‘Black Mirror’ season 7 episode ‘Common People’ ending explained

Black Mirror season 7 opener “Common People” might be about, well, common people, but the increasingly grim episode about one couple’s upended marriage employs an exit strategy that’s anything but typical.

“It’s one of our bleak ones,” creator-writer Charlie Brooker tells Entertainment Weekly of the episode’s ending, which deals a deadly blow to the happy union of laborer Mike (Chris O’Dowd) and teacher Amanda (Rashida Jones), who live a peaceful, frill-free life on lower-middle-class salaries, peppered with an annual splurge on an anniversary getaway to an inn called the Juniper (a nod to the romantic bond forged in the 2016 Black Mirror classic “San Junipero“).

After Amanda suffers a medical emergency that leads to the discovery of a deadly brain tumor and with help from a convincing company rep, Gaynor (Tracee Ellis Ross), Mike subscribes to a groundbreaking neuroscience company, Rivermind, which offers to essentially scoop out the afflicted portion of Amanda’s brain and replace it with synthetic material that can receive transmissions from a backup imprint of her brain to fill in the gaps and allow her to live a normal life. Or, so they think.

Gaynor tells the couple that the company is looking to expand its coverage area, and that they’ll soon be able to travel beyond the locally limited range of reception, and that Amanda will lose consciousness if they don’t stay within its bounds. Things go smoothly until Amanda’s new operating system begins using her voice to recite ads in her waking life.

The rep then informs the couple of an unyielding number of new subscription tiers that cost more money than the pair can afford, leading Mike to work overtime at his day job and, at night, resort to mutilating his body for money from paid viewers on a shady internet streaming site called DumDummies.

When Amanda’s functionality begins to suffer as Rivermind saps lower-tier services to benefit its higher-priced services (and the product’s fee balloons beyond the couple’s ability to pay), Mike indulges in fleeting moments of happiness with his wife via purchasing brief Rivermind boosters that offer Amanda control over select heightened senses for a limited amount of time — essentially, a gift card that lets her live a “normal” life for a short time.

After Mike loses his job for assaulting a coworker when the latter discovered and exposed publicly a graphic act Mike performed on DumDummies, the couple falls behind on payments. Their life disintegrates beyond repair, and Amanda decides that she wants to die.

“It’s key that Rashida’s character, Amanda, says to him, ‘Do it while I’m not here.’ She’s talking about when she starts giving a sales pitch (during her commercials),” Brooker explains. “We’ve established that she’s not aware when she’s running ads. She’s not mentally present. It felt so Black Mirror for her to ask him to basically euthanize her (in that moment).”

Indeed, in a final act of love, Mike smothers Amanda while she’s in commercial mode, ending her suffering, but amplifying his. The final shot sees Mike carrying a sharp object into his office, where he earlier performed his DumDummies acts, looking into the camera for a brief moment, and shutting the door behind him.

“Earlier, he alluded that he’s paid for her last half-hour of Rivermind Lux. He’s doing something for a private buyer on DumDummies. You can surmise from that that he’s probably not coming out (of that room),” Brooker observes. “It’s subtle, but he looks straight down the lens at the end, which is particularly chilling as endings go.”

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Brooker says of what could be Mike’s final act: “I assume the whole thing is an exit strategy, that’s my reading of it. There’s no way out. When I wrote the script, one of the producers went, ‘Oh my God, that’s distilled essence of Black Mirrorthat story.’ It’s a bit of a gut punch. When you enter that episode, you don’t see that it’s going to end up where it ends up. Tonally, it feels lighter at the start.”

But, as usual, Brooker suggests that the “Common People” ending can be read as ambiguous by others, too.

It’s also not entirely outrageous to think that Mike might continue on with his own life, and that he’s simply part of the never-ending machine of striving to survive. Sure, he just euthanized his wife after she became a victim of maniacal corporate-medical terrorism, but a man has bills to pay — and, in this reality, the only way for him to carry on in this particular realm of for-profit evil is to harm his body for money from strangers.

After watching Amanda succumb not to her illness, but to a capitalist structure that’s infected both her body and life at large, it’s easy to see why this episode of Black Mirror finds some things far bleaker than death.

Black Mirror season 7 is now streaming on Netflix.