Will Ash REALLY Be Right Back?

In the Episode of Black Mirror, Be Right Back, a woman, Martha, is faced with the moral dilemma of whether or not to reanimate the ideas of her dead boyfriend in the body of an android. At the funeral of her deceased boyfriend, Ash, a friend of hers suggests that she use a software that will mimic him in conversations. At first, Martha refuses, but after her friend signs her up for the program anyways, she finds herself becoming more and more attached to the program, as if it were a real person. Eventually, she is convinced by the software to purchase an android that will look and sound exactly as the old Ash did, but when she receives and animates the robot, she finds herself more freaked out than comforted. As Ash 2 learns small mannerisms and lingo that the original Ash used to use, Martha finds herself more and more attached to the android than she originally wanted to be.

I don’t think that this is a morally sound way to grieve over a person’s death, as it can isolate them from the reality of that person really being gone. In the show, Martha constantly rejects the company and consolation of other LIVE humans just to enjoy the company of the software designed to mimic the actions of her late significant other. She was reached out to by her sister and other friends many times, but ignored their phone calls just to text and talk to this software that was impersonating Ash. Ash 2 was definitely not a sound way of coping, as she directly expressed many times that he wasn’t acting entirely like the original Ash did. Although the program was designed to learn along the way, that is a problem in itself because it doesn’t give her the closure that she needs. Instead, she just kept creating new memories with Ash 2. I think it would have been a good idea to let the robot jump off of the cliff instead of placing it in the attic, because when her daughter was born, instead of learning to grow up without a dad, she became accustomed to the fact that an exact replica of her late father was sitting up in the attic, waiting for her whenever she wanted to see him.

 This film also presented an example of the uncanny valley, as she was extremely uncomfortable with the life-likeness of the android Ash for the first few days of his arrival. She didn’t want to touch him, or even be near him at first because of the fact that she knew that he wasn’t a live human, although he appeared to be such.