"Black Mirror" has long followed the mold of shows like "The Twilight Zone" by offering haunting, standalone sci-fi stories. But the Netflix series is taking the unusual step of returning to a previous episode in its upcoming season — with a little help from a South Jersey native.
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Cristin Milioti will reprise her role as Lieutenant Cole from the Season 4 premiere "USS Callister" in the next batch of episodes dropping Thursday, April 10. The Season 7 installment, titled "USS Callister: Into Infinity," will be the show's first sequel.
"Fans of the show will recognize the cast of a certain spaceship from one of our episodes reappearing," creator Charlie Brooker said in an interview with Tudum. "... Normally, I kill off all the characters at the end of an episode, [but] I kept some of ’em alive. I’m growing as a human."
The "USS Callister" followed a crew, led by Captain Daly (Jesse Plemons), aboard a spaceship vaguely resembling the one on "Star Trek." As with all "Black Mirror" episodes, however, something more sinister was afoot. The crew members were actually digital clones of Daly's employees at a video game company, whom he had replicated to boss around in a space-age adventure. Milioti's character Nanette Cole, a new programmer at the firm, leads her cloned colleagues on a mission to break free of Daly's control.
Milioti is still fighting in a digital world in "USS Callister: Into Infinity." A teaser that debuted Monday shows her bracing for impact on a plummeting spaceship and visiting planets in tactical gear. Most of her colleagues are back for the ride — including James Walton (Jimmi Simpson), Karl Valdack (Billy Magnussen), Elena Tulaska (Milanka Brooks), Nate Packer (Osy Ikhile) and Kabir Dudani (Paul G. Raymond) — but their odds apparently aren't great.
"It's 30 million players versus the five of us," Milioti says in the trailer. "We are f--ked. We are gonna die."
The actress, who was born and raised in Cherry Hill, earned her first Screen Actors Guild Award nomination last year for her "feral" turn as Sofia Falcone in the HBO Batman spin-off "The Penguin." She has also appeared in "Made for Love," "Palm Springs," "The Wolf of Wall Street" and "How I Met Your Mother."
Check out the rest of the "Black Mirror" teaser below:
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