Black Mirror season 4 'ArkAngel' review: A cautionary tale that feels Mehr like an indie movie 

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\'s stories being set in shiny near-futures, in chic, modernist homes inhabited by smart media types. But \'ArkAngel\' isn\'t like that at all.

In fact, it\'s only the blindingly white offices of the ArkAngel organisation itself which feel like a go-to

locale. Outside of that, \'ArkAngel\' takes place in a lived-in, working class world in one of those slightly battered American towns that indie filmmakers cherish so much.

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It\'s not just the setting that makes \'ArkAngel\' so refreshingly atypical. Although

has always featured richly-painted female characters, this is, to date, the only episode where men barely register (although this season\'s \'Metalhead\' can also make a similar claim). Marie (Rosemarie DeWitt) appears to be partnerless even at the time of Sara\'s birth, and the only man in her daughter\'s life appears to be Marie\'s father (Nicholas Campbell, looking unsettlingly like Steve Bannon).

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It\'s also a relatively calm, un-panicked episode. There\'s no delicious,

-ish twist, no throbbing sense of ominousness, just a straightforward story about an overprotective, neurotic mother and a girl who isn\'t allowed to grow up.

Learning to cope with and recognise danger is a vital part of our emotional and intellectual development. But ArkAngel, or at least the perception filter part of it, eliminates much of that. We see Sara walking down that road, a barking dog pixel-ed out, and we see her grandfather collapse of a heart attack and that too is muffled for her.

We discover, from the psychiatrist Marie takes Sara to, that ArkAngel was banned in Europe and is due to be outlawed in the States. We can only imagine that it was these development-stunting gimmicks that proved so controversial. What\'s strange is that, if the harm of ArkAngel was deemed so great, why can\'t the technology be shut down or reversed by government diktat?

While current apps, such as Apple\'s Find Friends, allow us to keep a GPS-assisted eye on our family and partners, this is that technology taken a few more miles down the line. It\'s no coincidence that Brooker includes the line "cutting the umbilical cord", because, of course, for Maria it never was cut, metaphorically speaking.

What starts off as a necessity, to protect her three-year-old daughter, soon becomes an addiction. The older Sara is never granted any privacy or the space to discover or to screw up.

There doesn\'t seem much else in Maria\'s life that can occupy her apart from Sara. No boyfriends, no hobbies, just this sick relationship with a viewing tablet and an obsession to shield her daughter from the horrors of the world. But for all this protection, there never seems much warmth in that household. There are few hugs or parental chats that aren\'t finger-wagging.

\'s greatest directing coup. Over 29 years, Jodie Foster\'s directing credits amount to just four TV episodes and four movies, so she\'s clearly picky. But Foster (a former child actress, remember) seems like the perfect fit for this story.

Apparently, it was she who suggested to Brooker than the story be given a blue-collar makeover, and, more than any other episode (including season three\'s \'Nosedive\'), this feels thrillingly, authentically American and more like a one-off, Sundance-friendly indie flick than an episode of a British anthology series.

The ending is beautifully ambiguous. Some may see it as tragic, with Sara\'s mother, bloodied and screaming in the middle of the road, her daughter seemingly gone forever. But others may see it as a liberation, as Sara marches off away from home and hitches a lift out of town, free at last of her mother\'s oppressive helicopter parenting.

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But who\'s driving that truck? It\'s nicely underplayed by Foster, but there\'s a sliver of threat in those final seconds. A teenage girl who\'s been mollycoddled her entire life, stepping into a stranger\'s vehicle. This is, in essence, the 15-year-old Sara doing what the three-year-old Sara did at the beginning of the episode, which is to go wandering off, unaware of the dangers ahead of her.

It\'s a cautionary tale, that, however hard it may be to cut those apron strings, every mother has to eventually let go.

has never really tackled parenthood before now, and it just proves how much untapped, uncharted territory there still is out there for the series to explore. Big Mother is watching you.

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