Black Mirror season five review – sweet, sadistic and hugely impressive

Charlie Brooker's dystopian series returns more confident than ever, offering up an ambitious tale of sexual and gender fluidity and a barnstorming performance from Miley Cyrus

The Bandersnatch boy is back. After the innovative-if-not-wholly-unprecedented interactive standalone episode under the Black Mirror umbrella, Charlie Brooker's anthology series (created with co-producer Annabel Jones) has returned for a proper run. Season five comprises three episodes - each a discrete story set five minutes from now - that continue in Black Mirror's lightly terrifying dystopian tradition of asking not what is the worst thing that could happen but what is the worst of the most likely possibilities. Like a sweetly sadistic scientist, it delights in shaving off slices of our collective psyche and sliding them under an unforgiving microscope to examine our most current concerns.

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