'Black Mirror' Teases San Junipero 'Experience,' Easter Eggs

The announcement of Black Mirror’s next six episodes killed what lingering hope we had for an official “San Junipero” sequel, but the series may not be done with its most popular installment. Not only may the VR tale get a shout-out in an “Easter egg hose” coming to Season 4, but showrunners are considering “an experience” followup to the episode.

It was shortly after the third season premiere that director Owen Harris entertained a few ideas for a sequel, but doubted that series creator Charlie Brooker would be willing to consider another “happy ending,” should they follow through with one. Brooker himself later revealed some deleted scenes from the hour would similarly have spun off in a darker direction (including a kindergarten class implied to be deceased), and referred back to that in conversation with The Hollywood Reporter.

As Brooker and co-creator Annabel Jones explained, they’d at least thought of revisiting “San Junipero” in some other form:

Brooker: I kept thinking about how that felt like a whole world in and of itself. I think we almost might do it in a completely different form if we were doing a straight sequel, if that makes sense. Maybe not even as a normal episode.
Like a standalone episode?
Brooker: Like a thing. An experience.
Annabel Jones: Like, for real.

That said, Brooker did seem to imply that Season 4 might reference elements of “San Junipero,” along with an episode that drops even more easter eggs than usual:

We do like to drop Easter eggs every so often in other episodes, so we may be referring to San Junipero again. It’s difficult because I don’t think we’d revisit those characters. That felt like such a story and we wouldn’t want to open it up again. […]
I think it’s fair to say that there is one episode where we’ve just opened up an Easter egg hose and fired away … It always used to be that it’s just a bit of fun. But then sometimes we’ve done some things where we did explicitly refer to other episodes. I think the rule is that when a character says something that explicitly refers to something else, it’s canonical. Also, they follow the same dream universe. That’s the other thing that I tend to say. There’s a line in “Hated in the Nation” where someone refers to a crime that happened in “White Bear.”

In the meantime, the fourth season is due out in October or November (the episode title announcement didn’t confirm as much), as directed byJodie Foster, Toby Haynes, John Hillcoat, Tim Van Patten, Hannibal alum David Slade, and Colm McCarthy. New stars include everyone from Fargo and Friday Night Lights vet Jesse Plemons doing his best Captain Kirk, to Rosemarie Dewitt (Easy), Andrea Riseborough (Birdman), Georgina Campbell (Broadchurch), Maxine Peake (The Theory Of Everything) and Douglas Hodge (The Night Manager).