in the finale.

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Plot overview: Chocolate bars and quantum compilers

In a made-up UK food company Ditta, the plot follows Maria (Siena Kelly), the Head of Flavour, who is a perfectionist zealot launching her newest venture—controversial chocolate bars with miso. Her life takes an unusual turn when she is joined by Verity (Rosy McEwen), her classmate and a neglected fringe socialite.

The narrative encapsulates disembodied dramedy theatrics intercut with pathological dread. Maria assumes that Verity bears some bitter resentment from their school days, even more so when a common acquaintance within their social circle is reported to have died by suicide. Her paranoia reaches its peak when Verity actively starts inviting her to the other side of reality—through ‘reality-dimpling’ gaslighting manipulations that reconfigure memories and details as it drives the target to the cusp of reality.

Eventually, the chaos builds into an oblivion of scattered memories. Verity constructs a quantum compiler, transforming childhood doodles into omnipotent scribbles—symbols that now hold the power to rewrite reality. Rather than weaponizing uncontainable tech doodles to defuse war, disasters, hunger, and disease, she seeks out psychologically metaphysical revenge on everything and everyone who harassed her in high school.

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Characters: Gaslighters, gatekeepers, and queens of the universe

• Maria is an extremely neurotic detail-oriented woman who emphasizes people’s infraction in candy nomenclature (“mallow” instead of “marshmallow”) and geographical blunders. She's smart, but also overly confident—perfect for gaslighting. Verity takes advantage of this, understanding that Maria’s reality can be altered enough to make the “truth” unsteady.
• Verity embodies a captivating blend of tragic victimhood and wrathful deity. McEwan gives a wildly swinging portrayal from a damaged genius to a gleeful manipulator of her own making. While dominantly powerful, the reason motivating her remains achingly human: she is desperately trying to change an unforgiving past.
• Kae, Maria’s boyfriend, and Gabe, her boss (Micah Workeye and Ben Bailey-Smith, respectively), provide more subtle insights into gender discrimination. The two men actually enable Maria’s isolation from the truth by dismissing her concerns as petty jealousy or womanly squabbling. This further enables Verity’s schemes.

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Themes: Memory, misinformation, and manipulated reality

Rewriting the past

What stands out in the summary of “Bête Noire” is a reconstruction of truth overtly (Verity’s compiler) or covertly (Maria telling Kae she never spread that rumor). As Brooker insightfully remarks, it is not only futuristic technology that alters reality; people do it daily with revisionist accounts and self-serving narratives.

The rise of deepfakes and AI hallucinations

Everything is more complicated in the presence of generative AI. The episode poses a menacing question: Can anything be trusted?

A memory, website, or the same name plate of ‘a coworker’—“facts” is something that Verity’s manipulation blurs. As the review observes, it mirrors Orwellian control systems, where domination over the present is achieved through the obliteration of the perception of the history.

Female rivalry and patriarchal blindness

Maria’s dismissal by the men around her partakes into Verity’s success. Her complaints are stamped ‘Women’s Issues’—the jealousy, hysteria, competition. This unremarked casual sexism further adds to the psychological terror, enabling Verity to warp reality unhindered until the explosive climax.

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Cinematic influences and visual tone

While “Bête Noire” takes inspiration from The Twilight Zone’s “It’s a Good Life,” which features a child who rules the world with predetermined wishes, it also draws from Everything Everywhere All At Once's hyperreality. Everything culminates in the compiler's absurd multiverse-like vision.

The episode’s art style employs pastels and modern corporate dullness, which are starkly at odds with the sci-fi pandemonium simmering underneath. It is these jarring and comedic changes to reality that make the ordinary setting so surreal.

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Climactic twist and ending: Be careful what you wish for

In the show's last moments, it does a classic Black Mirror flip: Maria kills Verity and takes control of the compiler. Instead of restoring order, she self-designates a Beyoncé-esque Queen of the Universe. It’s an unexpected turn that is simultaneously light-hearted and disturbing. Maria, who seemed like a victim, now suggests that power always corrupts, no matter who possesses it.

As the episode concludes, we face not only a cliffhanger but also a moral puzzle: If you had the chance to alter your reality as you see fit, would you really be any better than the flawed people you criticize?

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Conclusion: A small-scale episode with big questions

While “Bête Noire” might not be as eye-catching or sophisticated as other episodes in the Black Mirror series, it is a reflection, albeit one that makes you pause, on how a world emerges where truth, memory, and power converge and clash in unison.

Its take on AI and psychological manipulation in relation to the female experience within the tech and corporate world is undeniably impactful, even when masked as dark humor.

In the end, it is not only vengeance that comes to the forefront. Rather, it becomes strikingly clear how malleable our perception of reality is, and how often it is taken for granted that reality can be exploited, reshaped or destroyed at will.