Anthologies are all the rage these days, from Ryan Murphy's ever-expanding empire of mini-series to Joe Swanberg's collection of romance shorts. Yet no program has taken advantage of the elasticity of anthology storytelling quite like Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror, trading pet themes, genres, creative personnel, and tones from one episode to the next. A newfangled, potentially disastrous technology pops up in each installment, giving the series a healthy sense of cohesion, but the four seasons aired so far could not be more all over the map. Political satires and future dystopias, cop procedurals and war dramas, soulless nihilism and life-affirming humanism: If you dislike Black Mirror, perhaps you just haven't found the right episode.

The bad moms of Bad Moms have nothing on Rosemarie DeWitt’s Marie, the baddest mom of all. She thinks she’s only got her daughter’s best interests at heart when she signs the girl up for an experimental program that livestreams her vision to mommy’s iPad, but once young Sara hits her teen years, she doesn’t see the flagrant violation of her personal privacy that way. Situated on a shaky foundation — how could anyone in their right mind not see this idea’s potential for disaster? — and indelicately directed by Jodie Foster, this episode muddles its own commentary on the hazards of overzealous parenting and the emotional malformation resulting from it. If an episode insists on being dumb, the least it could do is be entertaining. “Arkangel” is neither.

Fleabag’s fan-favorite Hot Priest is mad as hell and he’s not going to take it anymore. Andrew Scott plays a guy whose picture probably accompanies the dictionary definition of “disgruntled,” a rideshare driver with a plan to kidnap a higher-up at a social media start-up against whom he has a monomaniacal grudge. One snafu begets another, and he winds up in a hostage standoff accelerated by his corporate nemesis’s near-omniscient access to information. Aside from that tweak to the crisis-negotiation formula, it all plays out relatively straightforward; not even a late-in-the-game appearance from Topher Grace as “Schmack Schmorsey” (actual name: Billy Bauer, though the likeness can’t be missed) adds less depth than it could. The risible final montage casts Brooker in a moralist light befitting Mother Hen, leaving us with a storybook fable, the moral of which is to not check our damn phones while behind the wheel.

Turning attention to the ravages of wartime and the way troops are brainwashed to kill, Brooker stumbles on his landing in an uncharacteristically weak third act. A soldier starts to wrestle with new feelings and a peculiar sickness after gunning down three of the feral mutant abominations that stalk a futuristic society. His sudden changes could be PTSD, or they could be something else. The eventual “twist” is so clearly telegraphed ahead of time that it hardly qualifies as such, and then when Brooker unloads it, the script fails to break any ground not already terraformed by the likes of Starship Troopers. Add a dash of violence falling further to the side of gratuitousness than usual, and you’ve got a slog of an hour with no reward for completing the mission.