Viewers have been "shattered" by Eulogy, an emotional new episode in the seventh season of Charlie Brooker's series, starring Paul Giamatti.

Since 2011, Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones' dystopian anthology series, Black Mirror, has presented 34 stories about the dark side of technology: how computer systems and digital gadgets might distort, warp and even end life for humans.

There have been the shocking, twist-filled episodes – a prime minister is forced to have intercourse with a pig on live TV to release a kidnapped princess (National Anthem); a woman chased by bounty hunters on a sadistic reality TV show is revealed to be a child-killer (White Bear) – but every so often, there's a tale that transcends the "what if technology went bad?" theme and instead manages to capture the multi-layered nuances of human existence.

This gentle, more emotional side to Black Mirror has previously emerged in several fan-favourite episodes, such as San Junipero, released in 2016: a love story between two young women set in the 80s, that is later revealed to be a simulated reality where the dead and the still living can co-exist together online. Be Right Back (2013) was prescient in its explorations of AI, and how the experience of grief might lead someone to create a computer-generated version of their loved one. And themes of infidelity and sexual obsession viewed through an embedded memory "grain" were explored with devastating results in 2011's The Entire History of You, written by Succession's Jesse Armstrong.

And while there's always a place for slightly silly, catastrophising predictions of the endgame of computers and the internet (Plaything and Common People in season seven are decent new examples of this), Black Mirror excels when the technology is just one part of the story, not the point of the story. The newest series appears to recognise this, and is perhaps the most heartfelt and emotional of the entire catalogue. With three of the seven episodes centred around a love story, however, it's episode five, Eulogy, which has been the standout, quietly devastating viewers on the day of its release.

"Eulogy broke me in a very particular way I wasn't expecting," one viewer wrote on X, while another said it was "an utterly heartbreaking yet fantastic piece of television… just beautifully painful". Another user added: "Truly incredible from every standard possible. I've been crying for the last 5 minutes… Heartbreak can't even scrape the surface of what this has made me feel." Another was still in recovery from the viewing: "It ha[d] me sobbing. And I mean heavy, fat tears."

The critics agree. Stylist's Kayleigh Dray

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