100 Favorite Shows: #58 — Black Mirror
“Lunatic with production values. That’s the worst kind.”
It might not seem like Black Mirror has been around for over nine years already, but the British sci-fi anthology series has been speaking to our current moment since December 2011. Along the way, the show (which is run by Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones) has released twenty-two episodes over five seasons, as well as one interactive film, Bandersnatch. In addition, to creating Black Mirror, Brooker has also written or co-written on all but two of the episodes (Jesse Armstrong’s “The Entire History of You” and Rashida Jones and Michael Schur’s “Nosedive” excepted) and moved the series from Channel 4 to Netflix in the interim between 2014 and 2016. Each episode grapples with various modern themes, but tends to stick to one tone (bleak) with a few exceptions, and they’re all anchored in subjects of technology-inflicted dystopias. For now, a sixth season is on hold, as Brooker thinks the world is plenty dark enough. A frightening sentiment regarding a show entitled Black Mirror, but an apt one all the same.
(There are spoilers for Black Mirror in this essay. Not all the episodes, but enough that you might want to avoid it anyway, if you’re opposed to that sort of thing. There’s also spoilers for The Good Place in here.)
Many have compared Black Mirror to The Twilight Zone since its debut on the British airwaves (back when it was a super underground, Fight Club-esque televison secret for Americans), but aside from being a sci-fi anthology series with a moral undercurrent, there is one crucial element that sets the two series apart from one another. The Twilight Zone takes place in a different dimension where the laws of reality don’t apply to the figures experiencing them. Black Mirror, however, exists in our world, our Earth. It’s happening right here at home. Maybe it’s occasionally set in a slightly distant future, but Black Mirror never pretends that society’s greatest plights are present anywhere except on our home planet.
Sometimes, these themes are rooted in shocking hypocrisy (“The National Anthem,” “Shut Up and Dance”), careless disregard for fellow humans (“USS Callister,” “White Christmas”), and helpless dystopias (“15 Million Merits,” “Nosedive”). At times, Black Mirror even dabbled with the idea of a Black Multiverse in “Black Museum,” when it was implied that every installment of the series (many of which have developed a shorthand that even The Twilight Zone struggled to achieve) existed in the same world. But Brooker’s writing was always at its best when it considered the technology as a potential replacement for humanity and what sets us apart from other species.
Most of the time, this subject is portrayed negatively, as in my personal favorite, “Be Right Back,” the story of how Martha (Hayley Atwell) grieves the vehicular death of her boyfriend, Ash (Domhnall Gleeson). It wasn’t enough that she lost her love, but it’s revealed shortly thereafter that, on top of it, Martha is also pregnant with their baby. At its core, “Be Right Back” is a moving story about loss and the impossibility for some to move on from their grief, but like all great sci-fi, it introduces plenty of thought-provoking technological developments as a mechanism for conveying Brooker’s crowning theme.
Initially, technology is introduced in “Be Right Back” as a distraction that has only sowed more disconnect between friends and lovers. “You keep vanishing down there,” Martha observes to Ash, remarking on his proclivity for ignoring her in favor of staring at his cell phone. He obsesses over the next great social media post that will either make people laugh or garner some likes, but as soon as he finds a good one, he’s right back to searching for the next. In so doing, he misses the laughs right in front of him. (He also misses the point of the Grand Canyon, which is not a “big gap.”) Ash ignores Martha’s requests for help opening doors in rain and holding hot coffees, yes, but he also ignores the bits she attempts to joke around with him over, like eating dinner from a shoe, rather than a bowl.
Instead of engaging with Martha, Ash grunts and returns to his screen. Only when she actively forces him to put his phone away into his pocket or the glovebox does he show the flashes of what Martha must have seen in him initially (when they debate the Bee Gees’ quality after singing along to Yvonne Elliman’s “If I Can’t Have You,” which the Brothers Gibb would cover).
At first, Ash’s inability to place his phone out of reach is seen as a potential divide that could split his relationship with Martha apart. When he’s dead just a few scenes later, though, it’s evident that Ash’s heavy social media usage was introduced for different purposes in “Be Right Back.” It’s the catalyst for Martha recreating Ash, at first through a texting app and then through a vocal replication service and, finally, a synthetic, Shelleyan robot doll that is meant to be a technological clone of Ash. The only reason it’s able to exist is because the A.I. foundation computed all of Ash’s virtual correspondence and imagery.
It’s unlikely that a Martha robot would be able to exist as near to the real thing as Ash’s robot does. She stares at screens, as well (her job consists of designing on a futuristic computer while the outdoor world stares at her through a nearby window), but when she stretches, it’s clear that she’s not comfortable doing so, like Ash (whose death is even brought about by an automated car). Furthermore, Martha is reluctant to partake in a service that claims to be capable of recreating Ash, but when Sarah (Sinead Matthews) insists that it assisted her in her own grief, Martha reluctantly becomes a medium and opens a communication channel with the dead.
At first, Martha promises a one-and-done conversation with the “almost creepy” version of Ash, but her fragility is ultimately compromised by the desperation she feels in recreating even a fraction of her love with Ash. After a while, she takes Ash’s cloud-based voice with her everywhere. They go on a hike together, they lay in bed together, they receive an ultrasound together. But it doesn’t take much for Martha’s fragility to snap back and overtake her pretensions of togetherness. When she drops her cell phone (which just has incredible battery health, by the way) at the OB/GYN’s office, she immediately curses and blames herself, as if she’s killed Ash all over again. “Shit, shit, shit,” Martha mutters while the rest of the waiting room looks on in concern. The shattering of the cell phone against the floor equates to Martha’s own heart and the closer she feels she comes to repairing it, the more she increases her chances of shattering her spirit all over again.
Ultimately, the OB/GYN panic attack is the crucial red flag missed by Martha on her downward slope to postponing her movement through the stages of grief. The intensely emotional reaction she experiences to a shattered cell phone should have been a signifier that a fake Ash was no replacement for her true love, but she orders a recreation of him anyway. Inevitably, though, Martha regrets the decision when robo-Ash is unable to recall the elements of the real Ash’s personal life.
He doesn’t remember what it means to “throw a jeb” or to protest, rather than obey, a command. He doesn’t even have a mole on his left shoulder blade. Texting with a bot or listening to a text-to-voice service isn’t the same as forging a genuine bond with another human being. Not one version of the Ash Martha tries to recreate is like the one she knew at all and it proves more harmful than helpful with her grief. She learns that what she thinks she wants the most (Ash at any costs) is not actually the solution to her overwhelming sense of loss. (Kind of like when Huey, Dewey, and Louie realized they didn’t want Christmas to be every day.)
After all, there’s no app to download that can wash away grief because the one thing technology will never be able to do is replace the core emotionality of humans. The human brain is too complex to be recreated in a lab and even if there’s one great day of conversation when it feels like tech has managed to make the leap, that’s only one day. Attempting to recreate that conversation is as much a folly as attempting to recreate a deceased loved one. Not every great day can exist in perpetuity. What it means to be human is to exist as we’re meant to: with sadness and joy, grief and new life. A technology company will never be able to strike a balance in an artificial human because even natural humans don’t always strike it the right way.
We’re reminded of these sentiments throughout “Be Right Back” as the private, intimate moments are the ones that divide robo-Ash and Martha, because they’re the one thing that Ash never dared to share on social media. (When the pair have sex, the score is pervasively melancholy and the camera focuses slowly on Martha’s experience in the bedroom, isolating her loneliness even further.) “You’re just a few ripples of you. There’s no history to you. You’re just a performance of stuff that he performed without thinking,” Martha wails at the A.I. when she realizes that it’s never going to be enough to heal her wounds because she can’t accept that they’re permanent. The downfall begins when Martha’s sister, Naomi (Claire Keelan), remarks that she’s happy Martha’s moving on after intuiting that she had another man in the house (though, she didn’t guess it was a falsified Ash) and Martha realizes that A.I. Ash is not the real Ash she tried to convince herself he was. He’s new. Technology is supposed to love the new, but for humans, there’s hardly any substitute.
Ultimately, Martha fails to convince Ash to jump over the lover’s leap she brings him to in an effort to end this prolonged suffering. He begins to simulate human tears and beg for his life (in a manner decidedly more tragic than Janet doing the same on The Good Place) and her scream rips through the shackles of her lungs, showing the world that her grief is something she’ll live with forever. Both in her heart and in the attic, where the fake Ash lives years later, when his not-his daughter (Indira Ainger) retreats to him with birthday cake. About five years have passed, but catharsis will never come.
The concept of technology as a means for replicating the human experience is dealt with much greater positivity and optimism in one of the series’ most acclaimed installments, “San Junipero.” The fourth episode of season three features Black Mirror’s first ever lesbian couple, Kelly (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and Yorkie (Mackenzie Davis), who meet each other at a nightclub in San Junipero, a simulated community designed for the elderly to slip into an unconscious state (while attached to technological stimulants) and relive (or live for the first time) experiences of their youth. It’s a concept that seems rife for tragedy (especially considering the series’ tone), but it ultimately becomes the most uplifting installment in the entire Black Mirror canon.
How grand it was to have hope for once in this show! (It’s even reflected in the vibrancy of the sunsets and dance floor attire, contrasted with the somber hues of most Black Mirror arcs.) And how remarkable that it was achieved by way of the same theme as the oppressive “Be Right Back”: technology as a way to recreate human experiences. In “Be Right Back,” it’s shown to be impossible, but in “San Junipero,” the technology does have its downside (it’s invented after the deaths of some beloved family members) and it’s still upheld as a bastion of joy. It also helps that “Be Right Back” strives to replicate human behavior, while “San Junipero” merely provides a setting for it to exist in perpetuity.
For Kelly and Yorkie, their personal San Junipero manifests as a beach town in the 1980s. Anyone embracing the simulation technology can be considered profoundly nostalgic (the entire concept is essentially nostalgia therapy for the elderly who know they’re running out of time to look back on), to begin with. But the technology itself works for the benefit of users, as it strives only to return them back to moments of peak joy in their lives. Even Yorkie’s recreated apartment in San Junipero reminds her of where she grew up, in her physical reality. It’s all an effort designed, not only to maintain immortality, but to ensure that only the love and excitement of youth will carry on into the afterlife.
That is essentially what the San Junipero simulation exists as — it’s humans inventing afterlife on Earth. Belinda Carlisle’s delightful pop anthem, “Heaven Is a Place on Earth” speaks to the sentiment expertly. The lyrics are almost too on-the-nose.
When I feel alone, I reach for you
And you bring me home
When I’m lost at sea I hear your voice
And it carries me
In this world we’re just beginning
To understand the miracle of living
Baby, I was afraid before
But I’m not afraid anymore
Ooh, baby, do you know what that’s worth?
Ooh, heaven is a place on earth.
They say in heaven love comes first
We’ll make heaven a place on earth
Ooh, heaven is a place on earth
Right when we finally start to understand what it means to love and to be alive and how magical it all is, we’re forced to follow along as helpless passengers to our own death. But by inventing a way for the mind to persist past death (literally, a fabrication of a new afterlife, or, heaven), we can take our emotional intelligence as it shapes the way we view our lives and our places in the universe and we can lift up the people we love with them, so long as they choose to stay in the simulation with us.
After all, it’s not enough to be immortal. I reckon most people would choose Juan Ponce de León’s Fountain of Youth over a magical immortality pill. What good is being alive if we’re sluggish and achey all the time? I always wondered if — as an alternative to heaven — the afterlife would just be a way for us to relive the best days of our lives on a perpetual loop, without realizing that we were stuck like Phil Connors. “San Junipero” somewhat relates to this idea, but transforms it slightly, instead providing an idyllic landscape for lovers who want to keep creating new favorite days for the rest of their time in a simulated heaven.
The bodies Yorkie and Kelly inhabit in their simulation differ from the ones that brought them to the radical science equipment in the first place. For as much as we like to say that love comes from the heart, the cliché is not scientifically accurate. Love actually comes from the mind, which has the emotional capacity to feel. By finding a way to carry the mind on after the body succumbs to morality, “San Junipero” becomes a fairy tale with a heavy modern influence of technology and 1980s nostalgia. Across these sci-fi concepts, period settings, and time jumps to the future, the love between Kelly and Yorkie remains transcendent. Like Christopher Nolan’s core philosophy in Interstellar, love is not only capable of transcending time, but of consciousness, as well. It’s a corny idea, but then again, so is Carlisle’s song. It’s better to just let go, dance, and go with it. Rationalization is never worth it during matters of love.
Part of the ability to “go with it” requires the audience to accept and cherish the insane, complementary chemistry between Davis and Mbatha-Raw, both of whom are giving what are probably the best performances in the entirety of Black Mirror. For Yorkie, Kelly exists as some manifestation of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, capable of shedding Yorkie’s shell away from her shyness and “making it easy” for her to understand her own sexuality. Despite the trope Kelly initially embodies, she still manages to become so much more, partially through Brooker’s writing, but also through Mbatha-Raw’s deeply human performance.
From this character understanding, it seems like Kelly would be the one who needs to convince Yorkie to join her in the simulation after they die, but in reality, it’s the reverse. Yorkie, despite her own identity crises that revolve around the myriad styles of ’80s music and the implication of Ally Sheedy’s character in The Breakfast Club, is all-in on the idea of an eternal happily ever after. It’s Kelly who is more reluctant. She’s afraid of missing her daughter, of falling into the rut of a boring romance, of trying to make sense of forever. Ultimately, love is the only quality capable of quelling these qualms and Kelly relents, but it’s a testament to Mbatha-Raw’s and Davis’ dynamite turns as the subjects of Black Mirror’s loftiest love story.
In just sixty minutes, the actors are tasked with not only depicting an entire lifetime of love and nostalgia-worthy experiences. But they’re also appointed the goal of showing these lives as being rooted in different approaches, while still being similar enough to result in a couple believable enough to spend eternity with. It’s no easy task, but there is not a single frame of “San Junipero” that makes the audience root for anything except a storybook conclusion. (A risky endeavor while watching Black Mirror.)
But yes, “San Junipero” does eventually possess a rare happy ending in the series. Even as a coffin is lowered into the ground and a tombstone for one of our protagonists is revealed, the ending is still much sweeter than it is bitter. After all, it’s hard not to smile when love conquers death and Belinda Carlisle returns to croon over the episode’s ending shots, interspersed with some credits for the episode.
Revelations that come from endings like these are always a lot of fun on Black Mirror. They’re almost as fun as the newfound understandings of stories that manifest when the twist of a story is revealed or when people on Twitter realize that the “black mirror” the title refers to is actually the blank screen of an iPhone. (Whoa, dude! That’s trippy AF!) Most of the time, these revelations pertain to the world that is fearful of technology and the dystopia unfolding right under our nodes. At the end of the day (and our lives), we have the ability to harness technology for the power of good in this world. We know this much is true and we’ve seen it in action as environmental and medical sciences, among others, have improved with progress. But we’re always going to be at our best when we’re just connecting naturally with human beings. That’s one of the biggest reasons why the COVID-19 pandemic gave me such hope in 2020. The fact that we struggled to persevere during it, even when we’re more virtually connected than we’ve ever been, is a sign enough that technology will never replace love and friendship, kindness and feeling. No matter what we invent, heaven’s always going to be a place on Earth.
