Black Mirror: ‘I’ll Be Right Back’, The Loss Of A Loved One

Black Mirror is a British series whose episodes are completely independent of each other, not even the actors are the same. It is not an anthological series like American Horror Story, as each episode is like a short film, with completely different actors, characters and settings. The seasons also don’t follow any kind of order or have the same number of chapters.

Black Mirror tends to expose, in a critical tone, our use of new technologies. This is done by presenting dystopian futures or extreme situations.

Black Mirror:  ‘I’ll be back soon’

The first episode of the second season of Black Mirror is titled “Be right back” (in Portuguese, “I’ll be back soon”). In this episode, we meet a young couple formed by Martha and Ash. Ash is a man addicted to social media, and since the beginning we see how he publishes his life on the Internet.

This addiction affects Martha, because even when she talks to him or asks for help, he is too distracted by his smartphone and does not direct his attention to her. It is a very realistic picture of our use of social networks and how sometimes, even if we are accompanied, we pay more attention to the cell phone than to our partner.

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

After Ash’s death, we see Martha listless, not talking, not crying… During the funeral, a friend starts talking to her about a strange app that will help her “cope with” the loss. Martha, in a state of denial, reacts angrily. Until she finally accepts her friend’s suggestion.

The application mentioned by her friend is capable of “restoring” life, as it performs a complete tracking of all our data distributed on social networks, being able to reproduce our way of speaking with total precision. Ash was a social media addict, so he will be the perfect individual to retrieve the most information and get more precision in the reproduction of his words.

Martha starts talking to “Ash” and is amazed to see that he is exactly like her boyfriend. The app goes beyond chat and allows voice playback, so they start talking on the phone.

The loss of a loved one is always hard and it can be very difficult to accept. Sometimes it is necessary to ask for professional help. Martha denies death and, given this denial, the possibility of “resurrecting” Ash arises, so she accepts and enters into a very risky spiral.

Grief in Black Mirror

Grief is a slow and painful process that requires a lot of effort on our part, but it is necessary to face it and go through all its phases for a successful overcoming. Accepting that a loved one has died does not mean forgetting it, our loved ones can live in our memory, but it is necessary to look to the future and accept the loss in order to move forward.

Martha has the opportunity to “not say goodbye”, to revive Ash, and at such a delicate moment, she accepts. It can be a little scary when we see the episode; however, it is very likely that many of us would fall into temptation if the opportunity to postpone the farewell were presented to us.

Martha closes in on herself and leaves the living aside, even forgetting that she still had a sister. There is a key moment when Martha suffers an anxiety attack from accidentally breaking the phone used to talk to Ash. At that moment, she feels that she has lost him again, that Ash has left her again. That’s when the app offers you the possibility to go a step further.

This extra step consists of buying a bionic doll that will take the form of Ash, will speak as Ash and, in short, will be an exact clone of Ash. However, it is still a kind of robot, lacking in feelings, which makes Martha begin to tire and what at first seemed like a good idea, now produces the opposite.

During the episode, we discover that Martha is pregnant and that she learns the news after her boyfriend’s death, which will make it even more difficult to accept her loss. The news of the pregnancy brings her reluctance and sadness for not being able to live the moment together with Ash.

Finally, Ash’s copy will be too much for Martha and she will eventually face the situation. Ash is dead and there’s no turning back, so Martha locks the copy in the attic, just as Ash’s mother had done with photos of her deceased family members. At the end of the episode, we see her a few years later with her daughter. The girl addresses Ash calling him by name, not as Daddy, because he is a copy of her father. Thinks like him, talks like him, and is just like him, but is he really Ash?

Black Mirror and new technologies

The series focuses mainly on our use of new technologies, but I would like to highlight this episode for being the most human and close and for dealing with a very peculiar situation.

What use do we make of social media? How protected are we on the Internet? The app was able to accurately recreate Ash, his way of speaking, his voice, his tastes… Even his physical appearance, which reproduces his appearance on a good day, in the best of its versions, because, as explained by the copy of Ash, we all post our best photos on social media.

Therefore, it is possible to consider whether the image we show ourselves on the Internet is a real image or a mirage. We only show what we want to be seen and, on social media, the competition to be the best at everything is quite palpable. In a way, every time we share something on the network, that something will remain there until the end of the Internet and, as a consequence, a part of us; somehow, social media is a step towards immortality.

The app knows everything about Ash, meaning the information he shared wasn’t really protected, as an app foreign to him was able to know everything about him. If we think about the number of people who access social networks on a daily basis, we will realize that this information is infinite and that we really don’t know to what extent it can be protected.

The moment of creation of the copy takes place in a cold and dark bathtub, something that already anticipates that not everything will be perfect, that we are going to see a kind of monster, like Frankenstein. All this resurrection maintains, in the end, a dark side that goes beyond overcoming the loss of a loved one, because it also starts to question how and to what extent we are aware of the impact that social networks have on our lives.