“Black Mirror” Is Weird, and by Weird I Mean Dumb

I first heard about this show back when there were only three seasons of it. I heard of how brilliantly written and insightful it was, riddled with prophetic and haunting lessons about technology, and everyone who recommended the show made special mention of just how intense and dark it was, to the point where they couldn't stomach more than one or two episodes at a time. All very promising stuff to hear but I can't say the show lived up to any of those expectations, at least to me. I find it to be mostly over-the-top since it frequently seems to rely on shock value. And the technological questions, while somewhat insightful, seem more like a constant stream of what ifs that were impulsively brought up during the writing process and were immediately after slammed on the page without a second thought, always as an attempt to wow the viewers, often at the cost of narrative integrity. At the end of the day the show is just twists on top of twists on top of twists. I suppose in a way such a thing could be a good attribute but I don't think it is here. There isn't much room for the story and the characters to breathe, which means that most of them end up like self-inserts of whatever the writers want at any given point. And at every other turn the script just comes to life, not organically, not in the sense of a character embodying his or her own perspective, but simply in the sense of being a mere vehicle for the message of the screenwriters, which is often times lacking.

I could go on but I'd probably have to watch the whole thing again, something which I definitely don't intend to do. So instead I'll just focus on a specific episode, and that is the finale of season one, titled The Entire History of You.

The episode opens with Liam, a young husband and father, being interviewed by three top bosses at a law firm. The interview seems to go more or less in his favor and, in typical Black Mirror style, the fine ethical questions are finely addressed by the evil characters stating they are evil, and the protagonist then tries to counter them but ultimately submits... Liam then takes a cab and uses a strange device that allows him to view his own memories through a kind of movie library in his brain. That's the gimmick for this episode, which is actually a pretty cool idea. Not only are people in this alternate universe able to rewatch their memories as many times as they want, whenever they want, but they are also able to upload them to any screen, thus sharing them with anyone else. In fact, Liam then takes a flight, and the way he boards the plane appears to be by proving his identity through a memory upload. This brings up some neat ideas about memory continuity and identity theft that would have been way better than the direction the episode took.

But alas, Liam goes to meet his wife Ffion who's at a friend's house for a dinner party. Liam is nervous because of the meeting and because he doesn't get along very well with those people who seem to be his wife's friends more than his. Not to mention that as he arrives he sees his wife being very friendly with a guy named Jonas, a guy who proves himself to be nice and easygoing, although perhaps a bit of a pretentious and extroverted lady's man. All of that stuff put together results in a very awkward party for Liam. And then, during dinner, everyone talks about the memory device gimmick of the episode, explicitly alluding to the theft of it in the form of a very obvious self-insert character named Hallam. This seems to be a world where every bit of people's memories is stored within a physical chip, a chip that can be removed and used for all kinds of nefarious goals. It is quite the scary idea, especially coupled with the fact that memory can be quite unreliable, even more so when malleable and subject to hackers as seen, for example, in the brilliant 1995 film Ghost in the Shell.

But all that talk over dinner is just the writers flexing, they don't do anything with the questions they brought up... What happens instead is that Liam becomes increasingly suspicious of his wife's relationship with Jonas. At first it was just little details like how happy she looked at the party before Liam arrived, or how much she laughed at Jonas' lame jokes, but Liam becomes more and more obsessed with it all. Eventually, and with the aid of the memory device, he finds holes in his wife's story and keeps pressing her, straining his marriage even further than it apparently already is. That's another weird thing, by the way. We get no indication that their marriage is on the rocks until the story wants their marriage to be on the rocks... And over the course of the episode, Ffion does admit she did have a fling with Jonas but that it was very brief, then she is lawyered into admitting it wasn't that brief, and so on.

Liam starts to drink a lot, becoming more aggressive and more obsessive. So the direction the episode seems to be taking us on is this idea that, because our natural memory can be so unreliable, we'd end up fully relying on this technological enhancement for all of our understanding of the world. However, because of our obsessive mentality, and perhaps because of a disconnect between our perception of reality and social cues versus an actual recording, our understanding of reality will become warped to the point where we can't see what actually happened, even if we are looking at what actually happened. What the episode teaches us is that this technology would make us go insane with a kind of constant Kuleshov effect. Or so I thought...

Liam drives to Jonas' house and confronts him. After becoming quite violent, Liam forces Jonas to reveal all the memories he has of Ffion and subsequently delete them. That is another cool idea they missed out on, this idea that, for good or bad, as long as a person has memories of you, they will never forget you, they will always have your intimacy and your privacy, to keep or to share. But whatever... Then at the beginning of part four, because the episode is pretentiously divided into four parts, we see Liam has crashed his car and appears to be sobering up. He rewatches the memory of forcing Jonas to share his memories of Ffion, and then notices a little detail – he discovers a memory Jonas had of being in bed with Ffion, a bed with a distinct painting over it... Liam comes home, confronts Ffion and, lo and behold, the painting is the one over their marriage bed. But not only that, due to the timeline of the affair, it becomes clear that Liam's daughter isn't his.

At first Ffion tries to defend herself, by lying of course. Apparently the affair happened at a time when she and Liam were separated because of someone named Dan... Who in the goddamn is Dan?... Whatever yet again... In response, Liam notes that the separation was only four days long. Ffion says the daughter couldn't be Jonas' because they used protection... but if they did then she could show it to Liam on the memory device, or if she can't show it because she deleted them then there would be a gap in the timeline... Ffion is cornered.

Liam is quite the detective then, he's a real Sherlock Holmes, which isn't great praise considering he seems to be the only guy in this world who uses the memory device tech to his advantage. Nobody else thinks to delete incriminating memories, nobody else thinks to be more private about their own device, and the makers of the technology didn't even create a privacy and protection system because they're all evil I guess. Oh, and presumably Ffion didn't delete the memories of Jonas because she would still review them whilst in bed with her husband... If Liam is meant to be the bad guy, then the episode does a horrible job at depicting it.

So how does the episode end? Ffion has left the home. Liam then wanders the house almost aimlessly but he's in fact reliving tiny bits of nice memories, memories of when his house was a home, when he and his wife were happy, living in comfort and raising their daughter together. But it's all built on a lie... Accepting that, Liam goes to the bathroom, takes a razor and begins to remove the chip in his head, a process which, by the way, was previously described by Hallam as total agony but that is now more like shaving fresh stubble with a dull blade.

That's the whole story and, I dunno about you but it seems quite dumb to me. The real twist should be that Ffion wasn't unfaithful at all and that the daughter was in fact Liam's, but that, due to his obsession with reviewing memories, he'd be constantly finding new details in his own past, he'd be hunting ghosts until his grasp on reality would be totally gone. The episode should end with a reveal of what really happened and none of it would match Liam's investigations. Jonas should have been revealed to be a friend to both Liam and Ffion, the awkwardness at the dinner party should have been revealed to be a result of Liam's anxiety always making him assume the worst from people, and so on.

But nope. Instead what we get is Liam being right about everything, all of his suspicions were confirmed. So what's the lesson here? This technology is bad because it allows us to discover the truth about things? This technology is bad because Liam was better off before he knew anything? Ignorance is bliss? Seems pretty weird to me... I guess if this show had been made a few decades ago they'd have an episode about how the technology of DNA testing is bad because it allows us to discover the real murder and then we have to go through the hassle of releasing a wrongly imprisoned man from jail.

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