Black Mirror Christmas special: Jon Hamm episode will see people 'blocked' in real life, not just on Facebook

Facebook and Twitter bleeds into the physical world

(Channel 4)

Channel 4 has released plot details and pictures from Black Mirror's upcoming Christmas special, which will consist of a trio of "Yuletide techno-paranoia" stories.

Taking smartphones and social media to their inevitably grim conclusions has been a theme of several episodes of the drama to date, and one of the new strands will follow suit, seeing people "blocked" in real life just as you can on Facebook and Twitter.

The other two are a little harder to pin down.

Here are the synopses for all three:

"In a mysterious and remote snowy outpost, Matt (Jon Hamm) and Potter (Rafe Spall), share a Christmas meal together and swap creepy tales of their earlier lives in the outside world. Matt is a charismatic American trying to bring the reserved, secretive Potter out of his shell. Are both men who they appear to be?

"Along the way we see Jon Hamm offering an unusual form of romantic guidance to an inexperienced young man, watch Oona Chaplin thrust headlong into a nightmarish world of ‘smart’ gadgetry, and explore what might happen if you could 'block' people in real life, just as you can on Facebook or Twitter.

"All three stories are bound together into a suitably unsettling whole. Fans of eerie Christmas stories are in for a treat…"

Jon Hamm will star in each intertwined story of the 90-minute special, alongside Oona Chaplin and Rafe Spall.

One picture sees Hamm apparently in the future, talking to some sort of electronic egg, while another sees him looking beaten down in an older or else dystopian setting.

Charlie Brooker returns to write the drama, which promises to be "the most mind-bending episode yet".

Black Mirror airs on 16 December at 9pm on Channel 4.