Now that Netflix has released the fourth season of everyone’s favorite sci-fi anthology series Black Mirror, it’s time to rank every bleak and disturbing episode from worst to best! Spoiler warning obviously, don’t read this unless you’re all caught up…
19. Metalhead (2017, season 4 episode 5)
The latest season has a pretty mixed bag of episodes, but this one unfortunately goes down as my least favorite of the series. It is no doubt gripping throughout, a black and white action short with almost no dialogue, but you expect more from a Black Mirror episode. This felt more like a stripped down proof of concept to pitch a full movie. The reveal of what Maxine Peake and the other survivors were searching for is indeed heartbreaking, but the lack of plot or big picture context makes it feel out of place with the rest of the show. It’s obviously a critique of what might one day happen if Boston Dynamics keeps ruthlessly kicking its robotic cows to the ground, but I kept waiting for at least an old news story or something to flesh out the world. The video game Horizon: Zero Dawn did an awesome job fully imagining a post apocalypse of tribes of people fighting these animal-like robots, slowly revealing how this all came to be. This gambled on skipping all the world building in favor of pure thrills. If this had been a stand alone Netflix movie fleshed out another hour, I would be way into it. But having it be a Black Mirror episode brings expectations of something much more complex: we are hoping for a meticulously crafted horror story that slowly (and dreadfully) unfolds before we can figure out the twist. While the special effects were great and Peake is amazing to watch, this fell pretty short of the show’s mind blowing standards.
18. Playtest (2016, season 3 ep. 2)
This one had the most potential to be straight up horror, but it never quite commits to terrifying you. Wyatt Russell (son of Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn) plays a dudebro American traveling through Europe to avoid dealing with his father’s Alzheimer’s back home. He needs money, agrees to be a test subject for a new virtual reality immersive video game, and things go off the rails from there. The problem is that it’s way too obvious he never actually leaves the playtest. The device of waking up from a dream only to realize it’s still a dream has been done to death in horror, and that’s essentially the same idea here, replacing dreams with VR. The first half is supposed to make us care about him and learn about his fears, but it feels too disconnected from the rest of the story. His relationship with the girl who gets him the job is too underdeveloped for us to really care. I was also just not a huge fan of Russel’s performance in this. He certainly comes off as American, but I didn’t feel as attached to him as I do with other episodes’ lead characters (his reactions to the tech and the jump scares in the game really took me out of it). It has a pretty brutal ending, but it’s almost too quick and severe to process. It felt like Brooker was concerned that the reveal that he was still inside VR after going home wasn’t enough, so he just kills him at the end for shock value. There’s some interesting ideas here, but I think they are better explored in other episodes.
17. Men Against Fire (2016, season 3 ep. 5)
The extremely challenging task Charlie Brooker has whenever he makes new Black Mirror episodes is that the audience is more and more aware of the formula. We know to immediately look for a twist, to try to see past whatever the main character thinks they are experiencing and guess the dark reality. This hurts some of the later episodes, especially this one. We know that a Black Mirror episode isn’t going to have a reality where there are suddenly monsters the army has to fight. So when Malachi Kirby and his fellow soldiers use their augmented reality displays, it becomes really obvious too early that things are not what they seem. This was originally at the bottom of my list, but then I remembered the ending to this one, after the twist was revealed, and how it really gave me the willies. Once Kirby realizes he’s been killing innocent people, Michael Kelly gives him a “choice”… live with the truth in a locked cell for the rest of your life, or have your memory wiped and happily return to the unknown mission of genocide. The horror is realizing this is no choice at all, we would all choose to have our memory wiped. This also reminded me of another character’s dilemma that melted my brain way back in 1999 in The Matrix (which itself would have made a hell of a Black Mirror episode). Joe Pantoliano’s Cypher makes a deal with the machines to have his memory wiped and get replugged back into the Matrix. “I know this steak doesn’t exist,” he says. “I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.”
16. The Waldo Moment (2013, season 2 ep. 3)
While this one started being hailed as prescient after Trump’s win, I still think it’s really underdeveloped and flat. Even Charlie Brooker himself admitted that he was disappointed with how it turned out, saying that it was “one episode that I didn’t really nail, didn’t get the stakes right.” The biggest problem for me, besides the low stakes, is that the episode can’t seem to decide who we are following: Jamie the bitter man child behind Waldo, or Gwendolyn, the driven Labour party candidate who ends up getting undeservedly screwed the most (and it’s hard to root for Jamie…a smug, emotionally immature white guy whose attack of conscious comes way too late after the damage to Gwendolyn is done). Still, the similarities with Waldo’s outsider appeal and Trump’s aren’t hard to see. Brooker was the only sane person I can remember who actually predicted a Trump win, and the phrase “this is like an episode of Black Mirror” really entered the public lexicon after Trump was elected. But knowing what we know now, a nihilistic foul-mouthed cartoon character placing second for one of the 650 seats in the House of Commons doesn’t really hold a candle to the reality of Trump. Waldo is only running to promote an Ali G style tv show, and the men behind his rise aren’t interested in pushing any political agenda. The men behind Trump are terrifying in their lack of compassion or logic. Our reality is in fact much worse than this episode, which kind of ruins it. As the years go on, we’ll see if this keeps happening with more and more episodes (hopefully not ha).
15. Crocodile (2017, season 4 ep. 3)
I’m all for a Black Mirror episode being bleak as hell, but even I think this one’s a bit much. I understand the necessity to the story to show us both Mia the accidental serial killer’s journey while also following Shazia the insurance investigator closing in with the memory scanner. But making Shazia a fleshed out character and then senselessly murdering her and her whole family is dark to the point of off-putting. As an audience member you feel a little betrayed and you check out. And despite Andrea Riseborough’s great performance, there’s no real way to pull off a character having to commit more and more murder to hide a murder without it all feeling rather absurd (like pitch black slapstick). This works in a Coen brothers movie, but that doesn’t seem to be the tone they’re going for here. The cinematography is awesome in this, and I love the exploration of all the tech (in true Black Mirror fashion, even the driverless pizza van isn’t just for futuristic set dressing, as it kicks off the whole investigation), but I just couldn’t get on board with where this episode goes. Still, the reveal at the end that it was all for naught, that all of those cold blooded murders weren’t enough to cover it all up (and that she didn’t even have to kill the kid cause he’s blind) because in the future a fucking guinea pig can remember your face is deliciously brutal.
14. White Christmas (2014, Christmas Special)
The special is really three different “mini episodes” strung together, and while there’s a lot of groundwork here for the world building of future episodes, none of them are quite strong enough to stand on their own. Jon Hamm is perfectly cast in the first section, as a dating guru who sees what you see and tells you what to do while you’re actually on the date. That part goes real dark real fast, and I wish it had dug deeper to be a full episode. Then we move on to Hamm’s real job, and we get introduced to the idea that your smart home is run by a digital clone of yours trapped in an Alexa “egg.” It’s definitely creepy the first time you watch (specifically the manipulation of time), but the horrifying realities of our digital copies get much more imaginative in later episodes. It kind of diminishes the impact of this one. And the final section, Rafe Spall’s confession to being responsible for the death of his father in law and his ex’s daughter, is mostly just really depressing (and there’s also been a better episode involving the “you are…NOT the father” reveal, too). It’s a little too obvious that Hamm isn’t to be trusted, but he does a great job throughout and really carries the episode.
13. White Bear (2013, season 2 ep. 2)
It’s so hard to know how much leeway to give this episode, given that its success depends entirely on the twist ending and post credits reveals. The majority of it is presented as a pretty straightforward (and heavy handed) post-apocalyptic survival tale about the slippery slope of reality tv voyeurism. A woman has to keep running for her life from masked killers, while several bystanders just film her plight on their phones. If this was the whole episode, it would rank lower than Metalhead. But Brooker gives us maybe the best twist in all of Black Mirror by revealing that this is all a new form of punishment for criminals, where park visitors get to watch helpless mind-wiped child killers get terrified day after day. And as we get more and more episodes where it’s all revealed to be a computer simulation, this one feels even more unique and original. But still, it’s not like this is Get Out and a second viewing blows your mind with all the carefully planted clues and double meanings. It’s mostly just a slasher short film that stalls until the big twist (and the voyeur stuff is still heavy handed after the twist).
12. Shut Up and Dance (2016, season 3 ep. 3)
Just like in White Bear, this episode makes you realize you’ve been tricked into rooting for the wrong person the whole time (and only Black Mirror could actually get you to regrettably side with internet trolls). This one does a much better job of first making you empathize with all of the “victims” of the trollface commands, and then forces to you actually think about just how much pain you’re comfortable seeing a pedophile experience. And when it’s all over, and you are feeling particularly nihilistic about everything, you suddenly remember the moment at the start of the episode where the main character gives a little girl her toy back, and you want to puke (White Bear doesn’t have anything like this. You at first interpret our main character to be a nice shy quiet teenager who’s been unfairly targeted, when he’s actually interested in talking to this little girl for perverse reasons). This is one of the only episodes set in present day, and it seems to have a very low opinion of mankind. Instead of saying “be careful what you wish for” with technology, it imagines a world where everyone is publicly doxed for their darkest transgressions. And it reminds us that fear, while easy to achieve (and entertaining to watch), will never be the proper tool to enforce morality.
11. Arkangel (2017, season 4 ep. 2)
Right away, you realize this has all the makings of a classic Black Mirror episode, which is why it’s so disappointing that the execution is off here. It takes current technology (pet tracking chips), and expands to putting them into children so parents can know exactly where they are. You get chills seeing it get implanted, but the scary part is you don’t even really blame the mom after seeing how awful it is when she loses her daughter for twenty minutes. The problem for me is that the tracking chip is made immediately irrelevant by the other big feature, that parents can see what their children see, and block out whatever they decide is inappropriate. This is all a metaphor for every parent’s noble but misguided attempt to shelter their children from ‘harmful’ ideas and images. The girl is exposed to violent movies and porn and ISIS videos the moment she hits middle school, just like every generation of kids has immediately encountered everything their parents fear for them when they become teenagers. The message isn’t anything terribly novel…the more overbearing you are, the more you’ll drive your kid right to what you’re hiding from them. Jodie Foster directed this pretty well, the acting is solid and there’s some cool transitions with the passing of time. But I couldn’t help but wonder that the plot might have unfolded the same without the tech…which is bad news for a Black Mirror episode. Still, the initial concept is enough to get this one almost to the top ten.
10. Nosedive (2016, season 3, ep. 1)
It’s easy to see why Netflix decided this would be their debut episode of Black Mirror. Not only does it look amazing (much more cinematic than previous installments), the concept is an instant classic, a world where people are all constantly rating each other with their phones. Bryce Dallas Howard gives an all time performance, perfectly cast as a desperate social climber with really bad luck. We immediately see through her fake happiness, and watch with horrified glee as things get more and more cringeworthy (you can barely look when she finally arrives at the wedding). If you’re reading this, there’s no way this episode didn’t speak to you. Many of us were probably mindlessly scrolling through Instagram while watching it (although you quickly stop checking your phone out of shame ha). The tone is lighter here, thanks to it being written by Parks and Rec co-creator Michael Shur and Rashida Jones (Brooker outlined the episode, but this is one of the only ones he didn’t fully write himself). It feels more like satire, allowing you to laugh at the absurdity instead of feeling the normal self-serious building dread. It’s fairly predictable in the way it unfolds, and the ending feels a little tacked on, but I do love the added twist that the only reason the bride invited her was because she was told having a maid of honor with a lower social score would make her look good. The leap between our reality and this future is much smaller than we’d like to admit. We already do all of this ranking, it’s just without augmented reality. What we wear, what we drive, our job, our house, our social circle, how many followers we have, who we can get to come to our wedding…everyone else is silently running the numbers in their head about the worth you’re presenting to society. This was happening long before smart phones, the technology is just making it easier to find more people to be jealous or disapproving of. Black Mirror is at its best when the leap is this small, and this is only this low because I prefer my episodes to be much darker.
9. Black Museum (2017, season 4 ep. 6)
While the first anthology episode White Christmas was tied together by having two characters swap life stories in a cabin, Brooker has much more fun this time around. He fully embraces the “spooky story” narrator employed by old shows like Tales from the Crypt or even Are You Afraid of the Dark? and fits in easter eggs from every previous episode (the Black Museum is really a Black Mirror Museum). The tone is a little jarring at first, having each section eagerly explained by a sociopathic huckster museum owner (perfectly played by Douglas Hodge), but this one really grew on me as it went on. The three stories are much creepier than the ones in White Christmas (interestingly enough, the first one about the doctor addicted to feeling his patient’s pain was based on an unpublished story written in the 80s by Penn Jillette of Penn and Teller fame) and the revenge twist at the end is definitely satisfying. Also the idea of a copy of your consciousness being stuck forever inside a teddy bear and only having two options to respond, yes with “monkey loves you” and no with “monkey needs a hug” goes from being absurd to nightmare fuel in no time. I also think this is a lot better than White Christmas because there is a deeper subtext, as this is the only one to really examine racism. Rolo Haynes (the curator) is clearly representing the awful history of white people profiting off of black pain (a history that is still very much continuing today with institutional racism funneling black men into the horrifying private prison industry). Black Mirror is usually thought of as a show about the dangers technology poses to humans, but Brooker has made sure to have it go both ways. He has focused again and again on the bleak future AI can also look forward to, showing digital copies of humans enslaved to run smart homes, or experience thousands of years of torturous isolation, or sit in an electric chair hundreds of times a day. Brooker looks at our racist history and doesn’t have to work hard to imagine how quickly humanity will justify having more rights than equally sentient technology.
8. Hang the DJ (2017, season 4 ep. 4)
The spiritual successor to San Junipero, this one is a welcome break from the rest of the darker episodes of the latest season. San Junipero’s twist is definitely better, and the gradual reveal of it causes you to be much more invested in that relationship, but you’re still very much rooting for Amy and Frank to end up together here. Brooker brilliantly plays off of our familiarity with the tropes of dystopian narratives like The Handmaid’s Tale or The Hunger Games, tricking us into thinking that this is a world where people are being forced to date whoever an algorithm tells them to until they find “the one.” You are told at the start of your first date how long you will be with the person…sometimes you only have 12 hours, sometimes years. And you have to go along with it without question. We know right away that something is off here, but we can’t put our finger on it. The set up works beautifully, causing us to root for them to break out of the oppressive system and tear it all down together. We assume that the other side of the wall will have some “The Village” Shyamalan reveal, that the rest of the world is carrying on as normal, or this is all entertainment for the rich. But the true reveal is so much better. We’ve been watching a simulation in a dating app, where our two characters meet a thousand different times, to rate their compatibility by seeing how often they decide to break out together. This all happens in a matter of seconds in the real world, and you can’t help but smile when you see the real life Frank and Amy look up from their phones and see each other (there’s something impossibly romantic about the fact that they have a whole history together that they don’t even know about). That smile fades though when you think about how unfair this all is to the simulations. They are put through years of bad dates, one night stands and unhealthy relationships, all to determine if their real life counterparts have any matches in a dive bar. It’s really the perfect bittersweet ending.
7. USS Callister (2017 season 4, ep. 1)
I might be biased as a Star Trek fan, but I think this was pretty easily the best episode of the new season. The uncharacteristic early reveal of what’s actually going on here is surprising at first, but it is a huge benefit to the story. So much happens in this one that it’s easy to forget we actually start out on Daly’s side, feeling sorry for the antisocial nerd who’s under appreciated. Then we see the horrifying reveal of how he vents online, abusing digital copies of everyone in his life. This is a tear down of not only tired male-centric adventure narratives, but the gross subculture of misogynist troll fans who jealously worship them. The plot somehow simultaneously flips every trope on its head and also works as a great episode of Star Trek. There are some brilliantly original ideas in this episode, and they are introduced as casually as Rick and Morty burns through its own genius sci-fi concepts. Digital clones hacking their way into the phone of their real world counterparts to get them to do what they want is amazing, as is the ending idea of a spaceship crew exploring the internet like it’s space (just that could be a whole show). And the cherry on top is all the carefully planted details involving Daly sealing his own fate. If he stopped feeling sorry for himself and had just finished the update in time, his co-workers wouldn’t be on vacation and would notice him missing immediately (there’s also the “do not disturb” notice he put on the door after getting the pizza and not tipping). The internet and online gaming and geek fandom is seemingly full of never-ending toxic masculinity…young men angry at the world for not giving them what they feel entitled to. Brooker calls them out for somehow not realizing they would be the villains in the stories they hold so dear.
6. The National Anthem (2011, season 1, ep. 1)
I’m gonna guess that this is the most divisive episode of Black Mirror. You either love it or you hate it, and you are usually assured to “just push past the first episode, it’s not like the rest of the show.” The present day setting, political satire and lack of any technological advancements certainly makes it feel like an outlier (btw, even though it’s barely six years old, it’s crazy how dated this episode already feels. No one is shown watching the “event” on their phone, they’re all glued to TVs). But I really do love this one, and it will always hold a special place as one of the most shocking things I’ve ever seen. There is obviously a message here about the dangers of public pressure and group think online…how bad it is that everyone must bend to the will of the insatiable thirst of Twitter. But that’s only part of it. This all only works because of how serious this episode takes the absurd premise. The nightmarish inevitably of what’s going to happen gradually fades from humorous to chilling. Right away everyone besides the PM is taking this gravely, and you and him both realize much too late that if it comes down to it, every single person (and that person’s freewill) is expendable if the government deems it necessary (to me the scariest part of this is the PM’s complete lack of agency…he is never in control, and everyone around him knows it and acts accordingly). What I love the most about this one is how you become part of the problem as you watch it. Just like every member of the seemingly heartless public in the episode, you keep nervously watching to see just what the hell they’re actually going to show. I’ve never seen something where the creator is actually daring you to turn off their show. Brooker points out how sick it is that you want to see if a man is going to have sex with a pig, while laughing knowing that you’ll stay till the end to find out (and he also makes you want to puke by revealing that it was all for nothing). Long live the pig episode.
5. Fifteen Million Merits (2011, season 1 ep. 2)
It makes sense that this was actually the first episode of Black Mirror written. It’s an important step for the show, but Brooker hadn’t perfected the style yet and it’s clear he’s still calibrating. Its focus is a little too broad, it’s heavy handed and set in much more of a digital dystopia than future episodes (connecting the dots between our world and the one onscreen is usually much less of a satirical leap). But the juxtaposition between this and The National Anthem really showed the potential of what this new anthology series could do. Brooker wrote this with his wife Konnie Huq, who had plenty of inspiration and material due to her experience hosting reality tv and singing talent contests in the UK. This episode bites off a lot (and it mostly succeeds), targeting things like our culture’s obsession with instant fame, the unhealthy focus on customizing video game characters instead of improving our own lives, body shaming and fitness cults, capitalism, addiction and reliance on touchscreen technology, and the patriarchy reducing a women’s worth to sexual objectification. Later Brooker would learn to only focus on a couple of these concerns per episode, but lumping all of it together into one extreme dystopia does help it really stand out in its visual style. You’d think the Wii avatars and Simon Cowell parody would feel dated now, but it sadly all still holds up. Another big reason this episode is so memorable is that Daniel Kaluuya is absolutely riveting in it. You knew six years ago it was only a matter of time before he got a breakout role like the one in Get Out. I’ve ranked slicker episodes below this one, but without it we wouldn’t have Black Mirror.
4. Hated in the Nation (2016, season 3, ep. 6)
Clocking in at an hour and a half, this is the longest episode and essentially a film. And it is a masterpiece. The only reason it’s not number one on my list is because I think Black Mirror is at its most “Black Mirror” when it’s much more personal and smaller in scope. This is instead a near-future crime drama (it’s essentially Brooker taking a crack at what his version of an episode of Luther would look like), and it slowly unfolds into one of the most shocking stories I’ve ever seen. Every great murder mystery epic starts small, a seemingly ordinary domestic dispute that leads our detectives to uncover a much bigger problem. I’ve just never seen the trope done on this scale…what starts out as one dead body ends up becoming almost 400,000 in the span of three days. Brooker somehow expertly weaves in artificial bees (evoking Hitchcock’s The Birds) and government surveillance into a story about the potential consequences of online hate. After watching this you never want to use a hashtag again, a device I’m sure many recent horror scripts have tried and failed to pull off. This whole concept could have easily been cheesy and terrible, but it is instead enthralling. I always thought Kelly Macdonald was criminally underused in Boardwalk Empire, and her performance here is nuanced and fantastic. She’s jaded but still hopeful, and her relationship with her tech-savvy trainee Blue (Faye Marsay, barely recognizable as the Waif in GoT) hits the same successful beats that Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt have in Seven (the added layer of having Blue be a red herring for much of the plot is a great touch, too). Like any good crime drama, this one keeps you guessing throughout until the jaw-dropping conclusion. The song that plays (Fall Into Me by Alev Lenz) as all of the bees are released for the final time is beautifully haunting. Brooker knows that he doesn’t need to show us the rest, the one sweeping shot of all the body bags in the hanger is enough. I’d love to see another episode like this with the characters returning, but I’m not sure it can be topped. #DeathTo
3. The Entire History of You (2011, season 1 ep. 3)
I imagine this is one of the first episodes people think of when they’re asked for their favorite. This really invented the perfect Black Mirror formula. It takes one of humanities biggest weaknesses (our faulty memory) and gives the technological solution we all think we’d want. And then it proceeds to show you how dark things could get, and by the end you don’t want the tech at all. It was surprisingly written by Jesse Armstrong, the creator of the cringe comedy Peep Show (this is the only episode Brooker doesn’t have any writing credit on). But unlike Nosedive (also written by comedy writers), it is never inviting you to laugh. Instead you are left to judge Liam (Toby Kebbell, an amazing actor who keeps getting cast in terrible movies), assuming that the lesson here is to “be careful what you wish for.” That this technology is just bringing out the worst in him, a drunk paranoid man over-analyzing things that aren’t there. And then when it’s revealed that he was right, and he finds out his kid isn’t his kid, the lesson seems to shift to “ignorance is bliss”…maybe remembering everything isn’t a good idea. The cast here is great (the new Dr. Who Jodie Whittaker, and Tom Cullen as the old fling who stirs all this up), and it could really work as just a stage play. There’s just enough world building here to make you queasy (adults using their childhood memories to sue their parents for ruining their confidence, the airport security looking through your memories to see if you’re a terrorist, and the idea of women having their memory devices forcibly removed and sold as porn on the black market), and it’s no surprise that Robert Downey Jr. optioned this back in 2013 in hopes of turning it into a movie. This one blew my mind when I first watched it six years ago, and it really set the tone for the rest of the series.
2. San Junipero (2016, season 3 episode 4)
I didn’t realize how intertwined the final two episodes on my list were until I started this ranking. Besides both being directed brilliantly by Owen Harris, they both deal with death, which is really the final frontier for all technological advancement (as I write this, Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos are probably texting about becoming cyborg vampires). The next episode deals with the grief of the living, while this follows the ones actually passing on. This was the first episode Brooker wrote after the Netflix deal, and he wanted to flip the expectations of Black Mirror. He ended up with an instantly iconic story that I’m sure many fans list as their favorite (this is also the only episode that won Brooker two Emmys). The first forty minutes are mysterious, leaving us racking our brains about what is possibly going on in this weird 80s California coastal town. Then the reveal comes, and you are pretty much sobbing through the final third. The love story between Kelly and Yorkie is certainly beautiful, but I’m also in love with the concept itself: science ends up actually delivering the heaven that religion promised (although like a good Atheist, Brooker can’t help but include the Quagmire, a bar on the edge of town where people will try anything to feel something new. To the non-religious, the idea of forever is its own type of hell). Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Mackenzie Davis are electric together in this (I’m a HUGE Gugu fan after seeing Beyond the Lights), and it was rightly praised for having an actual happy ending…there would have been rioting in the streets if the post credit scene of all the sparkling servers showed them suddenly catching fire. Everything about this episode is perfect, and having Heaven Is a Place On Earth come on at the end is literally magic. This will probably end up being Brooker’s magnum opus, but the next one wins it for me because it sadly will be the one we will all eventually relate to much more.
1. Be Right Back (2013, season 2 ep. 1)
More than any other episode of Black Mirror, this one sticks with me the most. Brooker got the idea for this after one of his friends died, and he was troubled by how wrong it felt to delete his number from his phone. Advancements in technology have been continually changing how we grieve the dead. We used to just have whatever physical objects they left behind…clothes, art, photographs, journals and letters. Most of this stuff would get donated or lost along the way before being passed down to the next generation. Then came recorded voicemail, then video, emails, old text threads, and now years and years of social media. We are leaving more and more behind when we die, much of it now being digital trails that are forever only a click away. Our Facebook pages become memorials. Brooker uses this episode to examine how healthy or unhealthy this could all be to the grieving process, while also pointing out how different our online voice can be from the person people actually knew in real life. The gradual progression of this is perfectly paced, and we cringe with dread as Hayley Atwell (who is incredible here) moves from texting, to calling, to inviting this physical thing into her home. This came out only a few months before Her, but I don’t remember making the connection between the two at all (probably because you mostly think of the android section of this). There are some true horror moments in this after she opens the box, and Domhnall Gleason makes your skin crawl as android Ash (just realized the name must be a nod to Alien). But mostly this episode is just really sad, as you can’t help but realize how hard it would be to not do the same thing if this was you. In the end, Atwell does what the generations before her did with those boxes of old belongings and pictures of lost loved ones, putting Ash in the attic. Some of us are lucky enough to not have this episode resonate yet, but as the decades go on we will all eventually be faced with the deeply personal decision of how to hold onto the digital versions of the ones we lose.
And that’s it (until season 5 eventually comes out). Thanks for reading! I’m sure you have different opinions on which episode spoke to you the most, lemme know in the comments!
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