Black Mirror: “Be right back”, the loss of a loved one

Black Mirror It is a British series whose episodes are completely independent from each other, not even the actors are the same. This is not an anthology series in the style of American Horror Storybut each episode is like a short movie, with completely different actors, characters and settings. The seasons also do not follow any type of order and do not have the same number of chapters.

Black Mirror usually puts us in critical tone the use we make of new technologies. It does this by presenting dystopian futures or situations taken to the extreme.

Black Mirror: “Be right back”

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

This addiction bothers Martha, because even when she talks to him or asks for help, he is too distracted by his smartphone and doesn’t pay attention to it. It is a quite realistic portrait of the use we make of social networks and how, sometimes, even if we are accompanied, we pay more attention to the cell phone than to our companion..

At the beginning of the episode, Ash tells Martha that his mother, when his brother and father died, took down all the photos in the living room and put them in the attic. Shortly after, Ash gets into a car accident and dies.

After Ash’s death, we see Martha apathetic, does not speak, does not cry… During the funeral, a friend begins to tell her about a strange app that will help her “cope” with the loss. Martha reacts with anger towards her friend, she is in a state of denial. Although she finally accepts her friend’s suggestion.

The application mentioned by her friend is capable of “bringing us back” to life, because It carries out exhaustive tracking of all our data on the network, being able to reproduce our way of speaking with complete accuracy. Ash was addicted to social media so he will be the perfect individual to rescue, more information, greater precision in the reproduction of your words.

Martha starts chatting with “Ash” and is amazed to see that he looks exactly like her boyfriend. The app takes it a step further than chatting and tells you it can play your voice, so you start talking on the phone.

The loss of a loved one is always hard, it can be very difficult to accept and, sometimes, it is necessary to ask for professional help. Martha denies death and, faced with this denial, the possibility of resurrecting Ash arises, therefore, she accepts and enters a very risky spiral.

The duel in Black Mirror: “Be right back”

Grief is a slow and painful process that requires great effort on our part., but it is necessary to face it and go through all its phases to successfully overcome it. Accepting that a loved one has died does not mean forgetting them, 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 “not to have to say goodbye”, to revive Ash and, in such a delicate moment, she accepts. It may seem a bit chilling when we watch the episode; however, It is very likely that many of us would fall into temptation if the opportunity arose to postpone saying goodbye.
Martha withdraws into herself and leaves the living aside, forgetting that he had met his sister. There is a key moment and it is when Martha suffers an anxiety attack for accidentally breaking the cell phone that she uses to talk to Ash, at that moment, she feels that she has lost it again, that Ash has left her again. That’s when the app tells you that you can take one more step.

This further step consists of buy a bionic doll that will take the shape of Ash, talk like Ash, and ultimately be an exact clone of Ash. However, he is still a kind of robot, lacking in feelings, and Martha begins to get tired, which at first seemed like a good idea, now causes her rejection.

Throughout the episode, we discover that Martha is pregnant and learns the news after the death of her boyfriend, a reason that will make it even more difficult for her to accept her loss.. The news of the pregnancy causes rejection and sadness for not being able to live the moment with Ash.

Eventually, Ash’s copy will be too much for Martha and she will end up confronting the situation. Ash is dead and there is no turning back, so Martha locks the copy in the attic, just as Ash’s mother had done with the photographs of her dead. At the end of the episode, we see a few years later with her daughter, the girl addresses Ash calling him by his name and not dad because he is a copy of his father. He 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 wanted to highlight this episode for being the most human and close and for presenting us with a rather peculiar situation.

What use do we make of social networks? To what extent are we protected on the internet? The application was capable of accurately recreating Ash, his way of speaking, his voice, his tastes… Even his physical appearance, yes, it reproduces his appearance on a good day, in the best of its versions because, as the application itself explains copy of Ash, We all upload our best photos to social networks.

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

The app knows everything about Ash i.e. The information he shared was not really protected, since an application outside of him is capable of knowing everything about him. If we think about the number of people who access social networks daily, we realize that this information is infinite and, really, we do not know to what extent it can be protected.

The moment of creation of the copy, we see that it takes place in a dark and cold bathtub, something already tells us that not everything is going to be perfect, that we are going to see a kind of Frankenstein’s monster. In the end, all this resurrection has a dark side that goes beyond overcoming the loss of a loved one.because it also involves questioning how and to what extent we are aware of the impact that social networks have on our lives.

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