Black Mirror season 4 'Crocodile' review: Bleak and unrelentingly brutal 

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, in its old Channel 4 incarnation, was never exactly a low-budget series, its 2016 rebirth as a freshly-fledged Netflix production certainly give it a welcome international feel.

Narratively speaking, there\'s no hard reason why this episode should be set in Iceland. All of its main players are British and the location is almost flippantly irrelevant to the storyline. But it does give the series a impressively cinematic aesthetic and lends it the chilly feel of a Nordic noir crime drama.

Technologically, we\'ve almost been here before. But while season one\'s \'The Entire History of You\' featured people fitted with implants that allowed them to store memories on a hard-drive inside their head, this episode has a device called a Collaborator (or \'memory dredger\', as it\'s nicknamed).

The difference, though, is that TEHOY\'s implant felt a lot more convincing as a piece of future tech. In \'The Entire History of You\', memories are replayed because they\'ve been recorded through microscopic cameras built into people\'s eyes. In \'Crocodile\' we\'re meant to buy that a machine is able to interpret our memories of an event in awesome, crystal-clear detail.

"The more emotional your response, the more vivid your memory of it is," insurance investigator Shazi insists. But – really? Can we actually conjure up a memory that includes such peripheral details as the pattern of the snow on the side of the road, or the exact facial features of a person who walked past us?

When the injured musician recalls the pretty girl with the bright red lipstick whom he locked eyes with prior to the accident, his recall is apparently so dead-on that Shazi is able to use facial recognition to track her down. It\'s a hard swallow, this one.

There\'s no real clue in the episode\'s opening to suggest where this one is going. After the fatal accident with the cyclist, it\'s Rob, the caned-up driver, who instigates the cover-up. It\'s he who dreams up the plan to dump the man in the river and who insists Mia (Andrea Riseborough) add more rocks to the sleeping bag to make sure the body sinks. But, 15 years later, it\'s Mia who has turned into the monster.

Now a successful architect, with a nine-year-old son, a doting husband and an enviably ravishing house amid the Icelandic mountains, she\'ll do anything, it seems, to protect her cosy new existence, including throttling her former boyfriend. And, of course, that\'s just the start of it.

It\'s a clever subversion – that the character we thought we\'d be following in this, who would be the conscience of the episode, turns out to be its villain. It\'s Shazi we care for – we get to see her home life, we see her joke and laugh and we know she likes the \'Anyone Who Knows What Love Is\' song (the third airing in

for this Irma Thomas evergreen). So when she\'s finally killed (blessedly off-screen), it\'s a gut-wrenching, heart-tearing moment.

For so much of its running time, \'Crocodile\' feels like the first instalment of a new Nordic noir series, with Shazi as its likeable, dogged lead. When she\'s offed, it looks as though Mia will actually get away with it. But then, of course, she goes and murders Shazi\'s husband and – most cruelly – their baby daughter (with the horrible irony being that the child was actually born blind).

But then we\'re back to the problem of this Collaborator gizmo. Would a baby\'s visual memory really translate into pictures that are readable as evidence? And – more to the point – would a guinea pig\'s?

The final seconds of \'Crocodile\' might have been easier to take if the episode hadn\'t been so unremittingly brutal, if, tonally, it had been more black comedy than a bleak, humourless murder drama. It\'s an almost laughable punchline, that a guinea pig is the crucial witness to a murder, but \'Crocodile\' seems like the wrong episode to smile at.

Of course, it\'s highly likely the police trail would have ended up at Mia\'s door anyway. Shazi had spoken to the hotel about wanting to track down that particular guest, so it wouldn\'t have taken a Sarah Lund-like police mind to work out what Shazi\'s next moves were. And, of course, the police have \'memory dredgers\' of their own, possibly even more sophisticated than the curiously clunky, \'60s

There\'s much to admire in \'Crocodile\', not least the winningly sympathetic performance from Kiran Sonia Sawar as the doomed Shazi, but that final tonal misstep robs it of top plaudits.

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