Monday, April 3, 2017

I had never heard of the show "Black Mirror" until Professor Curtis mentioned it in class one day.  Now that I have watched an episode of it, particularly the episode, "Be Right Back," I can now have the view that it is a very intriguing and somewhat disturbing series.  In this episode, a young British/Scottish adult couple moves into a new house in the country.  In the start of the episode, the couple is driving to the new house while listening to their favorite tunes on the radio.  The husband talks of his favorite song and starts to joke around and sing it.  Later on, once the couple is settled in, the husband leaves for work one morning and the wife is left at home by herself.  The husband ends up never coming home and the wife starts to worry that somethin terrible has happened.  The police show up at her door and she immediately knows her husband is gone forever.  Her friend talks to her at his funeral and suggests her talking to this piece of technology that can take the role of her husband but she yells at her and refuses.  She starts to get morning sickness as she deals with the loss of her companion.  Little does she know until she curiously uses a pregnancy test, that she is pregnant.  She breaks down because she now has no one to share this moment with.  Her friend went ahead and signed her up for the communicating device tool and the wife hesitantly starts to use it.  The more she talks to the device, the more she starts to feel like her husband is actually there.  The device suggests proceeding to the next step of communicating, that of a robot.  She gives in and helps build the robot that resembles and plays the role of her husband.  When she eventually has her daughter, the daughter is never told that her father is actually dead, and she begins to develop a relationship with the false object.  This to me is psychologically disturbing.  All in all, this episode of "Black Mirror" was something I never expected and hope to never encounter.  

1 comment:

  1. You refer to Ash 2.0, the robot, as a 'false object'. What do you mean by this? Certainly Ash 2.0 exists as an object - just maybe not as a human being. I definitely agree with you that encountering someone/thing like Ash 2.0 would be a very very weird experience.

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