Sean Gransee

All Black Mirror Episodes, Ranked by Reddit Comments


There’s a Black Mirror episode rankings thread where dozens of people have ranked every Black Mirror episode. I thought it would be interesting to average up all the rankings to get a general consensus of people’s favorite and least favorite episodes. Without further ado, here’s each episode ordered by its average ranking from that thread:

Sorted from best to worst

  1. White Christmas
  2. San Junipero
  3. USS Callister
  4. Hang the DJ
  5. Shut Up and Dance
  6. White Bear
  7. The Entire History of You
  8. Nosedive
  9. Black Museum
  10. Be Right Back
  11. Fifteen Million Merits (tie)
  12. Hated in the Nation (tie)
  13. Playtest
  14. The National Anthem
  15. Arkangel
  16. Crocodile
  17. Men Against Fire
  18. Metalhead
  19. The Waldo Moment

This takes into account all 44 comments (at the time of this posting) that included a ranked list of all 19 episodes. I excluded comments that only put them into tiers without giving a ranking within each tier. I also excluded comments that only ranked some of the episodes. (Many comments only ranked season 4, so those were excluded.)

SPOILER ALERT The thing I found most interesting about this list is that the top 4 episodes all have a similar premise. They all follow digital copies of human consciousness inside a virtual reality. I’ve seen a number of people complaining on Reddit about how too many episodes are based on that premise, but it looks like Charlie Brooker decided to take the success of White Christmas and copy the idea of “cookies” into a series of well-regarded installments.

I also wanted to get a sense of how much people agreed on the ranking of each episode, so I ordered the list by standard deviation.

Sorted from most agreed upon to most polarizing

  1. White Christmas (#1 in rankings)
  2. The Waldo Moment (#19 in rankings)
  3. Men Against Fire (#17 in rankings)
  4. Hang the DJ (#4 in rankings)
  5. Crocodile (#16 in rankings)
  6. Metalhead (#18 in rankings)
  7. Arkangel (#15 in rankings)
  8. USS Callister (#3 in rankings)
  9. White Bear (#6 in rankings)
  10. Nosedive (#8 in rankings)
  11. Black Museum (#9 in rankings)
  12. Hated in the Nation (tie for #11 in rankings)
  13. The Entire History of You (#7 in rankings)
  14. Be Right Back (#10 in rankings)
  15. Fifteen Million Merits (tie for #11 in rankings)
  16. Playtest (#13 in rankings)
  17. The National Anthem (#14 in rankings)
  18. Shut Up and Dance (#5 in rankings)
  19. San Junipero (#2 in rankings)

It’s unsurprising that the episodes deemed best (White Christmas) and worst (The Waldo Moment) are the most agreed upon. Most people tended to have those episodes near the top and bottom of their lists, respectively. What’s more surprising is that San Junipero is the most polarizing despite averaging out to #2. Quite a few people put that episode near the bottom of their list, but enough people had it in their top 2 to make it beat out almost every other episode in the average rankings.

So there you have it. Again, here’s the thread that all this data is crowdsourced from: https://www.reddit.com/r/blackmirror/comments/7ms2r8/black_mirror_episode_rankings_thread/

For anyone interested in doing their own analysis, I’ve compiled all the raw rankings into a JSON file.

© 2024 Sean Gransee