11:05PM GMT 11 Feb 2013
The first series of Charlie Brooker’s dystopian satire Black Mirror (Channel 4) was not just painful to watch – at times it was unwatchable. Plot lines including a prime minister being forced into carnal congress with a pig and a talent show star dragged into pornography did not so much send up our coarsening culture as contribute to it. Brooker’s show was determined to rub the viewer’s nose in how awful life is. Happy endings were, it seemed, a cop out.
It was refreshing, therefore, that the first episode of the new series was much more sympathetically engaging. Though set in a distorted reality future the couple at its heart were familiar types: Ash (Domhnall Gleeson), obsessively checked his smartphone for updates on a Twitter-like website, and his girlfriend Martha (Hayley Atwell), who playfully chided him for it. When Ash was killed in a road accident, Martha signed up to a spooky service: a computer program that trawled the internet for Ash’s public information and created a profile representing him that could reply realistically to her messages. Martha was horrified at first but after she discovered she was pregnant she found that looking at old pictures and imagining him alive was not enough. She became addicted to chatting online with “Ash”. The programme mimicked his voice, and enabled her to have incredibly lifelike conversations with the dead man.
Things turned more bizarre when she uploaded “Ash” onto a lifelike body. The sex was better – or at least more efficient – but Martha missed what made Ash human: his unpredictability, his flaws.
The show touched on important ideas – the false way we sometimes present ourselves online, and our growing addiction to virtual lives – but it was also a touching exploration of grief. To my mind it’s the best thing Brooker has done.
