This article contains spoilers for Black Mirror Season 6 Episode 1, “Joan is Awful.”
The first episode ofBlack Mirror’s sixth season, “Joan Is Awful,” kicks things off by probing the limits of fictionality. By the end of the hour, each major character is revealed to have been a fictional—yet apparently self-aware—representation of someone in the real world. Although manyBlack Mirrorfans probably expect as much by now, this can make for a confusing viewing experience.
The narrative of “Joan Is Awful"revolves around the premise that a quantum computer, or “quamputer,” generates and contains multiple realities for the sake of entertainment. Most of the episode takes place inside the quamputer. Its destruction in the penultimate scene raises the question: does everyone inside the quamputer die?
RELATED:Black Mirror Season 6 Does New Things The Creator Vowed Would Never Happen
The Plot
“Joan Is Awful” tells the story of Joan (Annie Murphy), an average middle-class businesswoman, who discovers that her life is actively being adapted and broadcast as a television series on a Netflix-like streaming service called Streamberry. At the beginning of the episode, the audience sees Joan make some morally ambiguous decisions, albeit nothing unforgivable. She considers cheating on her fiancé but doesn’t go through with it, and she fires a work friend of hers in a less-than-warm fashion.
The version of herselfdepicted by Salma Hayekin the new Streamberry show “Joan Is Awful,” however, is nothing short of despicable. When she and her fiancé Krish (Avi Nash) stumble upon the show while scrolling Stremberry, Krish sees Selma Hayek passionately kissing a person meant to represent Joan’s ex-boyfriend and gets angry at real-world Joan. Soon, Joan’s whole life falls apart as people begin to conflate her with Hayek’s heatable television character.
She learns by talking to her lawyer that Streamberry has tricked all of its users into signing away their likenesses by hiding an agreement in their terms and conditions. Hayek, too, has sold her likeness to be used in the show, which as the audience discoversis entirely computer-generated. In retribution, Joan decides to defecate on the floor of a church in the middle of a wedding so that Hayek will see a digital version of herself doing likewise and cancel the show. When Hayek (playing herself) shows up at Joan’s door ready for a fight, the two talk it out and decide to take down the show together by destroying the quantum computer responsible for “Joan Is Awful.”
The Quamputer
Joan and Hayek find, after infiltrating Streamberry, that “Joan Is Awful” is housed in a quamputer capable of creating digital worlds peopled by lifelike computer-generated characters. In fact, a Streamberry employee named Beppe (Michael Cera) informs Joan and Hayek that they, too, live ina CGI television show. The version of Joan played by Annie Murphy is only one of several Joans created to imitate one real-world “Source Joan.” So, if they destroy the quamputer, they will kill everyone in their universe and everyone in each layer of reality after theirs.
Ultimately, Annie Murphy-Joan decides that if she can only do what Source Joan has already done, then she does not have control over her own actions. It is not clear whether this assumption is accurate. The version of Joan played by Hayek—the one Annie Murphy-Joan watches on television—makes several decisions that depart from Annie Murphy-Joan’s, so quamputer renderings have demonstrated at least some capacity to act independently of their source.
In any case, Annie Murphy-Joan destroys the quamputer, apparently destroying all versions of reality residing within it. The episode then cuts to Source Joan having just done the same. Security escorts her and real-world Annie Murphy, whom Hayek had played in Annie Murphy-Joan’s layer of digital reality, out of the building and presumably to jail. The episode ends with a feel-good epilogue—a rarity inBlack Mirror. Source Joan eventually opens her own coffee shop, remains friends with Annie Murphy, and lives happily enough, even while under house arrest.
Does Everyone Die?
“Joan Is Awful” certainly seems, at first glance, to be one of the more light-hearted episodes of the series. Yet, it leaves the viewer wondering about all those digital people inside the now-obliterated quamputer. Did hacking it to pieces kill everyone inside? Can computer-generated people be considered alive to begin with? With therecent rise of public-facing artificial intelligencecapable of generating convincing human language, these questions feel particularly pressing. Can AI really think, or does it merely appear to do so?
The answer to that last question lies well outside the scope of audiences, butBlack Mirror’s answer—at least with respect to its own characters—may remain within reach. Some of the show’s most memorable episodes, like “San Junipero” and “USS Callister,” have tackled the subject of life after digital upload. Neither of those examples nor any others, however, have explicitly confirmed nor denied the existence ofanything like a virtual soul. Additionally, each episode ofBlack Mirrordoes not necessarily take place in a shared universe nor abide by a consistent set of rules.
In narrative terms, however, the dramatic effect of episodes like those listed above depends entirely upon the viewer’s investment in the lives of digital people. Even moments in “Joan Is Awful” rely on the assumption that the audience sympathizes with characters that exist only inside a computer. This suggests at least an ambivalent series-wide view of artifical personhood. Indeed,Black Mirrorthrives onthe line between human and machine.
It seems unlikely, then, that most of what the audience sees in “Joan Is Awful” serves only as a cleverly filtered allegory for the off-screen activities of Source Joan and Annie Murphy. As mentioned above, characters generated by the quamputer appear capable of independent thought. Viewers could interpret this to be merely the result of complicated quantum algorithms, butBlack Mirror’s blurry stance on machine-human hybridity makes such a conclusion improbable.
The show has demonstrated a commitment to questioning the difference between human and machine. Consequently, it feels likely that thestory’s superficially happy endingmay be intended to trouble rather than appease the viewer.Black Mirroris a show that wants to make its audience question the daily comforts of technology. The unwitting execution of countless digital people seems exactly like the kind of thing fans of the show could—and should—expect.
Black MirrorSeason 6 is available now to stream on Netflix.
MORE:Stephen King’s Children of The Corn: What Makes the Children Evil?
