“Be Right Back” is yet another creepy addition to the Black Mirror series that focuses on technologic advances and their usually devastating effects on the human population. This particular episode revolves around a woman, Martha, who loses her husband shortly after the young couple moves in together. Martha is devastated by the loss of Ash and her sadness is what ends up driving her to take part in this service that allows her to talk to her deceased husband. Dark magic, right? Not at all, in fact, it only takes a few minutes of some software to scan public posts Ash made on social media when he was alive and some videos to make a replica of him in the form of a texting app that she can chat with anytime she likes.
Now, losing someone close to you is hard. A friend, a family member, even your childhood pet that your parents told you just "ran away" is a loss that hurts and still hurts even years later. Grieving is a process and some tackle it better than others, but eventually, we accept that the person who passed is never coming back and we have to move on with our lives. Now, imagine seeing your grandmother be buried and then later after the funeral you whip out your iPad and you're chatting with her. How exactly does that work?
You obviously understand poor old Nan is gone, but you're talking to her right now. She's using the same lingo she used when she was alive, made the same jokes, made the same spelling errors. How are you supposed to accept that she's dead?
Martha used the app and she got too invested. She obviously understood there was a huge difference between the Ash she had fallen in love with and the app but you can see her descent into pure confusion. When she dropped her phone after trying to listen to a sound recording of an ultrasound and she couldn't speak to Ash App because of a malfunction she had a panic attack. She flew to the store to get a new phone and you could see the apprehension on her face as she waited to see if the App was going to work correctly and Ash App's voice could be heard. That's the moment where you could see she had latched onto this falsity as if it were the real thing and not just a computer program.
This is a scary thing and even scarier when you realize how close we are to making it a reality.
1 comment:
Yes I agree that this would be a scary reality and we are indeed close to it. I think that there should be a line drawn so the ash one ash two situation does not happen. I'm not saying that we should not let people grieve I'm saying that this method or any like it should not be introduced. I believe that if it is not introduced then humanity would benefit more from its absence.
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