Black Mirror Season 7’s Sweetest Episode Puts a Fresh Twist on a Classic Sci-Fi Trope
Is getting trapped in a simulation such a bad thing?
In an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation from 1988 called “11001001,” Commander Riker (Jonathan Frakes) meets the woman of his dreams on the holodeck. Her name is Minuet (Carolyn McCormick), and one of the first things Riker says to her is, “What's a knockout like you doing in a computer-generated gin joint like this?” This line was meant to evoke a similar line in the classic 1942 film Casablanca, in which Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) says, “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.” And now, the simulated sci-fi affection for old-timey movies continues with one episode of Black Mirror Season 7, in which an actress named Brandy Friday (Issa Rae) finds herself, thanks to AI tech, inside of a 1940s black-and-white movie titled “Hotel Reverie.”
And just like in many holodeck-gone-wrong stories in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Brandy soon finds herself trapped in this nostalgic, digital simulation. But the twist on this version of the story is that this time, with Black Mirror, we’re meant to wonder if getting stuck inside of a simulation is such a bad thing after all.
Spoilers ahead.
Issa Rae as Brandy, in Black Mirror’s “Hotel Revere.”
In “Hotel Reverie,” the outrageous holodeck of Star Trek: The Next Generation is brought slightly down to Earth. In his scenario, Brandy is taking the place of a pre-established fictional character from the original movie, much in the same way that Geordi (LeVar Burton) and Data (Brent Spiner) took on the roles of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson in the 1988 TNG episode “Elementary, Dear Data.” As in holodeck logic in ‘90s Star Trek, this Black Mirror tells us that the characters will see Brandy as the character she’s meant to be, regardless of her gender or skin color.
In this way, the episode deals with themes of reclaiming a kind of revised nostalgia, which is something that happened in the 1999 Deep Space Nine holodeck episode “Badda-Bing Badda-Bang.” In that episode, Captain Sisko (Avery Brooks) decides to accept the fact that a holographic, alternate version of the 1950s would have been not-racist, whereas the real history was much uglier. In “Hotel Reverie,” we get to see Brandy experience much of the same thing, and, like so many Star Trek characters, she falls in love with the AI version of Dorothy (Emma Corrin), an actress who lived a troubled life back in the day.
Like the various holodeck-gone-wild episodes of Star Trek, this Black Mirror episode leans on the idea that Brandy has to complete the preprogrammed story in order to escape the simulation with her brain intact. A malfunction has trapped her inside of this simulation, and she certainly wasn’t supposed to interact with the characters for as long as she does. Again, there’s a bit of a Star Trek thing here, as Brandy experiences several months with Dorothy while only minutes pass in the real world. This basic conceit — of living a life through a condensed simulation — occupies the entirety of the Hugo-Award-winning TNG episode “The Inner Light,” in which what happens to Brandy in this episode (relative to the time dilation) happened to Captain Picard.
But the Black Mirror twist combines a bit of TNG “Inner Light” action with the escape-the-holdeck trope from so many other Trek episodes. Because the interesting wrinkle in “Hotel Reverie” is that Brandy isn’t sure she wants to leave the simulation. Ultimately, she’s worried that once the simulation is over, it will effectively murder the woman she’s come to love so much.
Issa Rae in Black Mirror Season 7.
It would be easy to dismiss this episode as simply a question about “what would happen if you fell in love with your AI girlfriend” because that’s not entirely why the story works so well. Unlike Riker’s dream girl in “11001001,” the character of Dorothy has code that contains echoes of the real actress, who lived in the 1940s. This means that the person Brandy falls in love with is, in a sense, a real person, programmed with the aspects of the memories of a woman who once lived.
Of course, none of this would have happened without the fictional company Redream, which is just trying to make a quick buck by inserting contemporary actors into old movies. That concept, by the way, is the set-up for the 1995 Connie Willis novel Remake, a kind of cyberpunk book about a practice that is very similar to what we see in “Hotel Reverie,” complete with lots of references to the Golden Age of Hollywood.
Black Mirror, as usual, has put a lot of different sci-fi tropes into a blender, and the result with “Hotel Reverie” is a new take on an old story. Yes, we’ve seen characters fall in love with people who only exist as simulations before. But it’s never felt quite this tender, or urgently possible.
