'Black Mirror' Episode 'Eulogy' Explores AI's Role in Grief and Memory

'Black Mirror': 'Eulogy' episode explained

The fifth episode of Season 7 centers on a lonely old man named Phillip Connarty (Giamatti), who is contacted by a company called Eulogy to alert him that 1) Someone he knows has died, and 2) His memories could be valuable to the next of kin for "an immersive memorial" at the funeral. The male voice on the phone to Philip's quiet, cluttered, seaside home says, "You won't have to write anything. The Eulogy system curates your recollections and uploads them for the memorial." Philip is resistant. But before he can tell Eulogy to get lost, a drone appears dropping off all the equipment, including a guide disc, that he'll need to revisit his hazy, bohemian twenties in a Brooklyn artists' co-op called "The Coop." That was when he knew and loved Carol Royce (née Hartman). But as the system guides Philip to use physical prompts -- like photographs -- to surface memories, what is uncovered is jealousy, misunderstanding, and heartbreak. Phillip's guide through the Eulogy process is a pleasant English-sounding avatar (Patsy Ferran), who initially is cajoling, even as the gruff American resists every step. But as the story of Phillip and Carol unfolds, the avatar's tone gets sharper. The more Phillip snarls about times he felt Carol let him down, the less understanding the guide is of him. She begins to push Phillip to consider Carol's perspective. Did she want to switch from playing cello to keyboard to play in his band? Did she desire to spend Halloween with some Beetlejuiced creep who was not her boyfriend? And most, pressing of all, why did she leave him once he proposed marriage? Why is the Eulogy avatar so invested in this decades-old breakup? It's because the guide is modeled after Carol's surviving daughter, Kelly Royce. The virtual assistant is a cookie, a digital replication of a human's consciousness used as a super-advanced -- but arguably unethical -- version of AI in a variety of ways: household monitor ("White Christmas"), robo bestie ("Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too"), and torture device ("White Christmas" and "Black Museum"). Here, the cookie is used to guide mourners through their memories of Kelly's mother, Carol. Cookie Kelly's identity wasn't supposed to be a mystery. But impatient Phillip opted to skip the introduction, which included who he was talking to. More than simply an AI assistant, she's a reflection of the daughter of Phillip's long-lost love. Even when Kelly goes from being a voice in Phillip's head to a full-bodied companion in his mind as he tours through old memories, her face doesn't ring any bells. He's never met her, and he has put great effort into eradicating the memory of her mother's face. While Phillip may be oblivious, Black Mirror fans might suspect there's more to Kelly's appearance than meets the eye. But the real twist of this episode is that Kelly is not Phillip's daughter, though she could have been -- albeit not biologically. For decades, Phillip's recollection of Carol has festered with resentment, so he's long missed some telling clues dropped in their last night together. He recalls the fancy restaurant, the champagne he ordered, and how she didn't drink a sip. He remembers she'd put on weight. But even after Carol ran away from his marriage proposal, Phillip didn't put together the clues that she was pregnant. The baby wasn't his. As Kelly's cookie reveals, Carol had a one-night stand as revenge for Phillip's affair with Emma. The biological dad was never a big figure in Kelly's life. But Phillip could have been, if only he'd found the note. In a very Sleepless in Seattle move, Carol left a note at the hotel, spilling these secrets and offering Phillip one more chance to reconnect the following day at the stage door. But in his raging sense of rejection, he trashed the hotel room and overlooked the note with her nickname for him on it, "Philly." The first comes on the phone call. The man on the phone is from the UK and his voice is British. At first, the guide (Ferran) being British may not mean anything beyond it being the default setting of the UK-based company's app. However, the caller also mentions the service has been employed by Carol's daughter, Kelly Royce. And as Eulogy is meant to help the grieving remember the departed, it'd make sense in the world of Black Mirror for that virtual guide to be modeled after someone close to the recently deceased. When Phillip talks about the first time he met Carol, he makes a snide remark about her "character," noting that she never mentioned she was engaged when they met. While Kelly doesn't say anything, her face gets pinched with displeasure at the remark. This suggests she knows Carol. When Phillip talks about his band The Head, the guide gets irritable, as he is dismissive about Carol's preference for the cello to the keyboard. He blames Carol for the band's failure, noting that her "heart wasn't in it." The guide responds, "Maybe you should have let her play cello," adding, "The cello was important to her. She played it her whole life, taught her daughter to play it." That's an interesting and very specific fact! But Phillip is so aggravated he blows past it with an insult, asking if she was coded to be "mildly annoying." Here comes another clue. She says, "I wasn't really coded, more generated." Phillip interrupts with another insult: "generated from some digital asshole." She looks hurt. After his abrupt apology, they move on together. Things only get more heated. With Carol not around to channel his anger at, Phillip takes it out on Cookie Kelly, who gives it right back. "What did she do that was so awful," the guide demands, "so heinous that you became this wounded dog?" This leads to the story of Phillip's fateful trip to London to visit Carol. As he furiously recalls the night he proposed and Carol ran, the guide presses him on what it meant that Carol wouldn't drink the champagne. Then she says, "She was pregnant with me. Kelly Royce's daughter. The one she taught to play cello." Cookie Kelly goes on to explain that she's a "disposable avatar, a temp guide, an echo really. I'm programmed with her thoughts and opinions, so I can decide what she'd like to include [in the memorial] without her having to be exposed to everything herself. Which as you can imagine, might be upsetting." In Crocodile (Season 4, episode 3), the computer interface is a "memory dredger" or "corroborator," placed on a user's temple, which allows an outsider -- in that case, a claims adjuster for Realm Insurance -- to view the memories of the subject. In the episode, a collection of memories from various witnesses is used to build evidence of what really happened. While looking into a car collision claim, one investigator accidentally stumbles across a murder cover-up, a discovery that proves fatal for her and her family. In "Eulogy," similar tech allows Phillip to revisit his bohemian youth. Through Eulogy's system, he is able to stroll back into the old apartment building where he and fellow artists flopped, created, and partied. He's able to return to the rooftop where he first met Carol. But as he's destroyed her face in every photo -- in a very dramatic breakup move -- he can no longer access what her face looks like. The end of "Eulogy," is surprisingly sweet and even upbeat for Black Mirror. Through Kelly's coaching and Eulogy's software, Phillip is able to recover one precious memory in full. Playing a cassette tape Carol made for him, he remembers standing in the hall of the apartment building, listening to Carol play the cello she loved so much. He steps into the photo, and takes the place of his younger self. This time, he can see the face lost to resentment. And there she is, glorious and shining. But in the episode, this rediscovery plays intercut with his arrival at the funeral all the way in London. There, he sees the real Kelly. Who doesn't know much of him at all, but plays the cello in memory of her mom. She looks up, and seems to nod to him at the back of the church. That's up to the eye of the beholder. Has Eulogy changed Phillip's view of Carol enough that he can reach out to Kelly? Sure, the wounds aren't healed. But by the end, he's able and willing to see Carol's face again. He recognizes that the troubles in their relationship were not all on her. And he yearns to say goodbye, enough that he flies internationally to go to her funeral. But is that all? Could it be that his time in his own mind with the virtual Kelly has him hopeful that it's not too late to be her dad? I think so. One of the most optimistic episodes of Black Mirror, "Eulogy" shows how grief can be a bear, but can also bring people together. Sure, this Kelly won't have had the heart-to-heart talks that Phillip had with her cookie. But that means he might have a second chance to be a bit more tender this time. A second chance to make a first impression, and a second chance to be the dad he might have been.

Paul Giamatti and Charlie Brooker Explore Grief and the Future of AI in Haunting 'Black Mirror' Episode

Jasmine.4.t Is Boygenius' Favorite New Singer-Songwriter -- And Maybe Yours, Too In "Eulogy," one of the final episodes of Season Seven of Black Mirror, a lonely man named Phillip (Paul Giamatti) learns that an old flame has died, and he's been asked to contribute to a unique kind of eulogy wherein an AI guide (Patsy Ferran) pulls his consciousness into old photos to mine memories. Phillip claims not to remember much about the woman, but, over the course of the episode, his blurry memories sharpen, and he admits to himself that he never stopped loving her -- that his own hubris kept them apart. Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker had just wrapped production on "Eulogy" when his father died. The parallels between real life and fiction were haunting. "I found myself in an unusual position," he says. "We just finished the post on this episode when I found myself having to read a eulogy at my father's wake. I was struck by how we were collating photos for a slideshow. They feel like they're on the same frequency as memories are." In the tradition of episodes like 2016's "San Junipero" (in which two women in hospice fall in love when their minds are uploaded into a digital 1980s resort town), "Eulogy" isn't quite as dark the dystopian nightmares for which Black Mirror has become a kind of shorthand. But it is a beautiful rumination on loss, memory, and, in some respects, how technology like AI may not be as wholly nefarious as it seems. Brooker and his co-writer, playwright Ella Road, decided "there was a story here that could be heartbreaking and bittersweet, without a villain," he says. "It's somebody using technology to revisit the past and come out with a slightly different perspective and put some ghosts to rest." "They could have sent me anything and I would have said yes, but they happened to send me this great piece," Giamatti says. "I was really moved by it at the end, which doesn't always happen to me -- and I thought it was an interesting take on the technology. Maybe AI is a good thing at the end of this, which I thought was interesting." While AI tech has become a boogeyman to creatives -- leading to myriad lawsuits over big companies mining artists' work to create what seems largely to be derivative slop -- Brooker and Giamatti don't dismiss it out of hand. "I go back and forth on AI," Giamatti says. "I talked to a paleo-anthropologist once and his take on everything was that we'd given ourselves over to machines when we invented the wheel. But his positive take was we really have no idea what this stuff is going to turn out to be. It could be something we don't recognize at all, and it could be something that ends up doing very good things for us, and so, who knows? It's the people that use it that are the problem more than the thing itself. We have to be better at using it." The actor adds that he was once asked if a company could use his voice and declined. "I would rather do it myself right now," he says. Brooker, for his part, was inspired by more creative uses of AI: namely, the Beatles doc Get Back, which used the technology to sharpen archival footage and the "new" Fab Four track "Now and Then," which was created in a similar fashion. An old John Lennon demo was transformed into a complete song by isolating his vocals (and George Harrison's guitar tone) and combining that with new recordings from the rest of the living band. In those cases, then, AI wasn't used to create a doc or song whole cloth, but as a tool to make something old new again. "We were all watching that doc during a fairly dark point during the pandemic, and it felt like a transmission from the future," Brooker says. "I was keen for us to slightly channel this sort of interplay between this analog technology of the past, which is quite fragile and evocative and imperfect, and turn that into a very present-day immersive experience." "'Please don't cut the human out of this equation' is where my thoughts go," he adds. "I don't think it's a genie you're going to be able to put back in the bottle. You obviously don't want the situation in which an executive sits back and goes, 'Shit three films out, please,' but I was reading about The Brutalist, where there was a conversation about AI using the actors' voices to make them sound like they're speaking Hungarian. Am I outraged by that? I don't think I am. I mean, admittedly, I'm not a Hungarian voice actor. But again, no one was outraged by actors being Gollum." In fact, both Giamatti and Brooker say that given the chance to use the technology in "Eulogy," they would jump at it. "When I think about pictures of when I was a kid, there's a place that we used to go [that I would visit] -- my uncle ran a hotel up in Maine for many years," Giamatti says. "I wish it wasn't gone." Still, both agree that there's something ineffable about old photos and faded memories that can't be captured with technology. Like Brooker, Giamatti's father died -- many years ago, in 1989. "It's always nice to see a picture of somebody, but it's a little weird," he says, adding that the memory doesn't always match the image. "Maybe it's a more meaningful thing that your memory changes something, and your imagination functions more than the literal thing. I mean, it's nice to see pictures, but it's not [my father]. Whatever the hell it is I'm remembering in some buried part of myself is him." As for Brooker and his father's slideshow? "When you look back at old photos, they're imperfect and they're a bit blurry, or someone's got red-eye in them," he says. "They feel more emotionally resonant than today when you just scroll back through your photo feed and you can see the photos you forgot taking three weeks ago. I found it spooky that not long after we finished that episode, I found myself looking at photos I hadn't seen for two, three decades -- and you're right back there."