The premiere episode of Black Mirror’s fifth season makes it unclear whether the self-reflection it experienced with Black Museum was a glib dig at its audience or an indicator of genuine course correction. ‘Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too,’ the final episode of the fifth season, is pervaded by a sense of far greater humanity than nearly any episode that has preceded it. Its space feels genuinely lived in and it avoids the temptation to stuff the technological nightmare of the week into its forefront and subsequently trip over itself in an attempt to prove its own condescending cleverness (I still haven’t forgiven you, ‘Crocodile’). In many respects ‘Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too,’ bears fewer hallmarks of being a Black Mirror episode and more those of a glossy highbrow short film.
The aspects of ‘Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too,’ that do echo the recognizable Black Mirror’s tone and style are the ones that invariably hold it back. The initial establishment of plot-driving technology (in this case a robot designed to replicate the personality of the world’s biggest pop star) for about the first half hour reads as trite and stilted, possibly intentionally. Supporting characters’ backstories are defined by easily explainable tragedies as a shorthand for the illusion of depth.
Characters make their (albeit logically sound) leaps to barbarism and homicide to underline the show’s thesis of technology ripping away our humanity way too fast to be believed or earned in only 62 minutes. The episode spends so long leisurely enjoying its premise and characters that it jolts its story forward and careens into its climax at breakneck speed. In this case, literally.
The episode’s story is an observation on both fan culture and the soul-sucking nature of fame as a commodity. Ashley O. (Miley Cyrus) is the biggest star in the world and an idol to Rachel, who lives with her distracted dad and snobby sister, Jack, having just moved to a new house in California. Rachel gets an Ashely Too robot for her birthday and they become best friends, the fast-learning robot being a mimicry of Ashley’s sweet, inspirational, down to earth public persona instead of a reflection of her jaded, frustrated, foul-mouthed true self. Meanwhile, we see the real Ashley O. feeling increasingly trapped by her generic, lowest common denominator pop-music brand and hyper controlling aunt/manager, Catherine, and is increasingly desperate to escape from them. The irony, doing a great job of not calling attention to itself, is that as the Ashley Too’s personality gets more and more human Ashley One (is that what the O stands for?) is stripped down into more of a machine.
The older Black Mirror would happily have leaned into Catherine’s psychopathic homicidal nature and left viewers shivering as her investors threw money at her fully customizable hologram and forced the real Ashley back into a coma for Catherine to squeeze new songs out of like milk from a cow. It might have found an all too easy avenue to make the robot too smart for its own good an ally-turned-adversary like an Amazon Chucky doll. The older Black Mirror might have cut Rachel and Jack from Ashley’s story entirely or vice versa, seeking out the most pessimistic and violent or cringey ending feasible for characters with the gall to believe their lives could be better as the technology they employ advertises to them it could be.
Instead we get a story that feels far more human. Rachel’s idolizing of Ashley is given depth when we see how she responds when her hero needs her help. Ashley is compelling and three-dimensional and we feel genuine concern for her well being when things take a dark turn. The ending is uncharacteristically optimistic as it concerns itself more in developing the three titular characters than being the cautionary tale Black Mirror usually thinks itself best as.
Even the Ashley Too feels almost peripheral, as she is a major actor in the story but comes next to last in the order of importance for the characters. Ashley Too bears strong similarities to an Amazon Echo or an Apple device, but such parallels only serve to make it easier to understand how she works rather than be the entire point of her existence. The lack of violent or punishing resolution is what feels most jarring, as it leaves the episode without a clear target of critique and cynicism and no heavy-handed message in its wake. It is an unexpected change of pace, but not an unwelcome one.
Miley Cyrus gives an instantly iconic and revitalizing performance as the two Ashleys. The characters feel human and sympathetic, and she proves herself capable of a full range of emotions between the two. She is immediately the best performance the series has managed to garner. I would be fascinated to know what drew Cyrus to this role in particular, or if the role of a young adult being psychologically drained by a contractual obligation to maintain a pop star persona in direct opposition to her true self was something she felt she needed to get out of her system.
Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too may be rough around the edges, but it is Black Mirror’s most entertaining episode in years. It opts to leave its viewer bizarrely hopeful — both about the positive potential of technology and the not-entirely evaporated morals of humanity. It falls victim to the expected tendencies of Black Mirror and the limitations of short-form Netflix storytelling, but it shows undeniable signs of growth and maturity after four and a half seasons of grisly and disengaging executions. For once, Black Mirror got me to care about its characters, and it did not punish me for it.
Black Mirror, ‘Rachel Jack and Ashley Too’ is now streaming on Netflix.
