Meanwhile, Shazia (Kiran Sonia Sawar) is an insurance investigator who uses a "Recaller" that can project people's visual memories onto a screen.

The pedestrian is visited by Shazia (Kiran Sonia Sawar), an insurance investigator who uses a "Recaller" to view his memories, as best as he can picture them, on a screen.

In each case Shazia makes them smell beer from the nearby brewery and replays a song that played in a passing car to strengthen their memories.

As Mia exits, having removed her mask, she sees the couple's baby son babbling in front of her and kills him so as not to leave a witness.

Officers then quietly arrive at the ending of Mia's son's school production of Bugsy Malone, where she is in the audience, crying in silence.

Andrea Riseborough read the script to audition for the insurance investigator, who was later renamed Shazia and played by Kiran Sonia Sawar.

[7] The episode ends with Mia killing Shazia's son, who turns out to be blind, and her murder is witnessed by a guinea pig.

Mia then watches her son in a stage adaptation of the 1976 musical film Bugsy Malone, which starred Jodie Foster—the director of the preceding episode "Arkangel".

Production designer Joel Collins compares it to a slide viewer, contrasting with the thin screens of contemporary devices.

[10] Hillcoat commented that the "cruel inescapable logic" of Mia's actions were suited for Icelandic "strange, vast and primeval landscapes".

Snow needed to be continually brushed and special effects teams used heaters and hoses on important areas in frame.

Hillcoat opined that Mia has ambition as a "deep inner flaw", whereas Jones thought her actions was a "logical inevitability" of her initially protecting her friend Rob.

[17][18] David Sims of The Atlantic additionally identified elements of psychological thriller, and Charles Bramesco of Vulture found "a familiar series of law-and-order beats".

[21] Harley and The Guardian's Lanre Bakare both found it one of the bleakest episodes of Black Mirror, and Paste's Jacob Oller wrote that there was an "unrelenting pessimism at the heart of the story".

[21][22][23] Mia's home can be seen to reflect her character: it is larger than it appears, suggesting secrecy, and its numerous windows contrast with the heavy stone and concrete used in construction.

[24] Louisa Mellor of Den of Geek found Mia to be "traumatised by her actions but ... stuck on a murderous path from which she can't turn back".

[25] Prior to her killing spree, Bramesco found that Mia was "trying her best to be a dutiful mother and wife while pursuing excellence as an architecture expert".

[20] Writing for The Verge, Laura Hudson viewed that Mia "benefits from the presumption of innocence" as a white woman, and that she is "effective" as "an unlikely killer".

Hudson noted that most of Mia's victims are people of colour and drew comparisons to Get Out (2017), a horror film which she said "positioned white femininity as the canny, quiet heart of its violence".

Club, saw an ambiguity over whether Mia's grief was insincere, suggesting that it could be "all for show" or because "no matter how awful she feels, she keeps pushing forward".

[26] Kevin P. Sullivan of Entertainment Weekly saw the technology in the episode as "the means to another end and a different message entirely", though Hudson wrote that it was "hard to identify a takeaway".

Hudson said it was "an obvious proxy for the increasingly invasive ways our lives are surveilled, from cameras to face-recognition to data theft".

[20] In relation to the technology, the "grain" in "The Entire History of You" records one's vision and hearing exactly, whereas in "Crocodile" the Recaller is dependent on imperfect recollections.

[21] In "Crocodile", the song "Anyone Who Knows What Love Is (Will Understand)" plays—it became a recurring feature of Black Mirror after Abi sang it in "Fifteen Million Merits".

The talent show Hot Shots and pornography channel WraithBabes, two other features of "Fifteen Million Merits", are also mentioned in "Crocodile".

Other "Easter egg" references to Black Mirror instalments include the appearance of UKN, a news channel from "The National Anthem", and the pizza company Fence's, which also features in "USS Callister".

[34][35][36] The episode received mixed critical reception, with consensus that the technological themes could have been explored further and that the ending was gratuitously dark, but that the characters were well-acted and the setting was aesthetically pleasing.

[18] Critics mostly found the bleakness to be unjustified: Vulture's Jen Chaney wrote that it was "filled with so much brutal, senseless violence", comparing it unfavourably to the episode "Black Museum".

[20][22] Hudson said that the guinea pig being used to catch Mia "makes no sense, even within the episode's techno-mythos", though Mellor found this twist funny.

[21] In contrast, The Independent's Jacob Stolworthy saw her as "perhaps the most unlikeable creation to have featured in Black Mirror" to that point, and it was "unclear" whether that was intentional.