The issue with Black Mirror’s “Beyond the Sea” episode

“Beyond the Sea” is one of Black Mirror’s best episodes to date, not just from this recent sixth season, but the entire series. Already in season six we’ve experienced a hodgepodge of dire-yet-comical stories unfold – cue the episode’s predecessors “Joan is Awful” where Selma Hayak plays a deepfake version of herself or “Loch Henry”, the brilliantly executed true crime mockumentary that dabbles in our neurotic fetish for serial killers on the small screen.

Josh Hartnett as David in Black Mirror. Source: Daniel Escale / Netflix

“Beyond the Sea” elevates the concept of deepfakes – but instead of AI masking celebrity lookalikes on screen, these deepfakes take place as robotic replicas in the real world (or rather, the Black Mirror ‘real’ world). The two replicas featured in the show belong to astronauts Cliff (played by Aaron Paul) and David (played by Josh Hartnett), who, before being sent to space on a six-year mission, had their bodies scanned into a replica robotic form. This meant that their families back on Earth could continue to live as though their husbands/dads never left in the first place.

Now two years into their mission, the pair awake each day to work on the spaceship, monitoring the vessel and ensuring it stays on course. While at night, with a simple swipe of one’s dog tag across a science-y looking device, each man enters the conscience of their Earth replica. What a dream! This is what I imagine Facetime will become in the Year 3000.

This is no futuristic story either, but rather a parallel 1969. When the space race was at its peak and everything in America screamed astronauts and nationalism. Hats off to Production Designer, Udo Kramer who crafted this immaculate set and captured a world that merges familiarity with the probable.

While the premise isn’t anything new – we’ve seen replicas and cyborgs and robots (oh my!) take over the world long before Black Mirror; in the shape of hunky 1980s Harrison Ford (Blade Runner, 1982) to the freakish uncanny-valley bots of Will Smith’s I, Robot (2004). However, when we throw the idea of deepfake robots into outer space, where the very people who are operating them have the ability to live vicariously through said robot on Earth and enjoy those simple human experiences they’ve been missing out on (such as seeing the latest movie at the cinema or having dinner with your family), this certainly adds a splash of originality to the plot while raising the stakes.

You see, this is where we experience the first turning point of the episode. What happens when the very replica your mind is controlling deactivates on Earth? In this case, what if a clan of hippies enter your home while thrusting weapons in the air, ready to rip apart your cyborg body in the name of human ethics? Which is precisely what happens. This scene is disturbing and strangely comical – thanks to Tarantino and Manson, we've come to learn that any Californian hippie cult breaking and entering only means one thing: people are going to die. Sadly, it’s David’s innocent family who are brutally murdered, including his replica, all while David watches from afar, lightyears away, unable to prevent their demise.

With another four years of the mission remaining, David must come to terms with knowing that his family was horrifically murdered. With his replica permanently destroyed, now there is no hope of ever understanding what happened on that night and why.

That is until… You guess it! The noble Cliff offers David the chance of freedom on Earth for one hour a week in his own replica body, granting him access to the forest, the breeze, fishing, painting, and the fundamental activities of human life we take for granted. While this idea is generous, it’s hard not to see where this is going. With access to Earth, David now has access to his home and with the home comes Lana his lonely, neglected wife (played by Kate Mara).

Unfortunately, here is where the plot becomes too predictable. You betcha David is intrigued by Cliff’s wife. With no female affection in space and the cliché of the animalistic male trope looming over his character (thanks Charlie Brooker), David wants Lana. While Lana refuses David’s advances, the episode progresses with a will she won’t she tension, or will Cliff find out, won’t he? Of course, he does. And thus, a jealous rage of masculine energy ensues from both men (which is fair, David was really trying to fly too high here with the man’s wife), until David murders Lana and his son.

While Black Mirror has done well in the past to promote diversity through casting and exceptionally smart storytelling that propels the sci-fi genre forward, "Beyond the Sea" could have removed the slain-woman trope to tell a man’s story – no matter how emotional the stakes are for its characters. Must a wife/lover/mother die in order for the man to be awakened by emotional remorse for leaving his family in the first place? Or does this work both ways? Is a man only emotionally capable of traumatic, horrifying acts when someone he loves is taken from him?

The final scene ends abruptly as Cliff approaches David in the spaceship, eyes weeping red from seeing his slain wife and son on Earth. David sits unnerved, waiting for Cliff to return. Cut to black. The end. This is an unusual way to finish an episode that began as a promising, unpredictable take on isolation and guilt.

Instead, we’re left with another misogynistic trope used to push along the plot that gives us no answers. I’m still wondering, months after watching the episode for the first time, is all now forgiven between Cliff and David aboard that ship? Did they learn to accept what had happened, put aside their grievances and work together for the greater good of their jobs? Or was this another crime of passion they too were willing to look beyond?