Summary of a “Black Mirror” episode (evidence):

S.1 E.3

- They live in a place where memories can be played back by them and others

- Dinner party

- Liam is married with a kid

- Liam is a Lawyer

- He had an appraisal that didn’t go well

- His friends want to re watch his appraisal meeting so they can judge it

- Jonas is going through a bad breakup

- Liam thinks his wife is interested in Jonas

- One of the guests doesn’t have a memory replay thing because someone stole it

- She likes it

- Organic memories can be changed. That’s why people have the grains.

- Liam doesn’t like Jonas

- Liam’s wife slept with Jonas a few years before they got married

- They’re fighting over her past relationship with Jonas

- Liam called his wife a bitch

- They make up

- Liam re watches scenes from the dinner party

- Liam’s overanalyzing everything that happened

- Liam finds out that his wife is lying about how long she was with Jonas (6 months instead of 1 week)

- The car could tell that Liam wasn’t emotionally or physically ready to drive

- Liam goes to see Jonas at his house drunk

- Liam is interrogating Jonas about his wife

- They get into a small fight and chokes him and makes him wipe the dirty memories by threat

- Liam gets in a car wreck then replays his memories because he forgot them

- Liam sobers up and feels terrible about what he did

- Liam replays the “Jonas memory” for his wife

- He sees a picture in Liam’s memory storage from 18 months ago in Liam’s room while he walked out for 5 days

- So, she cheated on him

- She says he used a condom

- She says she wiped the memories from that night

- She lied both times. She still had the memory and he didn’t use a condom

- He pushes her because she won’t show the memory

- Liam watches the night where she cheated on him

- She takes the baby and leaves Liam

- Liam feels terrible about what he’s done

- He’s replaying memories to remember the good times

- Liam takes out his grain to forget everything

 

Analysis can focus on one scene, character, convention or whole episode

Argue for my interpretation/analysis of the text:

Liam was a very interesting character in this episode of Black Mirror. Liam is a struggling lawyer who shows up to a dinner party one night where he begins to suspect his wife is cheating on him. The story is set in a future time where people get chips in their brain that store all of their memories. The memories can be replayed, deleted, and stored, like video files we have today. Liam uses this technology to overanalyze everything that happened at the party and eventually found out that his wife cheated on him with her friend Jonas (without using protection), and that the daughter he thought was his may not actually be his. Throughout the searching process, Liam starts to go crazy. He threatens a man with a broken beer bottle, crashes his car into a tree, hits his wife, and many other things that wouldn’t be expected from the average person in that situation. Ever since Liam met Jonas at that dinner party, he seemed to be obsessed with “getting back” at Jonas even when he didn’t know what happened. The thought of revenge completely engulfed Liam. He searched through pretty much every memory he had, and searched others’ memories too just to find one small piece of incriminating evidence.

 

Questions to consider:

What is Black Mirror?

Could this story happen without the technology?

How does revenge figure into the narrative?

How does this episode use conventions of the genre?