Charlie Brooker is back again folks. Three more extreme but within-the-realm-of-possible stories to get us thinking about ourselves.

I’m going to warn you right now that this will contain spoilers. I am going to do my best to keep them to a minimum however I can’t talk about everything I want to talk about without including a few so I highly recommend that if you haven’t seen this episode yet you’d best bookmark this, go watch, and come back. There will also be some spoilers for series one of Black Mirror. Normally I’d consider a previous series fair game, but spoiling some of this stuff would be like spoiling who Kaiser Soze is, so seriously: go watch and then come back. You’ve been warned.

Good. Let’s begin then.

_Be Right Back_ stars Hayley Atwell and Domhnall Gleeson as Martha and Ash, a young couple. He is clearly addicted to his phone and the internet, to the point where he doesn’t hear her offering him ridiculous things and she has to tell him to put his damn phone away and interact with her. We get just enough screen time with Ash to get a sense of who he is and who they are together and then he dies.

Wracked with grief Martha is signed up by a friend for a service that basically is an app that lets you speak to the dead. It scrapes data from your social media profiles, emails, videos, photos, anything you can feed it and comes up with an approximation of the person in question.

What follows is both an exploration of grief and anguish as well as the question of the human experiences. We follow Martha as she is emotionally laid low and then raised up again by speaking to this approximation almost non stop.

When she drops her phone the system offers her “the next step”, an artificial Ash with the personality profile uploaded.

I’d like to point out here that both Atwell and Gleeson are superb. Atwell has to run the gamut of human emotion and does so beautifully. Gleeson plays both the internet addicted boyfriend and the approximation thereof well, in particular the contradicting states the False Ash has to exist in.

At first Martha takes full advantage, and I mean full advantage, but it soon becomes apparent that all is not right. Her grief is both quelled and then returned with even greater power. False-Ash at first being a comfort comes to drive her to the edge of sanity because he’s just not Ash.

And therein lies the reflection in the black mirror. Slowly but surely we’re putting more of ourselves online and more people are interacting with facebook, twitter, and every other form of online communication you can think of, and many friendships are made and broken vie these methods. You come to feel like you know someone based on the things they put out there but through False-Ash we’re reminded that none of that can replace the human experience.

In the climax of the story False-Ash is driving Martha to the edge of her sanity because on the one hand he’s right there with her, but on the other he lacks all the mannerisms, all the little tics, and the emotions that aren’t registered online. When she orders him to jump off a cliff and he willingly goes she rails against his utter willingness and how he isn’t acting like Ash. He then takes that information and mimics Ash not out of some sense of preservation but because that’s what False-Ash thinks she wants.

_Be Right Back_ is far more subtle than any of the previous episodes to date. Not hard when you consider that last series had a man fucking a pig, a man selling out, and a man relentlessly torturing himself with recordings of his life built into his brain. That doesn’t actually make it any less thought provoking though, in fact I’d say just the opposite. It’ll make you think about grief and the lengths you might go to, but also how you interact with your friends and family.

Black Mirror is about holding up ideas and showing us reflections that we haven’t considered, or maybe reflections we don’t want to consider about society and technology, and it’s off to a lovely start for this series.