Hello, stupid. It’s good to see you.
Midway through its third full season, Black Mirror finally cracks a smile and the degree to which it works is probably dependent on just how unremittingly grim the series has been to this point. In this episode, the youthful, and impossibly gorgeous, Kelly connects with the quiet, and improbably named, Yorkie in a sunny seaside town as 1987 rolls on around them. If you’re wondering what this has to do with Black Mirror, you’ve discovered one of the major pleasures of this episode, which is spending about the first twenty minutes of this languidly paced romance desperately seeking for clues as to why this is a Black Mirror episode. More on that behind spoiler tags. The episode is really, really good, taken as a whole. Gugu Mbatha-Raw, a consistently underrated talent, is vivacious, passionate and brilliant as Kelly and Mackenzie Davis, an actor that’s been growing on me since Blade Runner 2049, is pitch perfect as the shy, uncertain Yorkie.
Spoilers now, so three two one. I think the episode does falter just a bit at the end if only because I rather wanted at least some hint of ambiguity. Mbatha-Raw has a knockout monologue near the end of the episode and it stings enough and feels raw enough that the final shots of the episode feel a little bit dishonest to me. The episode wants to bring up the darker aspects of the San Junipero experience, but then handwave them away and I don’t know that it entirely works. Still, the episode has a lot of really powerful emotional material and Denise Burse knocks it out of the park in her small role as the “real” Kelly. At the end of the day, the episode pulls the cop-out that you can delete yourself from San Junipero at any time; this happened just as it was starting to dawn on me that San Junipero was kind of an existential prison, a place where you couldn’t even hurt yourself, much less die. Isn’t it the technical equivalent of the “curse of eternal life?” Well, no, because the episode wants to dodge that ambiguity in favor of just having a straight up happy ending and, as I said, this show has been bleak enough in the past that it’s earned the right to about a hundred unapologetically happy endings before the scale gets balanced, so fair enough. But still, I guess the ending feels . . . simplistic . . . and that’s one thing Black Mirror usually isn’t and maybe that was what was somewhat jarring.
Still, for all that, really great performances, great atmosphere, an intriguing central mystery and some great moments. I could stand a little more grit in the sand on the San Junipero beaches, but, well, you remember the song. 3 ½ stars.
tl;dr – well-acted with an interesting central conceit, but it’s less the optimism & more the final cop-out that somewhat hampers this episode; still, the optimism is earned, more or less. 3 ½ stars.