Warning: This article contains spoilers for the Black Mirror season 6 finale, “Demon 79.”
Black Mirror rarely takes the subtle approach when calling out massive societal issues, but “Demon 79” has something important to say that might be getting lost in the world-ending flames. As usual, the episode introduces viewers to a character who has no idea that their life is about to spiral into left field. In this case, they’re watching Nida Huq (Anjana Vasan) repeatedly experience microaggressions in her pursuit of love, happiness, and the right to walk out of her home without being leered at or insulted because of her skin color.
Nida is just like anyone else trying to make ends meet and grab a bit of happiness along the way. Then, like Joan (Annie Murphy), she’s put through a series of unsettling twists that leave her questioning her sanity. Unlike Joan, though, she’s doing it all as an Indian-British woman in an increasingly racist and xenophobic UK suburb. It’s still awful, there are just extra layers of terrible on top. Yet, “Demon 79” isn’t just a commentary on what it was like to be a person of color in the late 70s. It’s also a peek into how being constantly mistreated can turn an otherwise kind person into a deep well of violent resentment.
What Is Black Mirror’s “Demon 79” About?
Black Mirror has a strange way of bringing people together and season 6, episode 5, “Demon 79” is no different. Nida and Gaap (Paapa Essiedu) are as odd as a couple can get, when both parties meet right before the apocalypse and one of them is an actual demon. When viewers meet Nida, she’s not-so-comfortably living out her life in the sleepy English town of Tipley. She wakes up, makes a sensible breakfast, and sometimes reads the newspaper before trotting off to her work as a sales assistant in an unnamed department store. Everything about Nida’s life is plain...except for the part where she’s living it as an Indian-British woman with visibly brown skin.
The town she calls home is being infiltrated by the hate speech of a far-right political group calling itself the National Front. They see themselves as the victims of unregulated immigration and hate those they see as ‘others.’ White strangers leer at Nida as if she doesn’t belong. Her White co-worker Vicky (Katherine Rose Morley) regularly makes demeaning remarks about her. It’s enough to leave Nida fantasizing about brutally murdering Vicky just for the fun of it. To make matters worse, Vicky complains to management about Nida’s food being “smelly,” and Nida is relegated to the basement to take lunch. But that’s where Nida meets Gaap, who tells her the world is ending.
The demon manifests from a talisman Nida naively brought back home from work. How does “Demon 79” make that even weirder? Gaap takes the form of singer Bobby Farrell from the German-Caribbean musical group Boney M., since they were performing on TV when Nida did her accidental summoning. Plus, she seemed attracted to Bobby, and perhaps Gaap was hoping that would make his presence easier to bear. Hint: it did not.
Naturally, Gaap follows up his appearance by announcing that the world will end unless Nida murders three people, because Black Mirror is still twisted and just having a demon would be too simple. At first, Nida is reluctant to even acknowledge that he’s in her living room. Then she outright refuses to believe that the apocalypse is nigh unless she follows his rules.
By the time she’s stabbing a third person to death, she’s pretty much made her up mind to trust him. But she still has her doubts. That is, until she sets her sights on Vicky as her next kill. As she’s plotting to finally turn her murderous daydreams into a vicious reality, her co-worker strikes up a conversation with local politician Michael Smart (David Shields). Nida overhears him talking about his plans to sneak racist xenophobia into his campaign under the guise of putting loyalty to his community and country first. Gaap shows Nida exactly what Martin is capable of, and it’s nothing short of world domination. So, she goes after him. Unfortunately, nothing goes to plan and she ends up worse than she started.
How Does “Demon 79” End?
Nida essentially plans to hunt Martin down and kill him. She goes against Gaap’s desperate pleas to stop and continue going after Vicky instead, so he leaves her to her own devices. While Nida manages to knock the scamming politician off the road with her car, she’s apprehended in her attempts to finish the deed and taken into police custody. This is usually the point in a Black Mirror episode where the protagonist either bravely defies the odds, or admits defeat against the inevitable. In “Demon 79”, Nida is confronted with the fact that she’s failed her mission.
Luckily, the officers detaining her give her a chance to explain what she did and the motives behind her drastic actions. It’s clear that neither of them believes her, but they at least hear her out. When the clock strikes midnight, it starts looking like she might have been delusional all along. Then the first bomb strikes, and another, and on and on until Tipley is more flame than town. Gaap returns with an offer that Nida could refuse, but doesn’t. He’s being sent into an eternal void of nothingness, and she agrees to go with him. “Demon 79” ends with them holding hands as they walk away from a world exploding into flames.
In some ways, the ending of “Demon 79” is obvious. The world goes up in flames and those who once struggled to protect it end up walking away in a slow-motion sequence that would make Zack Snyder proud. Nida had a mission with certain stipulations that she needed to follow to avoid catastrophe, and she was unsuccessful. The result was exactly what Gaap spent the entire Black Mirror episode telling her would happen: the end of the world as she knew it.
In other ways, though, the ending of “Demon 79” isn’t what it looks like. It’s a reminder to be kind to one’s neighbors and co-workers. It’s a warning of how everyone suffers when people succumb to hate. Most Black Mirror episodes have a sinister undertone and a chilling lesson for viewers. “Demon 79” doesn’t set out to scare anyone with creepy music or horrifying visuals. It’s not a horror episode, despite being about a demon pushing a (mostly) innocent woman to commit murder. Yet, this Black Mirror episode is a wake-up call of how awry things can go when the very people who want to help are oppressed and silenced. “Demon 79” is what happens when a cruel and unforgiving world makes a monster out of someone who could have been a hero.