• by Les Luchter , Staff Writer, October 30, 2018

Don’t have time to watch “Black Mirror”? Simply don’t want to pay for Netflix?

Or are you a “Black Mirror” fan looking for something to bide the time until Season Five shows up?

Then check out “Glimpse,” another anthology series that explores the twists of near-future technology -- but in short-form, free content.

Co-produced by the Gunpowder & Sky studio’s Dust and media company Futurism, “Glimpse” has been debuting weekly episodes on Facebook Watch since mid-September. So far, seven installments are available, with the first season’s final episode set for this Thursday, November 1.

Unlike the usually dark “Black Mirror,” which can be downright depressing, “Glimpse” tends to be lighter and more optimistic, relying on “Twilight Zone”-like twist endings to wrap the quick stories up quickly.

My favorite, though, uses no such gimmick. The episode, “Sebastian Moller,” is instead a spoof of Netflix’s “Chef’s Table” whose secrets unfold slowly. Moller, played by Tony Cavalero of Nickelodeon’s “School of Rock” series, (pictured above) is a future master of “cellular gastronomy” whose celebrated dishes include “grilled dodo breast” and other results of “de-extinction.”

I also liked the past two week’s episodes a lot. Both plots involved virtual reality, with “Day 180” referring to the final session of an ongoing group of VR addicts undergoing withdrawal. “Analog Boy” is about a high school student who breaks his VR glasses, forcing him to go retro into a physical world. “Welcome to the past,” a street vendor says to him.

Also recommended: “Esperanto,” about a universal language translator, and “The Stork,” about how babies are destined to be delivered in the future.

However, two episodes — “Circuits,” about augmented tattoos, and “Sparky,” about “robotic pets” — ended too quickly, leaving me at a loss as to what had just happened.

I am eagerly looking forward to Thursday’s season finale, hoping it will be one of the better episodes.

All the shorts -- even the ones I wasn’t crazy about -- are well-produced and well-acted, and at a typical length of five minutes, well worth checking out for any sci-fi or speculative fiction fans.