San Junipero is Black Mirror’s best ever episode

[There are spoilers ahead. Black Mirror hasn’t taken on spoilers yet, but if it does I imagine there’s a fate worse than death for people who ignore spoiler warnings and then complain about something being ruined]

This year’s new season of Black Mirror has been somewhat of a highlight for Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker’s brainchild showing us dark, twisted dystopic versions of society, offering didactic teachings of everything that could possibly go wrong with humanities increasing reliance on technology.

It’s always been a favourite of mine because there are a small handful of television shows that dare to portray worlds and characters that are bleak and depressed, with nothing being quite as bleak and depressing as the first two series of Black Mirror. Surprisingly the show’s third season is no different, despite being extended by three episodes and broadcast via Netflix rather than conventional means.

Whilst only ‘Shut Up and Dance’ came close to matching some of the first two season’s episodes in terms of sheer unadulterated numbing bleakness like ‘Be Right Back’ or ’15 Million Merits’, episodes like ‘Playtest’ and ‘Men Against Fire’ came close. However my personal standout of this bumper season was ‘San Junipero’ for entirely different reasons.

For starters it was a complete departure from the usual descent into technologically induced terror that we’ve come to expect from Black Mirror. Already many people are describing it as the happiest Black Mirror episode ever, even describing it as having a happy ending. Whilst I wouldn’t go as far to agree that it’s a particularly happy episode and that the ending is actually happy, I will admit that this is definitely the most beautiful, and most hopeful episode the series has produced.

That’s because the show’s central premise isn’t trying to teach us a lesson about social media, or dehumanisation, or artificial intelligence. No, the element at the centre of the story is love, with Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s Kelly and Mackenzie Davis’ Yorkie meeting in a club situated in a party city named San Junipero where they end up falling in love. As this is Black Mirror there is inevitably more to it than that, but for the first thirty minutes or so that is simply the story that unfolds, in fact during that time we hardly see any mention of technology at all, and it’s genuinely heart-warming.

It’s not until the latter half of the episode that the ‘Black Mirror-esque’ nature reveals itself. Kelly and Yorkie are old ladies clinging on to life and for five hours every week they get to visit Sun Junipero, a virtual reality afterlife that upon death you can upload your consciousness to and live on forever visiting different eras and places. Kelly is using San Junipero to have as much fun as possible in her dying days, having outlived her daughter and husband, Yorkie was in a car accident that left her in a coma at a young age, so Sun Junipero offers her a chance of actually living a life. The two come together and questions are asked about the nature of living, of love, and whether or not ‘living forever’ is really all it’s cracked up to be.

There’s so much to like about this episode, the two leads in Mbatha-Raw and Davis are simply superb together, making their sprawling relationship that crosses real and virtual barriers as well as several decades feel real, emotional and honest. This is probably the best narrative based around a lesbian relationship that I’ve ever seen on the small screen, it doesn’t feel cheap, or like a box-ticking exercise, these are two characters we care about and like and their relationship feels real and makes sense. In fact, unlike other Black Mirror episodes, all of the characters in this are genuinely decent and nice people with no ulterior motives or hidden secrets, Greg is a saint I tell you! The retro-soundtrack and set design is perfectly nostalgic and accompanies the storyline excellently. Essentially, I thought all of the technical elements were superb

But there’s so much more to this episode than that. It’s such a uniquely layered and deliberate 50-odd minutes that when you start unravelling it the thought and attention put into it really take your breath away, it a masterclass that excels even Black Mirror’s standards. At the start Kelly pretends that Yorkie is her friend and that she’s dying in order to get away from an overzealous admirer, it’s such a normal interaction that you’d expect to see in a similar situation that you brush past it as unimportant. But when the conceit of the episode is revealed you realise that when Kelly was pretending that Yorkie was dying, it was laced with the double-meaning of the whole reveal that people in that virtual reality night-club and city could actually be dying with little time left to live in real-life, and that was why Wes left them alone, because he understood that none of them had that much time. It was such a neat little play on a real life situation that I damn near doffed my cap at the smartness of it all.

However this episode is smattered with smartness. All of the music choices, and I mean all of them, allude to the situation, with none being more obvious than Morrissey’s ‘Girlfriend in a Coma’ but again, the way the episode is structured you don’t really know what is going on until the very end. Even when they let slip little bits like the shots of the ‘Scream’ and ‘Jason Bourne’ film posters and Kelly smashing he mirror and reversing it, as well as mention of pain levels being set to ‘0’ and constant allusions to running out of time and ‘midnight’ you might think you know what’s happening, but you really don’t. Little things like the video game guy asking Yorkie to play a driving game with her, only for her to see it crash and get put off are just superb little references, as we later find out that she’s in a coma because of a car-crash.

And the ending, I could talk about the ending forever, and to do that I’d need to upload my consciousness to Sun Junipero. Do Kelly and Yorkie end up together? Sure we see it at the end of the credits but what if Kelly in that clip is a fake Kelly to keep Yorkie happy, what if Kelly decided to be buried with her husband and daughter? What if when the Video Game guy says ‘There’s two endings, 1 for 1 player and 1 for 2 player’ he’s letting us know that the two clips we see in the credits (Kelly being buried and Yorkie alone at the beach house and Kelly and Yorkie driving off’ are actually two different endings depending on whether or not Kelly decides to ‘pass over’ or not.

And all of this is without ruining someone’s life, without torturing someone for an hour, without ramming home the cynical point that humanity is dooming itself with technology. In fact Black Mirror-esque questions like – what happens if someone is ‘red-lighted’? Who owns the consciousness and Sun Junipero itself? What if they decided to sell the consciousness’s or use them for nefarious means? What happens if there’s a power cut? Aren’t even alluded to. There’s no room for cynicism and darkness in this episode.

Enough of me ranting. If you haven’t seen the third season of Black Mirror go and watch it now. It’s on Netflix, its six episodes, that doesn’t really count as a binge watch. You’ll enjoy every episode the show has to offer, but Sun Junipero is the one that you’ll think about afterwards, I guarantee it.