Black Mirror: “Be Right Back “, The Loss Of The Loved One

Black Mirror is a British series whose episodes are completely independent from each other, even the actors of which are different. This isn’t an American Horror Story- style anthology series, but each episode feels like a mini movie, with completely different actors, characters, and storylines. The seasons do not follow any precise order and do not have the same number of episodes.

Black Mirror tends to use a critical tone in dealing with our use of new technology, through the presentation of dystopian futures or extreme situations.

Black Mirror : “Be right back”

The first episode of the second season of Black Mirror is titled “Be right back” (in French, “come back immediately”). In this episode, we meet a young couple made up of Martha and Ash. Ash is a man addicted to social media, and we immediately see how he posts his life on it and is totally addicted to it.

This addiction annoys Martha, because even when she talks to him or asks for help, he is still distracted by his smartphone and does not pay attention to her. This is a fairly realistic portrayal of how we use social networks and how sometimes, even if we are accompanied, we pay more attention to the mobile than to the person who is. with us.

At the start of the episode, Ash tells Martha that her mother, when her brother and father died, removed all the photos that were in the living room and kept them in the attic. Shortly after, Ash suffers a traffic accident and dies.

After Ash’s death, we see an apathetic Martha, who does not speak, who does not cry… During the funeral, a friend begins to tell her about a strange application that could help her to “cope” with the loss ; Martha reacts angrily to her friend’s words and plunges into denial. However, she ended up accepting her friend’s suggestion.

The app mentioned by her friend is able to “bring us” back to life as it tracks all of our social media data comprehensively, being able to reproduce the way we speak with incredible precision. Ash was addicted to social networks, so he is the perfect individual to save: the more information there is, the more accurate the reproduction of the way of expressing oneself will be.

Martha begins to communicate with “Ash” and is amazed to find that it is exactly as if she is communicating with her boyfriend. The app goes beyond just communicating and tells her that she can even reproduce her voice, so that they then start talking on the phone.

Losing a loved one is always difficult, it can be very hard to come to terms with it, and sometimes it is necessary to seek professional help. Martha denies death and, faced with this denial, arises the possibility of resuscitating Ash, which is why she agrees to use the app and enters a very risky spiral.

Mourning in Black Mirror : “Be right back”

Grieving is a slow and painful process that requires significant effort on our part, but it is necessary to face it and go through all of its phases in order to get out of it. Accepting that a loved one has passed away does not mean forgetting them, the people who are dear to us can live in our memory, but it is necessary to look to the future and to accept the loss in order to move on. before.

Martha has the opportunity to “not have to say goodbye,” to revive Ash and, in such an awkward moment, she accepts. It can be a little scary when we watch the episode; however, probably many of us would have succumbed to the temptation if the opportunity to postpone the moment to say goodbye had presented itself.

Martha closes in on herself and leaves the living aside, forgetting even that she had stayed with her sister. The key moment comes when Martha suffers an anxiety attack after accidentally breaking the phone she uses to talk to Ash. She feels here that she has lost him once again, that Ash has left her again. That’s when the app tells her she can do more.

This extra step is to buy a bionic doll that will assume Ash’s form, speak like Ash, and ultimately be an exact clone of Ash. However, this doll will remain a kind of robot, devoid of feelings and Martha will start to get bored; what at first seemed a good idea, now generates rejection in her.

We find out in the episode that Martha was pregnant and didn’t hear the news until after her boyfriend died, which is why it will be even more difficult for her to come to terms with her loss. The news of the pregnancy causes rejection and sadness at not being able to live the moment with Ash.

Ultimately, Martha will no longer put up with copying Ash and will eventually come to terms with the situation. Ash is dead and there is no way to go back, which is why Martha locks Ash’s copy in the attic just like Ash’s mother had done with the photos of her late husband. At the end of the episode, we see her a few years later with her daughter, who addresses Ash calling her by name and not dad as it is a copy of her father. He teaches like him, talks like him and looks like him, but is he really Ash?

Black Mirror and new technologies

The series mainly focuses on our use of new technology, but we wanted to focus on this episode as it is about the most human and the closest, and to deal with a rather particular situation. .

How do we use social networks? How safe are we on the Internet? The application was able to recreate Ash with exactitude, his way of speaking, his voice, his tastes… Even his physique: it reproduces his appearance on a good day, in the best of its versions because, as explained in the own copy of Ash, we put our best photos on social media.

Therefore, it is worth asking whether the image we give of ourselves on the Internet is a real image or an illusion. We only show what we want to see and, in social media, the competition to be the best at everything is quite palpable. In a way, every time we share something on social media, there will be a trace of it as long as the internet exists and, therefore, a part of us will subsist; social networks are, in a way, a step towards immortality.

The application knows everything about Ash, in other words, the information he shared was not really protected since a third-party application is able to know everything about him. If we think about the number of people who use social media every day, we realize that the information is endless and we don’t really know how protected it is.

When the copy of Ash is created, we see that he takes a cold bath in the dark, thereby giving us a clue that everything will not be perfect, that we will see some kind of monster like Frankenstein. This resurrection ultimately takes on a dark side that goes beyond overcoming the loss of a loved one as it is also about questioning ourselves about how and to what extent we are aware of the impact of social networks in our lives.