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Black Mirror Recap: Farmicide

Season 6 Episode 2 Editor’s Rating4 stars ****

Photo: 2023 Netflix, Inc. Black Mirror is a show about technology, but it’s not always a show about the future. Almost every season has an episode that strays from the speculative genre, tackling the current moment instead. Some of those are good (“The National Anthem,” “Shut Up and Dance”) and some are bad (“The Waldo Moment,” “Smithereens”), but there’s a common theme in all of them: You don’t have to travel far into the future to see the ways technology can hurt people or to witness a dystopian media landscape that prioritizes “content creation” over inpiduals.

The true-crime documentary fad fits pretty squarely into that category, though it’s a subject that has gone unaddressed so far in Black Mirror. And while shows like American Vandal, Only Murders in the Building, and Paul T. Goldman have provided a wealth of solid true-crime parodies in recent years, the genre still makes sense as a target, especially for the type of spooky character-driven story that Black Mirror often nails. After all, Netflix is still churning out those docs (and docudramas) every year; productions like Making a Murderer, The Keepers, and Don’t F**k With Cats are as responsible for the genre’s proliferation as anything. Netflix even has its own subheading on the “true crime” Wikipedia page.

The documentarians in “Loch Henry” are Davis (Samuel Blenkin) and his American girlfriend Pia (Myha’la Herrold), who met at film school in London. They’re staying a couple of nights at Davis’s childhood home in the Scottish countryside with Davis’s mother, Janet (Monica Dolan), before heading to Rùm to interview a man who spends his time guarding rare eggs from thieves. But while Davis is happy with these modest goals — he envisions spotlighting “one of the last remaining holdouts against the commodification of nature” — Pia is itching for a bigger story.

She gets it on their second day in Loch Henry, when they visit a local pub run by Davis’s old friend Stuart (Daniel Portman, a.k.a. Game of Thrones’s Podrick Payne) and his depressed father (John Hannah). There, Pia gets more context for the tragedy Davis’s family went through. It turns out there’s a reason such an obvious potential tourist spot would be so desolate, and that reason’s name is Iain Adair.

“Loch Henry” is roughly the same length as the first episode, but it feels like it tells a more complete, purposeful story, with less crammed into every scene. Its info dumps happen organically, as in the immersive story Davis tells at the pub. He explains that Adair was a young man who kidnapped and killed at least eight people in the ’90s, torturing them in a hidden bunker at his family’s farm before burying their bodies in the field.

When Davis’s own cop father, Kenneth, got to investigating two victims in particular — Dawn and Simon Challis, a couple in their twenties who went missing — it ended with him being shot in the shoulder outside Adair’s house. Moments later, assuming he had been discovered, Adair shot and killed his own parents, then himself. While Kenneth managed to recover from the wound, he contracted MRSA in the hospital and eventually died. Janet has blamed Adair for her husband’s death ever since, even though he wasn’t directly responsible.

Almost immediately, Pia pushes to check out Adair’s creepy, abandoned home, suggesting they change the focus of their documentary to this “death den” at the heart of a small town. She even says she’ll make the documentary if her boyfriend doesn’t. Davis is understandably concerned about dredging up painful memories for his mother — “That’s real. That’s not fucking content,” he says of his father’s death — but ultimately, Janet supports anything that will get the word out about what really happened to her husband. Stuart supports the idea, too, eager for something that can put Loch Henry (and his bar) back on the map. The only person who actually objects to the documentary is Stuart’s mysterious dad, Mr. King, who angrily points out the pointless opportunism in digging up some old story just for public recognition. There’s truth to what he says, but his strident objections hint that there’s more to the story, probably involving himself.

So our team gets to work: Stuart provides the drone and a thorough archive collected by his obsessed late mother, while Pia and Davis get to work assembling interviews, archival footage, and B-roll. Pia secures the support of producer Kate Cezar by offering up unseen footage of the Adair house. When the trio checks out the dungeon for the first time, they go “proper Blair Witch,” taping over an old recording of Janet’s favorite detective show, Bergerac, to get some gnarly black-light footage.

There’s a nice chemistry among this core trio, with Stuart’s brashness playing nicely off Davis’s tentativeness and Pia’s adventurous attitude. And while this is a much less comedic episode than “Joan Is Awful,” I think the jokes here fit better — especially the naturalistic riffing on advertising the dungeon to tourists. But then that very scene is interrupted by a car crash, leaving a mostly fine Davis and Mr. King in the hospital for the night. It’s the perfect opportunity for Mr. King to come out with what he knows. “I don’t have any proof,” he says. “I think I’ve always known.”

And what exactly has Mr. King always known? We find that out in the following scene when Pia gets to work digitizing and realizes Janet’s countless Bergerac tapes are hiding a much bigger secret. They’re actually snuff films, tapes of Janet teaming up with her husband and Iain Adair to torture and kill their unsuspecting victims. The one that we do see is pretty damn disturbing, showing Janet donning a mask before dancing into the bunker to “Come Baby Come” by K7 and killing Dawn and Simon with a drill.

It bears mentioning that the cast does great work here, especially Herrold, who reacts to the tape with the proper horror and disbelief. And she nails Pia’s barely concealed fear as she sits down for dinner with Janet, eventually leaving the house for a walk because she doesn’t have service. Dolan is equally impressive, conveying weird vibes from the beginning while leaving open the possibility that she really is just a lonely, grief-stricken widow who loves her son.

There are horror elements here, for sure, but “Loch Henry” somewhat subverts the climax we might’ve been expecting. Once Janet realizes what Pia knows, seeing the tape upstairs, she chases her down — but in the end, Pia’s death comes as a result of her own clumsiness, tripping in the middle of a dark stream and hitting her head on a rock. And Janet’s own death is deliberately self-inflicted, with Janet setting out her tapes and a note before putting on her old torturer mask to hang herself. The way she figures it, the story is going to get out anyway; there’s no avoiding it, so she might as well provide exactly what her son needs.

Here, the episode skips forward in time, showing that a Streamberry true-crime doc was made, and Davis became famous for his role both behind the camera and within the story. (Essentially, he tried to tell a story but became the subject, like in Blair Witch.) We get a glimpse of the trailer for Loch Henry: Truth Will Out, which is full of clips from the snuff films edited together with creepy music for entertainment purposes. There’s also some further clarification about the details of what happened: Kenneth and Janet were the ones who guided Iain Adair, and it was Kenneth who killed the Adairs before wounding himself to cover it up. Mr. King turned out to be a red herring, but he’d developed a longtime suspicion after a night of “sex games” with the married couple.

It’d be easy to go the opposite way with this conclusion, showing how the truth of a story can be twisted and altered in the transition to the screen. But I like what we get instead: The truth of the story does come out, but at what cost? Would Davis and Pia have lived better, more fulfilling lives if they made the “Egg Man” documentary like Davis originally wanted, sacrificing fame for appreciation from a niche audience? (In the case of Pia, the answer is obviously yes — her death may be an accident, but it’s framed a bit like an interloper’s punishment for trying to milk content from her boyfriend’s family tragedy.) Stuart has nothing but positive things to say now that his bar is thriving again, but Davis’s life suddenly feels fundamentally empty, even though he achieved the recognition that he once coveted (even if it was under pressure from his more attention-hungry girlfriend).

After the BAFTAs, Davis is approached by an actress who compliments his work, though most of the credit ironically goes to Kate Cezar, who actually steps in front of him to discuss the possibility of this actress playing Pia in the upcoming drama they’re developing. Once he’s back at home, Davis reads the little note his mother left with her tapes: “For your film. Mum.”

It’s a fascinating, haunting ending: This is a young man who was taught to use documentary filmmaking to pursue the truth but got much more than he bargained for when he learned the full context of his upbringing. Would he have been sustained by the false comforts of the story he’d been told, believing that fiction long after Janet passed away? In true crime, gruesome facts can earn you the big bucks, but what value does the truth have when it kills the people you care about?

But “Loch Henry” wouldn’t be as good as it is without sticking to psychological implications over cultural commentary. After all he went through, Davis is left with this little sign of his mother’s love, a reminder that this secret murderous sadist still ultimately cared about his success. How do you set aside your love for the people who raised you, even when they’re responsible for unimaginable atrocities? Learning the truth about someone you love might make it easier to acknowledge their imperfections, but can it really stop you from feeling how you feel? They say the truth will set you free, but maybe it just leaves you a prisoner in your own story.

Easter Eggs

• Perhaps the most blatant, damning reference is when Stuart asks, “What was the name of that Netflix thing? About the guy that killed women?” and Pia responds, “Maybe narrow that down.” As in “Joan Is Awful,” I applaud calling the streamer out, but it’s hard to know how to feel about the company’s self-deprecation, especially with the continued negligence of the people at the top.

• Other nominees for “Best Factual Series” include Suffer the Children: The Tipley Pedophile Ring and Euthanasia: Inside Project Junipero, the latter of which refers to “San Junipero.”

• Part of me is still unsure about Pia’s death, which is pretty anticlimactic, and part of what prevents this from reaching my top tier of Black Mirror episodes. Either way, I like her character, and I like that the show doesn’t go too far in painting her as greedy.

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