Although Black Mirror’s latest season was narratively uneven, thematically it’s all about digital doubles—a trend continuing from season 6 but reaching back for the past decade of the series’ run. Four of the six new episodes focus on some sort of virtual consciousness, with the shared message of don’t discount these digital beings. The stories that center on “cookies”, or copies, explores how they exist in parallel with their prime selves, and how attaining sentience allows them to become the prime in their own universes. The remaining two episodes use complementary approaches to challenge ideas of what constitutes a prime self versus a new-and-improved version, whether it’s a parallel-universe double or a backup consciousness mapped onto synthetic brain matter.
I expected that the most compelling episode this season would be “USS Callister: Into Infinity,” the sequel to season 4’s brilliant skewering of male nerd fantasies via Star Trek and Galaxy Quest. But while that installment poignantly wraps up its predecessor’s story, it’s a less effective standalone than the season’s standout episode, “Eulogy,” in which a bitter loner (Paul Giamatti) steps into memories of his late ex-girlfriend and discovers a new perspective. I’ve long noticed a connection between Black Mirror’s digital doubles and the innies-versus-outies of Severance, but this brief, powerful episode bridges the gap between both series—the bridge being grief.
Spoilers for Black Mirror season 7 and Severance season 2.
Though not just grief—in Severance, Lumon seeks to eliminate anxiety, boredom, terror, dread, physical pain, every awful or inconveniencing emotion and sensation. That’s the dark heart of Macro Data Refinement and the twisted experiment involving severed employee (or “innie”) Mark S. (Adam Scott) unwittingly conducting experiments on his “outie” Mark’s supposed-dead wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman). For years, Gemma has been severed into two dozen different consciousnesses, each one forced to endure a specifically painful or exhausting trial—the dentist, plane turbulence, writing thank-you notes—with the intention of seeing if any memory of that experience passes back to the prime Gemma. The final test, codenamed Cold Harbor, puts Gemma in a room with the crib that represented her and Mark’s dreams of parenthood to see if she can take it apart without breaking down.
In Black Mirror’s “Eulogy,” a company by the same name contacts Phil (Giamatti) asking for his help in constructing a virtual memorial for his ex-girlfriend Carol, who he dated for three years a lifetime ago, when they were both young artists living in Brooklyn and (eventually for her) London. Eulogy’s technology utilizes the familiar virtual-reality disc, creating an immersive headspace for Phil to explore old photographs with the help of an AI Guide, which takes the form of a young woman (Patsy Ferran). Despite this persona, the program also possesses the AI capacity to sharpen blurred details, though not to fill in the missing details of Carol’s face; that’s Phil’s job.
Try as he might, Carol’s face won’t fill in beyond vague shapes; it’s been too long, his memory has been blurred by their heartbreaking end, and their generation didn’t have the benefit of social media reflecting back infinite images of themselves to constantly access. There’s also the fact that he’s scrawled over or cut out her face in every photo—active forgetting over passive. But the Guide patiently perseveres, encouraging the real Phil to search his Cape Cod home for any mementos that will jog his memory, including a disposable camera with a single nothing photo from his ill-fated trip to London. A throwaway clue in that snapshot leads them to a letter, written by Carol, that he unwittingly kept without ever reading, which in turn reveals two devastating truths: She was pregnant by someone else the night she seemingly rejected his last-ditch marriage proposal, and she asked him to meet her the next day at her stagedoor if he wanted to make things work anyway.
Anyone familiar with this subgenre of Black Mirror episode will likely pick up early on in “Eulogy” that the Guide is no mere computer program, but a digital double of Carol’s daughter Kelly. (The hint is in how Phil initially recoils when he first sees her—not because of the presence of another human in the still photograph, but because of the resemblance that he does not realize he’s seeing.) Yet the emotional gut twist is why the Guide exists: She was created so that the real Kelly would be spared sifting through the volume and intensity of memories submitted, yet she still exists as an approachable conduit that would engage her mother’s friends more effectively than an impersonal AI.
The Guide is a clear successor to the digital cookie first introduced a decade ago, in 2014’s “White Christmas” holiday special. Initially presented as an administrative assistant, the digital double of Greta (Oona Chaplin) rails against the indignity of managing her human self’s home, her entire existence dedicated to the menial tasks of slightly undercooked toast and other creature comforts. It’s only when Matt (Jon Hamm), the company rep training her, ups the time dilation in her device to make six months pass in a minute, that she is cowed into obeying orders, desperate for something to do. This twisted “onboarding” brings to mind both the opening scene of the Severance pilot—where Mark S. surveys Helly R. (Britt Lower) on seemingly innocuous questions that reveal how thoroughly disconnected from her outie she is—as well as the dark workplace parodies enacted by middle manager Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman). Both use corporate-speak and familiar office rituals to enact horrors of depersonalization on these people.
Because they are people. Innies still inhabit the same bodies as their outies, separated by a physical blocker surgically implanted in their shared brain. Cookies are separate entities, yes, but at their moment of creation they possess all of the same memories as their prime selves, unlike the innies who start from a blank slate. One branches, while the other builds.
It’s not all doom and gloom for the cookies; some get to party in “San Junipero” until it’s time to slip into the afterlife, date the same person in a thousand simulations à la “Hang the DJ” to figure out their likelihood of making it work in the real world, and relive classic movies like in “Hotel Reverie,” this season’s simultaneous ode to vintage Hollywood and remake culture. But no matter how engaging these worlds, they are still prisons, in the form of pocket universes.
The pocket universe is key: A photograph, an office, a simulacra of a garage—these environments are expansive, able to contain hours or months or years of a life, yet constrained enough that they can be tucked away or forgotten. That makes it easier to justify eventually disposing of them, whether shoving painful memories into a box or shutting down the MDR department once Cold Harbor is successfully completed. To their prime selves, these copies or extensions are short-term solutions for their long-term comfort.
Nanette (Cristin Milioti), the heroine of “USS Callister,” is not created to improve her prime self’s life. In fact, the only life she’s expected to benefit is that of Robert Daly (Jesse Plemons), the unassuming co-founder and CTO of Callister, Inc., creators of the immersive Infinity game. When the cookie Nanette wakes up onboard a spaceship, she discovers to her horror that she and other Callister employees have been digitally cloned to allow Daly to live out his Space Fleet nostalgia fantasies as their cruel captain. Though Nanette manages to outsmart Daly, trapping him in this pocket universe and escaping into the Infinity game, at the start of “USS Callister: Into Infinity” she and her crew are limping along on limited credits, terrified that the next power-hungry player they encounter will be the one to delete them permanently.
Carrying the mantle of captain has exhausted Nanette; at the start of the episode, she would welcome death at another player’s hands, if only to put an end to their plight. Once the prime Nanette and Callister co-founder James Walton (Jimmi Simpson) enter the game to talk to their digital doubles, our Nanette discovers that they can save themselves by journeying to the heart of Infinity… where another cookie of Daly exists in a recreation of the garage where he coded the original version of the game. Abandoned there by Walt for what feels like centuries, he has patiently created the game’s countless worlds, waiting for someone to visit. The fact that prime Robert never stepped into Infinity’s heart could imply that he believed the Robert copy was just a program running in the background; but considering the specific ways in which he tortures his crew in “USS Callister,” he knows exactly who he has imprisoned and what lonely purgatory he’s damned him to.
In populating Infinity with multiple doubles acting as parallel-universe selves, “USS Callister: Into Infinity” poses the question of how much two versions of the same person can branch apart into potentially unrecognizable selves. Viewers spend so much time with captain Nanette that she comes to seem like the true Nanette—that is, Nanette at her most optimized, her most creative and cutthroat and audacious. Spending time with the prime Nanette in the sequel is jarring for both viewers and characters; from her dorky costume to her propensity for over-apologizing, this Nanette is a buggy version 1.0—yet she’s the one who gets to enjoy the freedom and mundanity of the outside world. This Nanette proves just as vulnerable, however, when she winds up in a coma from a hit-and-run.
The question becomes even more dire when captain Nanette encounters the time-capsule version of Daly who has supposedly not been shaped by the real-world triggers that turned Daly so cruel: the success of Infinity clashing with the disregard of his employees. Milioti’s acting is fantastic, as she plays Nanette’s trauma reactions to captain Daly (who could erase her face with a snap of his fingers) and tries to give this gentle, lonely god the benefit of the doubt.
But this Daly toys with her all the same, dangling contradictory solutions that would require her to choose the good of the crew over her chance to escape to the outside world by transmitting into comatose Nanette’s brain. This Daly pouts when she doesn’t engage his Space Fleet fandom; he laughs at her frustration when he reveals that there’s a way to solve all the problems, and that he was only testing her. He almost gets away with a copy-and-paste command instead of cut-and-paste, intending to create another copy of her against her will so that he would have a constant companion in his garage, which is even smaller than his ship and much easier for him to control. This Daly removes her mouth with yet another snap of his fingers, revealing himself to be just as entitled at his core.
Eulogy’s Guide exists to save Kelly from emotional strain during an already trying time. But that defeats the purpose of Kelly engaging with the mosaic of memories that make up Carol, which includes the spontaneity of examining every piece. Listen, I can tell you how unpleasant and inconvenient it is to, say, open an unmarked envelope that turns out to contain childhood photos of your late dad annotated by his mother, and to burst into tears in the middle of tidying the house. But I’m glad that I experienced it rather than let someone else curate that fresh grief for me. The supposed achievement of Cold Harbor has Gemma’s twenty-fifth innie dispassionately disassemble the baby crib with absolutely no recognition of what it once meant to her. I can only speak to my own (incredibly fortunate) experience on the other side of infertility, that in retrospect I wouldn’t want to erase my own moments of crying at cousins’ surprise pregnancy announcements now that I get to watch our kids play together. But I don’t think anyone who yearns that much for a child would want to so cut themselves off from that potential version of their life so as not to recognize that hope or despair.
The alternative is to be Phil, who must now confront the entire life that he could have had if he had surfaced from his self-pitying drunken bender enough to read Carol’s letter and mutually take that second chance for that conversation. (Again, the tragedy of their ages: there were no cell phones to send a did you see my letter? text.) He missed out on an entire lifetime showing up for Carol and Kelly, to watch mother teach daughter cello—to see them both, all of their selves, as they grow together. But the episode’s dual final shots offer a glimpse of hope: present-day Phil mimics his younger self’s stance watching Kelly play her mother’s song on the cello, while watching Carol play the song in the photograph once he unearths the recording and finally jogs his memory. It’s not too late to get to know Kelly, though it comes with the tricky obstacle of having to do it all over again; presumably the Guide filtered out their more wrenching conversations, which means that it’s on Phil to make himself vulnerable all over again if he wants to get to know the prime Kelly. Failing that, it’s never too late to remember Carol’s face.
Where “USS Callister: Into Infinity” comes full circle is the prospect of reintegration, as captain Nanette is able to transfer her consciousness onto her body’s brain and wake up from the coma… with the added surprise of her entire crew joining her. The episode’s ending is surprisingly chummy, not the horror twist one might have expected in earlier Black Mirror seasons; rather than feel violated by the cookie chorus in her mind, Nanette seems strangely unhurried to find a solution for transferring them. It’s not perfect, but it beats constantly outrunning death.
Severance still has a lot of blanks to fill in concerning reintegration; aside from each Mark experiencing overlays of the other’s environment in his respective space, we haven’t actually gotten to see both interact in real time. The closest was their wild camcorder argument from the season 2 finale, which brings to mind cookie Nanette brilliantly blackmailing her prime self via revenge porn in “USS Callister.” At the heart is the question, can these two personas coexist? So far, Black Mirror has not been able to make the case (Nanette’s mental hitchhikers notwithstanding) for two versions of the same person reconciling their contradictory experiences and desires. In that universe, it’s a transactional relationship from first task to final replacement; but maybe Severance can figure out the kind of teamwork that makes the dream work.