Netflix’s Black Mirror has simply dropped one of the crucial heartfelt and quietly devastating episodes of its complete run.
With Eulogy, episode 5 of the brand new seventh season, the trippy anthology sequence from creator Charlie Brooker trades its regular darkish dystopia for one thing rather more approachable: The smooth, dreamlike ache that accompanies revisiting the previous, and the way in which trendy improvements like AI could make previous issues new once more. The result’s a standout episode harking back to emotional highs from the present’s previous, like San Junipero (the episode from Black Mirror’s third season, through which two girls fall in love when their minds get uploaded to a type of resort-like digital afterlife).
Usually, Black Mirror is a mirrored image of our darkest techno-nightmares, the place innovation turns sinister, and human failings are encoded in code. However right here, in a uncommon second of tenderness, expertise turns into a conduit not for horror, however for connection to previous lives. And to the type of sorrow that lives quietly beneath every part we’ve left behind.
Eulogy stars Paul Giamatti as Phillip, a lonely, middle-aged man who learns concerning the dying of an previous flame. An AI firm invitations him to take part in an immersive funeral expertise, one which requires him to actually step into previous pictures so as to extract the reminiscences they comprise. A drone supply drops off the mandatory package at Phillip’s door, and after opening the field he removes a small nodule. As soon as hooked up to his temple, the tech works its magic. Light Polaroids remodel into actual life. Nostalgia turns into corporeal.
Phillip initially waves off the entire thing, protesting that he’s solely stored a couple of unremarkable pictures, however the blurs of his reminiscence ultimately crystallize into the reopening of an previous wound — and the conclusion that he by no means stopped loving Carol, the free-spirited cello participant who stole his coronary heart and who’s simply died, lengthy after she and Phillip separated.
In one of many pictures, we watch Phillip re-enter a celebration from many years in the past. Idiot’s Gold by The Stone Roses spins within the background as Phillip steps deeper into what was as soon as a frozen, static picture. Now, the picture surrounds him fully, the observe’s hypnotic beat underscoring a second so vivid and alive that the cigarette smoke, clink of glasses, and thrum of music within the air not need to be merely imagined. He’s in it now — reminiscence made actual. And there’s Carol, main younger Phillip up the steps.
The deeper down the rabbit gap he goes, the extra all of it begins coming again to him. “Speaking together with her was straightforward,” the older model of Phillip reminisces to the AI avatar accompanying him, his voice brimming with emotion. “She was humorous … she was like nobody I’d ever identified … Nothing else existed, simply us. That’s all we would have liked. We made plans.” He whispers: “Man, we had been so younger…”
The entire episode unfolds like that. It’s a ghost story wrapped within the sophisticated heat of nostalgia, remorse, and what we lose when time outpaces the folks we as soon as had been. Little by little, Giamatti’s monologues and the episode’s accompanying rating put the items of the couple’s relationship again collectively, forcing Phillip to relive the breakup another time. And in so doing, it provides him an unflinching close-up into how and why it began to go unsuitable.
This was simply one of the crucial affecting episodes Black Mirror has ever delivered. What makes it so outstanding, particularly for a sci-fi sequence, is the way it reimagines AI not as a risk, however as a quiet companion guiding a person by means of the wreckage of his personal reminiscences. Expertise isn’t the villain; it’s the vessel, permitting him to face on the fringe of the previous and watch the particular person he was once drift additional out to sea.
Eulogy isn’t nearly misplaced love. It’s about how we stock our grief in crooked locations. It’s about missed letters, unreturned cellphone calls, and the way expertise, for all its cleverness, can solely ever simulate what’s already gone. “Eulogy broke me in a really specific method I wasn’t anticipating,” one viewer wrote on X, whereas one other added: “Really unimaginable from each customary attainable. I’ve been crying for the final 5 minutes… Heartbreak can’t even scrape the floor of what this has made me really feel.”
