Can We Trust Reality? Black Mirror Season 7 Episode 2 is a Must-Watch

Black Mirror Season 7, 2025

Episode Two Review

S7 EP02 | Bête Noire

Bête Noire, meaning a person or thing that one particularly dislikes. Episode two of Black Mirror’s seventh season sees Maria, a high-flying development executive at a chocolate company Ditta. Everything is going well for her until someone she hasn't seen since school, Verity Green, shows up for a focus group tasting session. 

This episode dives into the meaning of frustration and the spiral into madness, we quickly learn that Verity Green is far more mysterious than she appears. Maria is suspicious from the moment she lays eyes on her and knows something is off about her. As Maria attempts to learn more about Verity she quickly realises everyone is against her and everything she once knew had changed. 

The first half of this episode I was waiting for it to get started, it was incredibly slow paced at the beginning but do not let that fool you; this story gets incredibly good. The themes of this episode revolve around paranoia, obsession, not letting go of the past, frustration, going mad, believing in yourself and trusting your gut. Everyone in Maria’s life turns against her but she continues to follow her instinct and it pays off eventually. 

This episode takes place over a week, a simple seven days of Maria’s life feels like an eternity. As each day descends the title sequence bursts onto the page with incredibly ominous backing music informing us which day of the week it is. I found this simplistic style choice to be incredibly hilarious and it kept me intrigued, as the days continued I knew we were building up to something incredible. 

Essentially, this episode is the physical materialisation of the saying “the past comes back to haunt you” and also plays with the idea of the Mandela Effect. Being adamant something is one way when in reality, it isn’t, Verity forces Maria to feel the same way she did in school; alone. Verity interjects herself into Maria’s life to get payback for what happened to her in school, Verity is determined to find out the truth and she will torture Maria until she gets it. The performances from Siena Kelly and Rosy McEwan were incredibly enticing and I thought their interactions which one another were awkwardly realistic and unbelievably hard to watch at times. Rekindling a relationship from school is not something anyone wants to do and this episode relished in the uncomfortable silences and fakeness of it all. 

The interactions between Maria and Verity poetically mirror the technology in the episode, creating a fault sense of reality and living in an alternate version of the truth.  Overall, Bête Noire was an unexpected hit for me. When the episode took a while to build I was hesitant to sing its praises but the final half of the episode was unforgettable and truly sinister. The ending was both satisfying and heartbreaking, incredibly bleak and forces us to realise both women were bad people. 

Probe Points

★★★★☆