Fair or not, I tend to imagine the same plot as an old Twilight Zone as a metric to gauge how much narrative substance there is as opposed to how much they are riding on visuals and atmosphere. There is enough here that it is an actual story, and it is a very "Twilight Zone" story. Does that make it "better"? You know what? Yes, yes it does. It absolutely does. Fundamentally, this is the strongest episode so far. Look, I liked the one with the bikes even though its world didn't really make much sense, but Series One was basically the one mile walk to the rural convenience store to see if they have real Chocoroles in stock, and episodes like this are our Chocoroles. Not that it is perfect, but we aren't in it for perfect. It is an anthology show; they aren't supposed to be the most brilliant things ever. It is more like, a concept that is somewhat clever or interesting but lacks the utility to become anything longer.
I'm noticing many early episodes are romance / love / relationship based. It makes me wonder if they had in mind some kind of "Love Future Style" theme in mind at first but shifted the theme and packaging to ironic consequences of emerging technology before filming. Both themes have their limits, but I get that being worried about being hacked in some way and/or sentient computers and stuff like that is a pretty common superstition / fear, and even more so in the times of this show.
Anyway, what happens is: you got this married couple, and you see enough to know they are happy together, and then the man dies. What her job is a bit of mystery. It is something bougie and middle class. She makes shitty drawings of dogs on a future screen in a special room she had set up for that. After her partner dies, she gets turned on to a technology that mimics his voice and uses online info about him to simulate that she can talk to him on the phone.
So far, not so interesting. You figure that is the whole deal and it will be about her being addicted to the phone app and having to move on, but things escalate in a different way, and props to Cellphone Bad for what happens next. She gets a UPS delivery, and it is a Real Doll of her late partner, and when she leaves it in the bathtub with some warm water and a packet of sea monkeys, it becomes a debased clone of him.
Not "debased" physically, but the clone is still reliant on the semblance of him from his former online presence. It isn't growing its own personality or emotional responses, so he becomes kind of frustrating in that way. At first it seems to be fun for her because much like Data, he is fully functional in all ways, but that only takes you so far. I suppose it can make you think about what a "relationship" is and what makes it more significant than a platonic personal relationship if not the status of validation in being acceptably attractive enough to be sexually active, but maybe that is a little bit of a heavy subtext to mine out of this.
Speaking of "sexually active" it turns out she was pregnant from shortly before her man died. It is the kind of TV pregnant where there is no real physical change despite a lot of time passing. It is kind of an obligatory thing to make her pregnant so they can explain the presence of a child in the "a few years later" wrap up scene.
It was a bit slow paced but these don't have to be colorful rollercoaster rides all through. It is a focus on one character that they put in a fairly isolated setting to avoid showing a bigger future world going on, hence the bougie work at home job where she is some kind of designer / artist. These kinds of sparse environments are and will be common through the life of the show.
In future episodes, Black Mirror will deal with "the problem of self" in ways that some find to be frustrating. In this case, not. The ultimate answer was clean cut. The clone was simply NOT the guy. Full stop. The issue of a consciousness being duplicated is not on the table. That was the "twist" here; that despite the "clone" being organic it was still a programmed machine that in reality carried no "essence" or what have you from the actual deceased guy. This particular future tech was not stated to imply it was an extension of the consciousness or soul beyond one's lifespan. It was just a meat robot pretending to be a guy. It is like if someone fell in love with Clippy.
I believe she only introduces it to her daughter because she had to explain in some way to the kid why there is a guy confined to the attic all the time, and as a demonstration that she is tragically stuck with this thing for life despite it being used as a transitional crutch to process her grieving.
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