This isn’t exactly a recap, but it contains spoilers

The first time I saw “Be Right Back,” the first episode of Black Mirror‘s second season, I came away thinking that the episode wasn’t as layered, as conceptually complex or challenging, as anything in the series’ first run. After a second viewing, though, I’m beginning to question that first impression. Next to the season 1 episodes—the bleakly effective “The National Anthem” and “The Entire History of You” sandwiching “Fifteen Million Merits” the series’ creative pinnacle and spiritual heart—”Be Right Back” is a quiet, even delicate affair. But it’s no less effective and affecting for its lack of the kind of twisted storytelling fireworks we’ve come to expect from Black Mirror.

The story focuses on a woman, Martha, who chooses to resurrect her dead boyfriend, Ash, first as a disembodied digital persona, and ultimately as a creepy physical being made of synthetic flesh. The power of the episode rests largely on the performances of its two leads: Domnhall Gleeson as the boyfriend and later as his synthetic doppelganger, and Hayley Atwell as the bereaved girlfriend who discovers she’s pregnant shortly after her partner’s death.

Both performances are powerful, doing a lot with what little they’re given. Gleeson (best known as a Weasley brother in the Harry Potter movies) ably establishes Ash’s living personality in a handful of scenes. Ash is attached to his phone, constantly checking and updating social media, but he’s hardly a tech-obsessed zombie: when Martha pushes him to put away the smartphone, Ash is funny and vibrantly alive, singing in the car, joking about his hatred for disco but his love for the BeeGees, and telling Martha about losing his brother and father when he was a child. Later, as Ash’s robot double, Gleeson has an even more difficult job: portraying not Ash, per se, but Ash’s living performance of Ash-ness. See, since the robot’s personality is extrapolated from the living person’s digital persona, robot Ash is basically an amalgamation of quips and observations that echo the kinds of things that the living Ash might have said, but go no deeper than that. There’s a wonderfully creepy “uncanny valley” aspect to Gleeson’s performance of the synthetic being—he’s almost human, but there’s something off about him.

Atwell, meanwhile, (Peggy Carter on Captain America and TV’s Agent Carter) is the one who has to carry most of the episode on her shoulders, the emotional heart of the story through whom we see and interpret most of the events. Everything about Atwell’s performance feels real, and heartbreaking: Martha’s love for Ash, her grief, her reasons for wanting to resurrect Ash, and ultimately her disgust at the poor copy of her partner that ends up on her doorstep.

That Martha ultimately rejects Ash’s synthetic double makes “Be Right Back” perhaps the most optimistic episode of Black Mirror so far. Odd to say, since the story is about death and grief, but it’s true—the episode is the only one, so far, that seems to hold out hope of something essential about human beings that the Black Mirror, the growing digital mass consciousness, can never touch. The cloud may be able to cobble together a convincing performance of Ash using his tweets and emails, but it can’t ultimately replicate the depth of his personality, the essential mystery that he—and every human—essentially represents.

The early scenes of living Ash interacting with Martha are important here, because they’re all about the ways that human beings can surprise us. That Ash hates disco but loves the Bee Gees, for instance—that’s something that Martha didn’t know. It’s a small surprise, but it’s a surprise. It’s a part of himself that Ash has kept locked away, and when synthetic Ash hears “How Deep Is Your Love” come on the radio, he calls it “cheesy.” And when Ash discovers a picture of himself as a little boy in his parents’ old house in the countryside, there’s a big difference in how he presents the picture online and how he explains it to Martha. When Ash loads the picture to a social media site, he says simply “Check this out,” but it turns out that the picture was from a bad day in his childhood: his brother had just died, and his smile in the photo is fake, put on to please his mother.

These are small moments, but rich in their reminder that when we encounter another person, even one we’ve known for a long time, we’re essentially encountering a mystery. No matter how well you know a person, there’s always something about them that is surprising, infinitely strange, and sacred—some central core of them-ness that will always remain just outside your grasp. That’s what makes human relationships so frustrating. It’s also what makes them beautiful. And it’s the one thing synthetic Ash doesn’t have: depth. Robot Ash may be programmed to please Martha—emotionally, sexually, obeying her every command around the house. But it’s not enough. As Martha tells him:

You’re not you, you’re just a few ripples of you. You’re just a performance of stuff that he performed without thinking, and it’s not enough.

Like the human personality, every episode of Black Mirror has at least one aspect that defies easy categorization and understanding. In “Be Right Back,” I can think of two scenes that continue to provoke and perplex. One is the scene on the cliffs, where Martha takes robot Ash and tells him to jump. At first, the robot complies and moves closer to the edge, but then Martha says, “See, Ash would’ve been scared, he would’ve been crying,” and it’s at this point that the robot turns around and does just that: cries and pleads with Martha to let him live. Martha ultimately relents and lets him live—but was this display of the most basic human instinct, the instinct to survive, real or just another performance? The question of whether robot Ash has any real consciousness, any real subjectivity beyond his programming, is one that continues to trouble.

The other perplexing scene is the final one of the episode, in which we discover that Martha has banished robot Ash to the attic, visiting him occasionally with her daughter—real Ash’s child. Earlier, we learned that the attic is where Ash’s mom put pictures of his brother and father when they both died. Banishing the pictures of a dead loved one is a well-worn trope of emotional repression and refusing to deal with grief. But by having Martha send robot Ash to the attic to gather dust alongside the pictures, the episode forces us to reconsider the trope. Pictures, after all, are in many ways no less performative than social media. And relying on photos to stand in for a lost loved-one is no less frustrating than using that same loved one’s social media activity to construct a synthetic consciousness—both are ultimately flat, unsatisfactory representations of the thing you want, of the person you want: the infinite, surprising, frustrating mystery of them. The thing about death is that it’s precisely that infinite, unreproducible thing that’s snatched away; and the thing about grief is that you eventually have to accept that it’s just gone and no reproduction will ever be a sufficient replacement.

Odds and ends:

• Robot Ash is awesome at sex—he’s been programmed with knowledge from pornographic movies. But the only sexual encounter we see between real Ash and Martha is unsatisfying for her. Even so, Martha ends up preferring the real Ash. A real encounter with a real human is ultimately more important to her than a being that has been programmed see to all of her needs.

• Ash turns on his phone before embarking on the road trip that ultimately takes his life, so I think we’re meant to suspect that his distraction had something to do with the accident. So if you take nothing else away from the episode, take this: don’t text and drive.

Click here for analysis of more Black Mirror episodes.

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