Black Mirror is a British series whose episodes are totally independent of each other, even the actors are not the same. This is not an anthology series like American Horror Story, because each episode is like a short film, with completely different actors, characters and characters. Seasons also do not follow any order or have the same number of chapters.
Black Mirror tends to expose, in a critical tone, our use of new technologies, which is done by presenting future dystopian or extreme situations.
- The first episode of the second season of Black Mirror is titled?Again? (in Portuguese.
- “Will I be back soon?”).
- In this episode.
- We meet a young couple made up of Martha and Ash.
- Ash is a man addicted to social media.
- And from the beginning you can see how he posts his life on the Internet.
This addiction affects Martha, because even when she speaks to him or asks for help, he gets very distracted with his smartphone and does not direct his attention to her, it is a very realistic picture of how we use social media and how sometimes, even if we are accompanied, we pay more attention to the mobile phone than to our partner.
At the beginning of the episode, Ash tells Martha that when her brother and father died, her mother took all the photos from the room and kept them in the attic. A short time later, Ash suffered a car accident and died.
After Ash’s death, we see Martha apathetic, don’t you talk, don’t you cry?During the funeral, a friend begins to talk to him about a strange app that will help him lose. Martha, in a state of denial, reacts angrily until she finally accepts her friend’s suggestion.
The application mentioned by your friend is able to ‘refund’ life, because it completely tracks all our data disseminated on social networks, capable of reproducing our way of speaking with total precision. Ash was a social media addict, so he’ll be the ideal. to retrieve as much information as possible and get as accurate as possible in the reproduction of their words.
Martha starts talking to Ash? And she’s surprised to see that she’s like her boyfriend. The app goes beyond chat and allows them to touch the voice, so they start talking on the phone.
Losing a loved one is always difficult and can be very difficult to accept. Sometimes it is necessary to seek professional help. Martha denies death and, in the face of this denial, the possibility arises to “resurrect?”Ash accepts it and enters a very risky spiral.
Grief is a slow and painful process that requires a lot of effort on our part, but we must face it and go through all its phases for a successful overcoming. Accepting that a loved one has passed away does not mean forgetting, our loved ones Can live in our memory, but we must look to the future and accept the loss in order to move forward.
Martha has the opportunity to “say no goodbye,” to revive Ash and, at such a delicate time, accepts. This can be a little scary when you watch the episode; however, it is very likely that many of us will be tempted if we are presented with the opportunity to postpone separation.
Martha closes on herself and leaves her life behind, even forgetting that she still had a sister. There’s a key moment when Martha suffers a panic attack for accidentally breaking up the phone that used to talk to Ash. At that moment, she feels that she has lost it again, that Ash has left her again. This is when the app gives you the opportunity to go further.
“The life of the dead is in the memory of the living. “Cicero
This additional step is to buy a bionic doll that will take Ash’s form, speak like Ash, and ultimately be an exact clone of Ash. However, it is still a kind of robot, absent from feelings, which makes Martha I start to tire and what initially seemed like a good idea, now produces the opposite.
During the episode it is discovered that Martha is pregnant and that she hears the news after her boyfriend’s death, which will make it even harder to accept her loss. The news of the pregnancy brings her unholy and sadness at not being able to live the moment with Ash.
Eventually, Ash’s copy will be too heavy for Martha and she will eventually face the situation. Ash is dead and impossible to return, so Martha keeps the copy in the attic, just as Ash’s mother had done with photos of her deceased. At the end of the episode, she is seen a few years later with her daughter. The girl addresses Ash by name, not a father, because she is a copy of her father. Think like him, talk like him and be like him, but is he really Ash?
The series focuses mainly on our use of new technologies, but I would like to highlight this episode because it is the most human and close and to face a very particular situation.
What is the use of social media?To what extent are we protected on the Internet?Has the app been 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 his versions, because, as Ash’s own copy explains, we make available to social networks our best photos.
Therefore, it is possible to consider whether the image we show of ourselves on the Internet is a real image or a mirage, we only show what we want to see and, on social networks, the competition to be the best at all is quite palpable In a way, every time we share something on the net, that something will stay there until the end of the Internet and , therefore, a part of us; in some ways, social media is a step towards immortality.
The app knows all about Ash, which means that the information he shared wasn’t really protected, because a strange app for him could know all about him, if you think about how many people access social media on a daily basis. , you realize that this information is infinite and that you don’t really 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 will see a kind of monster, like the end Frankenstein. Al, this whole resurrection has a dark side that goes beyond overcoming the loss of a loved one, because it also begins to wonder how and to what extent we are aware of the impact that social networks have on our lives.
“Life is nothing but a passing shadow. “-William Shakespeare-