*CAUTION: The following review contains plot spoilers for this episode of Black Mirror. If you have not yet seen it and wish to do so, then proceed with caution*
Technology is beginning to take over the world.
Every laptop, phone, tablet, music player and others are a further step to the closer intergration of human life into the machine, and innovations are piling up like horse lasagnes in a returns bin. The chances of the world's technology suddenly going all Skynet on us is remote, but there are still some worrying and plausible ways human life is changing in the face of all this technology.
The first series of Charlie Brooker's bleak technology films Black Mirror was especially notorious at providing some of the possibilities. Obviously the scenarios are unlikely to happen - no matter how unpopular David Cameron gets, it is unlikely he will be forced into a sexual relationship with a pig - but they did provide an intriguing satire on modern technology and worrying omens of what could happen.
The first two episodes were primarily satires on where we are now - the development of social media into a political and cultural force. While the third episode was the series' weakest, it also provided the most plausible and scary development - chips inserted into your skull that can record everything. Aside from the fact Robert Downey Jr is interested in making a feature length film out of the concept, the most bizarre thing is that similar innovations are being launched now.
One other more plausible possibility is the idea that our digital footprint - Facebook statuses, Tweets, e-mails, text messages, YouTube uploads, etc. - can be manipulated upon death into a programme that mimicks our personaility when we're gone. Episode one of the second series concerns this worryingly plausible future, and how it might work.
The main protagonist is an artist called Martha (Hayley Attwell), who moves in with her husband Ash (Domhall Gleeson) to his parent's old house. The first few minutes show the back-story of their relationship. He's constantly on his phone using social media, while she lightly chides him for heavily using the "thief".
They live in the near future, where said phone is thinner than a credit card - as are laptops and highly sophisticated graphics tablets - and can be revived after dropped on a sort of resuscitation pad, while couriers now use biometric scanners to record delivery, dashboards are replaced by video screens, pregnancy testing kits having dancing babies instead of a blue light, and so on.
A number of these innovations gradually reveal themselves over the course of the piece. But the storyline is thrown into motion when Ash dies in an accident returning their moving van, and her friend signs her up to "something that can help".
Originally she tries to ignore it, protesting it is sick, but then comes the revelation that Martha is pregnant - hence dancing babys on the testing kit - and this is the catalyst for her move into the unknown. Stage one sees Ash's sizeable digital footprint animated purely as simple messages, sort of like Twitter for exorcists.
Rather than stopping there, she is soon encouraged to embrace the second stage - a full digital recreation of voice to go with the initial text. It's a perfect tonal recreation of his voice that provides further character simple text doesn't provide. This was where a lot of the implications and staggering pondering questions begun to pile up.
However, Martha begun to live her life fine. Her boyfriend sounded like the way she imagined it and it goes along mimicking his views on scenery, his jokes, his opinions, even what he might think of her UltraSound scans. This techno-romance functioned right up until the moment she dropped her phone and thought she'd killed 'him'.
This panic encourages the full plunge into stage three, and then things get out of hand a little. At the start, somewhat unnoticed, is a news report that "synthetic flesh" is in full production. Sure enough a box of synthetic flesh parts are delivered to her house. As commanded she leaves it the bath in a mixture of water, salts and electrolytes, and overnight it reanimates itself into a physical copy of Ash using his digital app as a brain.
Something about this just seems like a step too far. It doesn't feel too far removed but it ultimately feels like trying to grow your own boyfriend wouldn't work, no matter how hard gossip sites Tweeted they'd go along with it if they could have options to grow their own copies of celebrities. However this step too far feeling is an opinion not confined to viewer alone, and what helps rescue this bit - after a while of living with her reproduced lover, Martha starts to feel her new creation is too perfect. A textbook attempt at boyfriend, even down to the robotic sex, just isn't a substitute for a flawed but genuine human love.
Things seemingly reach a spectacular end atop a cliff when Martha brings Ashbot 2.0 to the position and she tries to persuade him to jump while he tries to fight after at first seeming keen on doing it. It's a truly unsettling sequence that is pretty well crafted and it would've been a pretty good way to end just on her screaming at the organism to jump.
But it doesn't stop there. There's an awkward coda when a few years later, where Martha allows her daughter to spend some time with 'daddy', who now lives in the loft. The idea of this is certainly worrying purely for the idea of having a robot guard your kids, and having said child develop an attachment to their fake guardian. It's a worrying gambit of thought-provoking questions.
Brooker's script is pretty well formed, allowing a very well worked and intimate portrayal of love and death, and how technology is making it's presence felt in these matters. The principal actors are certainly expert at managing his vision, with Attwell doing fantastically well to carry the show and balance a delicate range of emotions in her circumstances, while Gleeson is a good counterpoint both as a real person and his consequent digital re-animation.
The rural setting is also very well selected and utilised. The isolation of the setting rams home Martha's loneliness and helps the story progress at a sharper pace than it might in a city, where moving on is a more straight-forward affair.
All in all this terrifying vision is fantastically well formed. It engages supremely well with the viewer in providing thought-provoking and troubling technological visions, while providing a very well acted romance - replete with sci-fi overtones.
4/5
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