It's pretty rare that a prop in Black Mirror is for mere show — and that includes the books the characters are reading.
Season 6's third episode, "Beyond the Sea," wields page-turners as clues, foreshadowing characters' fates and revealing their innermost thoughts through what they're reading. The episode sees Aaron Paul and Josh Hartnett as astronauts Cliff and David, who are completing a six-year mission in space together. As technology would have it, they each have "Earth replicas" of themselves that enable them to continue their lives with their families back home during the mission. But it all ends in tragedy.
SEE ALSO: Every 'Black Mirror' episode ever, ranked by overall dreadWhat clues could have helped us foresee this episode's horrendous happening? Look to the books!
Here's all four books featured in the episode and why they've been included.
Airport, Arthur Hailey
When we first meet Lana, she's sitting in her living room devouring British-Canadian writer Arthur Hailey's 1968 Airport, a book set over one night in a fictional Chicago airport. In the book, the airport's general manager Mel Bakersfeld has a tense relationship with his wife due to his demanding job, which is similar to what's happening between Lana and Cliff.
Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann
Near the tragic conclusion of the episode, Lana confesses to Cliff of her yearning for physical intimacy with her husband and her feelings of isolation in their country home. Of course, if you're paying close attention, you already knew this based on what she'd been reading.
Earlier, Lana is engrossed by Jacqueline Susann's deliciously lurid 1966 novel Valley of the Dolls. While Dolls is known for its portrayal of the seedier sides of show biz, its female protagonists also struggle with tumultuous marriages, sex, loneliness, mental health issues, and female friendship in New York City. Lana describes it to David as "the guiltiest" pleasure when he notices she's reading it, and during this exchange we learn that unlike David, "Cliff doesn't really read."
Credit: Nick Wall / NetflixFor Lana, Valley of the Dolls offers her an escape; it gives her a taste of her old life in the city and all of its social interactions. Lana plainly shows her loneliness in her request to Cliff for a party at their house with the locals, which he dismisses. In fact, even David notices Lana's isolation in the country before Cliff does.
"Cape Ann going to be cosmopolitan enough for her?" David asks Cliff while in the space station. "I only met her the once, but she struck me as quite the butterfly."
The Illustrated Man, Ray Bradbury
We know David loves sci-fi because he recommends it to Lana, but we also get a peek at a specific title that has more to do with the series as a whole. Bored and anxiously awaiting David's return from using his Earth replica, Cliff finds a book on the control panel: Ray Bradbury's classic 1951 collection The Illustrated Man, whose 18 short stories indubitably share creative DNA with Brooker's series.
Credit: Nick Wall / NetflixThis book is obviously important enough to David to bring with him to a six-year mission in space, but more than that, this is Charlie Brooker's nod to the dystopian fiction icon whose cynical view of the dangers of technology are more prescient than ever.
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Robert A. Heinlein
Books become the main point of connection between Lana and David; they even visit a bookstore in town together after Lana reveals, "There aren't many books in the house." David picks out a book for Lana and predicts she'll like it —and he's right, you can see she's already halfway through it a week later.
The book is Robert A. Heinlein's 1966 novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, a libertarian sci-fi tome about a lawless colony on the moon that leads a revolution against its Earth-bound oppressors to gain independence. This lunar society notably has two men for every one woman — kind of like our protagonists in "Beyond the Sea" — and the narrative foreshadows the fate of Cliff and David, who will both ultimately end up independent from their Earth replicas through violence.
So there you have it! You should be judging books by their covers, at least in Black Mirror.
How to watch: Black Mirror Season 6 is now on Netflix.
