Some reviewers had mixed feelings about the episode. Jane Simon of the Daily Mirror said that "White Bear" lacked the "instant emotional tug" of the series opener. She commented that, a third of the way through the episode, she had lost hope that it would conclude effectively, "[...] the acting was unbelievable, the script was riddled with horror-film cliches, the violence was a bit over the top [...]", but that by the end she was positively surprised. Joyner praised it as "stylistically ... breath-taking" with "intense action", but felt "the themes come across as particularly flat" and "hardly original". He was disappointed until the twist, and concludes that Brooker has "crafted an hour of television more bold and daring than I've seen in a long time". Jeffery said "this is Black Mirror as full-blooded horror" and that it never gets boring, while criticising the characters and the final sequence as "a little overlong and obvious". TheWrap staff was divided; while some found it has a good social critique, others considered it to be "least effective when it goes for horror". Although Parker compared the first 45 minutes to "a low-budget, low-quality version of 28 Days Later", full of "horror movie clichés", he realised that was "the whole point". He was positive to its societal criticism and wrote: "So the reason it all felt like a rubbish horror movie for 45 minutes is because that's what it was, just with a real person in the centre of it." It was ranked eleventh out of the thirteen episodes by Charles Bramesco of Vulture, who said its message is "lost beneath a simplistic twist that pulls a switcheroo and [it] fails to do much else".
