Well, you aren’t you, are you?
That’s another difficult one, to be honest with you.
Season two kicks off with the most subdued episode of the season, a quiet, somewhat successful exploration of grief. When Hayley Atwell’s significant other, a disheveled Domhnall Gleeson, is tragically killed in an accident, she finds herself turning to a strange technological service to try to connect with her dead lover. The initial technology here, an AI that can absorb everything a dead person has posted on the internet and then interact with the living via messaging or phone as that person is probably the closest to home any of Black Mirror tech has been so far as it really does feel like something that might be available next year or even next fall. I mean, given Brexit, I suppose it’s possible we might see the PM **** a pig just any day now, but we’ll set that aside for the moment. Hayley Atwell is really wonderful in the lead role here; it’s a role that requires a huge emotional range and she nails every moment. Domhnall Gleeson is very good in the first half of the episode, playing the boyfriend pre-death and then giving a vocal performance over the phone. When the episode takes a more far-out sci-fi turn at a bit past the half point, I feel like things go off the rails just a bit and I don’t particularly like Gleeson’s performance.
I suppose the question is to what degree is Gleeson’s performance as the android bad because the android’s performance as Ash is bad? But maybe it’s more layered than that. To what degree is the android’s performance as Ash worse than it really would be which then makes Gleeson’s performance worse than it should be? I mean, the AI is achieving something approximating a real human personality over the phone conversationally. I don’t understand why, when that AI is transplanted into an android, the AI suddenly loses the ability to make inferences or understand idioms or any number of things that it could do just fine over the phone. Is this all nitpicking? Yes, I suppose, but it’s a reflection of the fact that the final few scenes of the episode just didn’t land emotionally that I’m thinking this way.
Still, it’s fine, not terrible by any means, just a disappointment by the standards of the first season. Viewed on its own, it’s a good episode of television. 3 stars.
tl;dr – second season gets off to an inconsistent start with an episode that’s half great and half mediocre; a great lead performance carries things through to the end. 3 stars.