Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
***MAJOR SPOILERS FOR BLACK MIRROR, “SAN JUNIPERO” AHEAD**
Black Mirror is known for its macabre twists. It loves to drop you in the middle of a befuddling world, and then once you think you’ve sorted out the so-called rules of the world, it will pull the rug out from underneath you. Once you get used to it, you get in the habit of approaching a new episode of Black Mirror with a thrilling blend of skepticism and dread.
So, it was an utter shock when season three episode “San Junipero” gave us something we could never have anticipated: a happy ending.
Here’s the initial pitch: San Junipero is a neon-lit ’80s beach town. The young and beautiful flock there for a chance to party, have fun, and escape. Glamorous, out-going Kelly (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) meets shy, bespectacled Yorkie (Mackenzie Davis) and the two fall quickly for each other on the dance floor. However, there’s more to San Junipero than meets the eye. The dark twist? San Junipero isn’t a real place.
Instead, San Junipero is a virtual reality vacation town where people facing the ends of their lives can escape to for a brief respite from the confines of their ever-degrading physical existence. They can choose an era (1980s, ’90s, ’00s, etc) and relive the prime of their lives — or what the prime of their lives could have been. You can visit Tucker’s, a typical bar with drinks and games and a dance floor, or the Quagmire, an S&M club. Still, it’s more than just a place to visit; You can choose to live there forever. That is to say people can choose to upload their consciousness into the cloud and “live” there after death.
Needless to say, certainty of a cyber paradise over the uncertainty of the great beyond is appealing to some and amoral to others. Kelly is using it as a getaway in her final days. She doesn’t want to form attachments because she doesn’t want to be tempted away from passing away naturally and meeting her beloved husband in the great beyond. Yorkie’s situation is somewhat different. She’s been a comatose paraplegic for decades; She was injured in a car wreck after coming out to her conservative parents. For her, San Junipero is a chance to finally be alive and in love. Needless to say, she becomes obsessed with finding Kelly again and chases her through the various eras of the town.
It seems at first glance that “San Junipero” deviates from the rest of the Black Mirror canon. Instead of presenting us with a vision of how technology can warp us from the inside out, “San Junipero” offers a glimpse of hope. Kelly and Yorkie ultimately use the technology to connect with one another and to forge a happy ending based on true love. It’s almost jarring to the extreme.
Black Mirror is supposed to be dark. Black Mirror is supposed to be scary. Black Mirror is not supposed to leave us feeling like our hearts are bouncing in our chests — and yet, that’s what “San Junipero” is defiantly doing. So is this still Black Mirror? Well, yes. Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker has always maintained that the show isn’t about technology turning people bad, but people allowing their worst selves to emerge with a nudge. It’s in effect a show about humanity. “San Junipero” is here to assert that we aren’t all bad inside. We’ve seen the devastating power of love in past episodes like “Fifteen Million Merits,” “The Entire History of You,” and “Be Right Back,” but “San Junipero” is about the flip side of the emotion. “San Junipero” is about the fear we feel right before we leap into love — and the thrill that comes when we eventually jump wholeheartedly into it.
So, yeah, “San Junipero” is classic Black Mirror. Its twist is that we aren’t so bad after all.
