You might have noticed some interesting music choices in “Black Museum,” the final episode of Black Mirror‘s most recent season. And no, we’re not talking about their repeated use of Irma Thomas’s “Anyone Who Knows What Love Is.”
In the episode, a young woman named Nish (Letitia Wright) stops off at a charging station to power up her vehicle and wanders into the nearby Black Museum. Here, slimy proprietor Rolo Haynes (Douglas Hodge) boasts a collection of ill-fated tech devices, many of which he was directly involved in bringing to market. The episode is split into several stories, culminating—as most Black Mirror episodes do—in one last twist.
The episode features an incredible original score from Cristobal Tapia de Veer, whose other credits include The Girl with All the Gifts (2016), and BBC America’s Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.
 “Familiarity” has a demented carnival vibe that kicks into gear after about 10 seconds of ominous whirring. Ethereal voices offer breathy beats while the sound of a warping tape lends a sense of apprehension. It’s perfect for an episode where our nemesis is a charlatan showman—the ringmaster of his very own horrifying, dystopian freak show. You can hear this theme multiple times, particularly over the scene where a father who has agreed to host his comatose’s wife consciousness in his own mind begins to realize just exactly what they’ve done.
Tapia de Veer said that though he’s a fan of the show, he was not influenced by other episodes “because Colm’s [McCarthy, director] ‘Black Museum’ was its own thing. It is very Black Mirror, but the style felt new to me, so I worked on it as if it were a stand-alone film.”
You can check out the entire score on Tapia de Veer’s BandCamp.
Image: Netflix
