Yahoo News Josh Hartnett and Kate Mara break down their spacefaring Black Mirror episode
Warning: This article contains spoilers for Black Mirror, season 6, episode 2, "Beyond the Sea."
Black Mirror has gone to space before; the season 4 premiere "USS Callister" remains one of the show's very best installments. But "Beyond the Sea," from the just-released season 6, takes the final frontier in a darker direction. Written by series creator Charlie Brooker, the episode stars Aaron Paul and Josh Hartnett as Cliff and David, two astronauts from an alternate 1969 who have embarked on a long-term mission in deep space.
In order to stop the isolation from getting to them, the spacefarers regularly transmit their conscious minds back to Earth, where they inhabit identical robot replicas of themselves so that they can still spend time with their wives and families.
It all sounds like a grand adventure, right? That's certainly what the characters thought when they took on this mission.
"I think that David is 100 percent an optimist who is hopeful about the future of technology and its relationship to people," Hartnett tells EW. "And for that sin, Charlie Brooker had to destroy him."
Nick Wall/Netflix Josh Hartnett in 'Black Mirror' season 6.
Hartnett continues, "David represents a time and place where there was great hope in our future outside of Earth. Colonizing the moon, or even Mars, that sort of thing didn't seem like a distant possibility. In our reality, this was the time of the Gemini space program and people going to the moon. It was all happening! But this is Black Mirror, so everything goes very, very pear-shaped after that."
Here's how it happens: Early in the episode, David's home is attacked by a radical cult while he's inhabiting his robot body. Protesting that the intermingling of humans and robots is a crime against nature, the cult members violently murder David's wife and children in front of him before destroying his robot body — seemingly trapping his consciousness in his human body on the spaceship.
But with years left to go in their mission, Cliff decides that he can't have his crew mate going stir-crazy with grief. So he decides to let David take turns inhabiting his own robot body.
At first, this solution seems to work great — particularly for Cliff's wife Lana (Kate Mara), who really connects with David's mind in her husband's body.
"As a 1960s housewife, Lana doesn't feel like she has really many options at all," Mara tells EW. "She really just wants her husband back, or at least present. She's lonely and searching for connection in some way. David gives that to her. He's just much more present and attentive; she feels seen when he's around."
Nick Wall/Netflix Aaron Paul in 'Black Mirror' season 6
Because of the unique structure of "Beyond the Sea," Hartnett and Mara do not actually share any scenes. But they worked with Paul and episode director John Crowley to make sure that they were all on the same page about their characters.
"Luckily, we had some rehearsal time with our director," Mara says. "It was a lot of talking about all of the scenes. That was nice because, before we actually filmed anything, we were able to really wrap our heads around the experience and the journeys that these characters go on."
Hartnett adds, "Aaron was in our rehearsals and we were able to discuss some of these things. He was very open about what he would like to do, and John was very clear about what he needed from Aaron. Instead of it being an impersonation of David, it was more that he needed the internal machinations of David to be correct. In the script, the character was written as 'Cliff-David' during those scenes, and Kate said she felt that difference very acutely."
"Beyond the Sea" has a very dark ending, even by Black Mirror standards. After Cliff starts to become disturbed by David's interactions with his wife, he tells his co-pilot that there will be no more sharing of the robot body. David responds by briefly trapping Cliff outside the ship, buying him time to go down to Earth one last time and murder Lana and their son.
"I had to think about this a lot before we even came to rehearsals, because I have to make it work," Hartnett says. "I don't get to decide what he ends up doing. That's what he does, and now I gotta figure out why. So in my opinion, it was a choice in his mind between killing himself, killing Cliff and assuming his role on Earth (but thereby killing himself, because you can't operate the ship with one person), or doing this. Those were the three things."
Hartnett continues, "he doesn't expect to feel anything again. He wants to kill himself, clearly. But when he puts himself in the airlock and Cliff brings him back and then offers him this new possibility of hope and a semblance of something that feels like humanity, this little fire starts to light inside of him again after this horrible event when he thought it was all over. But then it's taken away. When Cliff tells him 'Lana thinks you're a creep and doesn't want to see you again,' that light gets snuffed out and something snaps. It's like, 'I want you to feel what I'm feeling so that then you'll understand what it feels like to have that light snuffed out. That is the only way that we can actually connect.' I think that's what he does."
Mercifully, we do not actually see Lana's body. But the sequence of Cliff walking down the stairways of his own house, past walls covered in blood, is haunting in its own way.
"I was relieved," Mara says. "But I also think that it can be just as haunting to not see anything. Our imaginations are so powerful that not showing violence can be just as violent and horrible to have to sit through. It's much more interesting to have to use your imagination a little bit there."
Black Mirror season 6 is streaming now on Netflix.
Sign up for Entertainment Weekly's free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.
Related content:
