The black mirror episode
The black mirror episode full#
In the final scenes of the episode, when Ashley’s full personality comes to the fore in an Ashley Too gone rogue, Cyrus’ voiceover performance is amusingly aggrieved. There are some killer one-liners from Ashley’s auntager, who embodies all the money-hungry, image-conscious cynicism of top-level music managers (my favorite: “She’s Ashley O, not Leonard fucking Cohen”). I could empathize with the episode’s parallel plotline of a young Ashley fan who, having just lost her mother and moved to a new town, takes solace in an Ashley Too doll first I was happy she found an AI robot to confide in, then ultimately unsettled, which felt like the clear goal. To reverse this, the episode jumps the shark in an outrageous and implausible way, as “Black Mirror” is wont to do.Īs an episode of a series that alternately scares the shit out of me and makes me cringe, I found “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too” par for the course. Later in the episode, it’s made painfully clear that she is a literal prisoner trying to get away from these fucking psychos, as Father John Misty insisted. She begins crying out for help in her music, writing a song about caged animals on her big white “Imagine” piano while the sun rises over her Malibu complex.
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Offstage, it becomes clear that 24-year-old Ashley is essentially a prisoner of her evil auntager (aunt + manager), a greedy team of execs, and the expectations of her enormous fanbase. Miley Cyrus stars as a hyper-commercialized singer named Ashley O, whose retail empire of blandly affirmative bubblegum hits expands to include a foot-tall AI robot implanted with her personality. In an episode called “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too,” Charlie Brooker’s anthology series takes on the pop industrial complex.
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I was reminded of this quote again last night while watching the newly released fifth season of “ Black Mirror,” the hit sci-fi drama that uses technological hyperbole to suggest depressing truths about society.