Two college friends have a virtual affair with each other in the Season 5 premiere of the Netflix sci-fi series “Black Mirror.”

In the first — and most successful — of three episodes, “Striking Vipers,” Danny (Anthony Mackie) and Karl (Yahya Abdul Mateen II) are reunited at Danny’s birthday party. They haven’t seen each other in 11 years. Danny’s married to Theo (Nikki Beharie), his college sweetheart, and they have the whole suburban setup: house, backyard, kid. Karl is still on the market, with a gym-toned body, to appeal to millennial women.

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As a birthday party present, Karl gives Danny a copy of the video game they used to play in college, “Striking Vipers X.” The new version has a virtual reality add-on and Karl supplies the necessary software so they can play from separate locations. In creator Charlie Brooker’s fiendishly clever script, Danny and Karl choose as their game opponents Lance (Ludi Lin) and Roxette (Pom Klementieff), sexy martial artists.

With discs attached to their temples, Danny and Karl zone out on their respective couches while the combat between Lance and Roxette leads to a kiss at the end of the game, and through subsequent sessions, greater degrees of intimate contact, until it becomes clear that the two friends are coupling in the virtual world.

Mackie and Mateen deftly convey bewilderment and confusion as the nature of their friendship changes. Brooker expertly teases out the sexual tension between the two men while they never touch each other.

Brooker’s story explores the provocative ways the world we live in and those we escape to for entertainment intersect, overlap and threaten to supplant each other. Danny and Karl try to bring their affair into the real world, with surprising results — one that even poor, practical Theo can learn to live with.

The second episode, “Smithereens,” is an effectively dark satire on the perils of social media. A disaffected young man (a wonderful Andrew Scott, who plays the flirtatious priest on Season 2 of “Fleabag”) crashes into a car while checking a smartphone prompt, resulting in the death of his fiancee. Brooker nicely ratchets up the tension as Christopher (Scott) kidnaps an employee at Smithereen, the company that created the app that he blames for ruining his life. In negotiating the hostage’s release, the creator of the app (Topher Grace) is forced to speak like a person instead of relying on talking points provided by the app’s administrators.

The third — and most hyped and least successful — episode stars Miley Cyrus as Ashley O, a pop-star who falls into a coma engineered by her greedy manager. A robot version of Ashley too neatly comes to her rescue as Brooker resorts to lame broadcast network cliches — cue those police-car chases — to keep Cyrus in the limelight. Though Cyrus has some fun doing voiceovers for the robot, it’s a case of producer infatuation.