Black Mirror S6 E3 - Beyond The Sea
At its midpoint, Black Mirror’s season 6 brings us its longest and maybe quietest episode, Beyond the Sea. directed by John Crowley (Brooklyn, The Goldfinch), it details the interactions between two 1969 astronauts – the stoic Cliff (Aaron Paul) and the talkative and artistic David (Josh Hartnett). Each man has a robotic double on Earth that he can tap back into - but when tragedy befalls David’s replica, the men begin sharing Cliff’s, to a slow but predictably terrible outcome involving Cliff’s wife and David’s natural charisma.
The two-person spacecraft is not particularly cramped or unpleasant. In fact, the reality presented by this episode is of a pretty pleasant and utopic form of spaceflight - it’s clear just from the setup that rather than a depiction of literal space travel, it serves as a metaphor, two men adrift at sea, forced to put their lives in the hands of the other.
For Beyond the Sea does not represent a surrender to technology, or even to a higher power – it represents surrender to your fellow man, in all his impulses and imperfections. Being forced to trust him, with family or with a very large space shuttle, and being forced – and failing – to overcome unfeeling and closed-off masculinity to deal with his intensely dangerous trauma. For this reason, this episode is notably low-key, not exaggerating the aesthetics of its time and place, and dealing with technology far removed from anything even resembling what was possible in 1969. It draws the focus away from dystopia and onto the characters, their problems and interactions existing almost in a vacuum.
Beyond the Sea does not feel like a Black Mirror episode, even with the show’s loosely defined visual and narrative styles. The concept of a robotic double may have been done a number of times in the show’s earlier AI episodes, and the two-man spacecraft almost reads like a retreading of the cabin in White Christmas – but unlike White Christmas, nothing about Beyond the Sea feels grand, or even satirical. It’s a small-scale tale of grief and infidelity set in a small country house and an even smaller spacecraft, doused in the aesthetics of small-town Americana, centred on a couple of small, powerless little characters. It has the trademark pessimism of the series, but being set in the 1960s, it’s a timeless pessimism - one of human imperfection interacting with the unattainable magic of technology.
For a fan of the Black Mirror formula, one might be disappointed to be greeted with this feature-length period drama midway through the season, closer to fantasy than it is to sci-fi. However, as this series progresses past its sixth consecutive iteration, it’s interesting to see that something relatively fresh can still be made within it, perhaps indicating a movement towards a show more versatile in what it’s able to produce, thematically and stylistically.
