Here’s Something to Add to your Netflix Watchlist: Black Mirror (Spoilers)
Maybe you may or may not have heard of Black Mirror. A Netflix original series, 4 full seasons, consisting of a selection of independent stories in no particular order of watching. Within each episode, reveals the dark side and events of our imagination, creativity, and design in revolutionary technology. Much of the series can commonly include a sort of utopia like much of our modern day movies and shows, Divergent Series, The Giver, Under The Dome and even The 100. We primarily revolve and depend on these ideas of technology either bettering our lives only for it to take over our lives.
I came across this Series in my college time, my English 2 professor had us take a look at Season 3 Episode 4: San Junipero. We had seen the clip that helped with much of its story, and instead embedding Belinda Carlisle – Heaven Is A Place On Earth into your mind. Possibly a recognizable 80s pop song we could probably enjoy a good listen to. In sum, a wonderful LGBTQ dedication, this episode along with the short trailer, can bring you into the perspective of a young woman, Yorkie, or supposed young woman. Exploring the golden ages of the 60s stumbling into a hip bar, which tends to not be her best suit due to her very timid nature. Although she seems to have a sort of disconnection with the place another young woman follows fair skinned, Kelly, escaping an addicted lover that demanded more than just a night stand. Using Yorkie as an escape to be left alone, all those in the place had a sort of awareness to a condition from terms of “Full timers” or “Part Timers”. Yorkie made it her business to leave the place as the things that were happening became slightly overwhelming as Kelly followed and persisted in figuring out who Yorkie was. In the back of the club on a rainy evening they shared a short connection, almost awkward but for the most part Kelly is in for the fun in her Young state.
It just about didn’t take long until they shared an intimate kiss, that lead to a night of intimate passion. Something Yorkie was rather familiar with. As the time goes, it changes by weeks, and suddenly all the characters are in the next era, 70s, 80s, 90s and so on. while afterwards it tends to loops back. Similar to our daily trends, i.e. Taco Tuesdays, and Throwback Thursdays… You can possibly even say it’s near close to following a series, i.e Mondays is Game of Thrones, Wednesdays is Grey’s Anatomy, Saturdays tends to always have Saturday Night Live (SNL).
As the two occasionally find time apart, Kelly doesn’t find herself visiting the hip club for a few past eras, only to have Yorkie find her in the 90s. Kelly, Actively trying to convince her night stands of less strings she doesn’t understand Yorkies story and clarifies it under another intimate night in bed under their sheets laying side by side to talk.
Yorkie at 21 got into an accident, due to her unsupportive parents of her sexuality, she took her car out for a furious drive and ended up in a terrible accident, leaving her in a deep coma for a bit over her 21 year life span. She was testing a new system that introduced a simulated world filled with others who are also testing the system, or dead and are being displayed from what’s called, “Mind Files”.
Remember those articles and news theories that Google, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon are all always collecting data and information of and about you. Are just about the stepping stones to conjuring up individual mind files for just about every single person that own any one of these profiles. All your pictures, can work and contain as memories, and every selfie can have the computer regenerate your exact figure, your written posts can easily copy out your attitude and emotions. All we would have to create is an unlimited world, sounds familiar? Minecraft has done it. Then get a software to upload all this data, store it safely to create a clone of yourself into an almost hyper realistic world.
What about Kelly, going back to the Episode, Kelly is going through her own sickness and hardship. Well taken care of and looked after in a Senior living, many also using the silver buttons connected to the sides of their temples, collecting and continusly interacting with the hyper realistic world. Which they are only restricted to about an average 3 hours into the system, to avoid a disconnection to their reality. Kelly is going through a treatment in Cancer that’s Slowly eating away at her life, she promises to go physically visit Yorki in a modernized hospital almost. Where she finds Yorki in her immobilized state of a coma. Learning more how her family had just about abandoned her, and unable to be Youthinzed without someone to sign off for her. So she would have to Marry a kind man, of a nurse who works there, although instead Kelly decides to take the vow since they have connected emotionally in the system. Successfully making Yorkie a Full timer, transfering all her last memories and collected data into the single silver circle.
The two meet again in the system, to celebrate their marriage a first for Yorkie, only for afterwards they get into a dispute. Kelly insists it being a kind gesture and not pure affection. Expressing her previous husband, and daughter who had both passed before her. Where Kelly blamed Yorkie for her naive nature, where she wouldnt understand what it’s like to have been in a long matrimony, with a daughter, and heartbreak and love. While her husband and daughter didn’t get to have a system of a perfect living, so it was a decision of passing spiritually and not technologically. The dispute only frustrated Kelly more to drive off and fling herself against a barricade and shooting her out the front window of her jeep. She doesn’t die, or she can’t, she can’t feel pain, as a Part Timer.
As time skips along, we find the sickly Kelly, pounder in the sunset on a bench next to her care take. Barely struggling to breathe, with thoughtful silence as she gazed further, bringing some concern across the caretaker, only to receive Kelly’s Final decision. She was ready for Passover, Youthization. To only surprise Yorkie by also passing over with her mind file to the vast system. The ending leaving you to see where they kept them. A long endless hall of dancing lights as they danced in the dance floor. A machine carefully placing a new silver circle into an empty slot, as the zoom out continued, to reveal hundreds and thousands of others and rams that carefully measured and maintained them. All taken into a large specific building.
As a reflection, we all believe we go somewhere on our spiritual passovers, leaving it at a very religious argument. Others can be fine with having a pass over in an artificial world, gives a sense of immortality to living in a world made up of all your data as if you never left. Sometimes it’s not about the dark side of technology, it can be the challenging arguments it can create in a selection of preferences. We still simulate these kinds of things, storing pictures, music, sounds, into space devices and letting it float around mindlessly in space for an extraterrestrial discovery. Creating documentaries for future generations, and even time capsules to be opened for the unknown times. It all revolves around our technology that collects, stores, and will someday copy our data into something of a new world.
Special thanks to Glow for her awesome guest review!