If you’ve been busy binge-watching the newest season of Black Mirror, you may have missed something crucial thanks to Netflix’s autoplay function. You might want to go back and hit that “Watch credits” button at the end of “Joan Is Awful” — or just keep reading.
There’s an extra scene at the end of Season 6, episode 1, which explains one major action on behalf of our protagonist: that crap-fuelled church scene.
After mid-level manager Joan (Annie Murphy) discovers the new Streamberry show Joan Is Awful is mirroring her life, she’s fired from her job for violating her NDA through the actions of her onscreen counterpart (played by a digital likeness of Salma Hayek Pinault). She sleeps with her ex and discovers she’s signed away the rights to her likeness to the streaming service. It’s chaos completely out of her control. So, Joan takes matters into her own bowels.
Seeing a loophole in the show’s life-mirroring process, Joan decides to do something so outrageously awful that it would offend Hayek Pinault to have even a digital likeness of herself reenact. After a binge-eating episode, Joan uses a laxative, dresses in a cheerleader outfit, and draws a dick on her forehead in lipstick, then turns up at a random church to interrupt a wedding with an airhorn and a full-on blowout in every sense of the word.
“Salma Hayek’s gonna fucking hate this,” Joan gleefully chuckles while getting her mugshot taken. Sure enough, it ends up on the show.
“Never in my wildest nightmares I thought I’d see myself defecating in a church,” the real Hayek Pinault says to her lawyer the next day, slamming the character as a “deepfake heretic abomination.”
Turns out, it isn’t technically a revenge move at all. It can’t be. This Joan, played by a digital likeness of Annie Murphy, isn’t the real Joan either.
As Michael Cera’s character Beppe explains in the operations nucleus of Streamberry, there is another Joan behind all of this — a “Source Joan,” if you will, who is played by Kayla Lorette. All of the actions taken by the Joan portrayed by Murphy, from her relationship breaking down to her destruction of Streamberry’s precious quamputer, are predetermined moments from real Joan’s life.
Ergo, the real Joan shit all over a church wedding.
Brilliantly, we do get to see this scene, but it’s hidden right at the end of the episode credits. The episode ends with the real Joan under house arrest, though she’s achieved her dream of running her own coffee shop and becoming friends with the real Annie Murphy (who is also under house arrest). She’s also back to being the main character in her own life story. But there’s one loose end to tie up in the final, final scene.
Blasting an airhorn, in full cheerleader garb, with lipstick-drawn forehead penis, the real Joan storms into a church in real life, yelling “Merry Christmas, one and all!” before the inevitable happens. Trust us; it’s worth the wait.
How to watch: Black Mirror Season 6 is now streaming on Netflix.(opens in a new tab)
