History Recap / BlackMirrorArkangel

* AnAesop:
** Children need privacy and to learn how to deal with fears and mistakes on their own. (For example, Sara eventually stops being scared of the neighbour's barking dog once Marie stops using the blur function.)
** Eventually, your children will grow up and do stupid things you won't approve of. That's normal. There's nothing you can do about it, and the best you can do is make yourself a trusted person they can turn to instead of trying to control every facet of their lives, which will only drive them away if not make them rebel harder against your rules.
** If you shelter and smother your children and don't teach them the information they need to navigate adulthood, relationships, etc, they'll find it out anyway, and not always from a good source.
** For better or worse, the parent-child relationship comes with a power dynamic ''heavily'' in favor of the parent, and a parent who feels powerless against the world has two options: invest power into the child so they will be not be powerless against the world as well, or extract power ''from'' the child in order to feel like the world isn't more powerful than the parent.

* BewareTheNiceOnes: Sara is a pleasant and friendly young woman with a healthy social life, but she's ''scary'' when sufficiently angered: when she discovers that her mother is still using the tablet, and fed her an abortion pill without her knowledge or consent, she bludgeons Marie into unconsciousness with the tablet in a fit of rage.

* ArtisticLicenseMedicine: The school nurse tells Sara that she's not pregnant anymore due to the emergency contraception. Contraception works by preventing a pregnancy, not terminating an already-existing one. However, given that every episode of ''Black Mirror'' takes place TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture, it could possibly be HandWaved that medical technology has advanced enough to make a pill that can work as either contraception or abortion.

* BothSidesHaveAPoint: In regards to Marie using the Arkangel tablet when Sara is 15. It is true that Sara is doing some questionable things (albeit ones fairly typical for a rebellious teenager), including trying drugs, lying to her mother where she's at, and having sex with her boyfriend Trick. However, the measures Marie takes to stomp out said behavior, including going to Trick's workplace to harass him and giving Sara a smoothie spiked with an abortion pill without her knowledge or consent, are clearly crossing a line.

* CoverInnocentEyesAndEars: The Arkangel tablet has a function to automatically blur out and muffle anything that is causing the child's stress levels to go higher than usual.

[[Recap/BlackMirrorUSSCallister USS Callister]] | '''[=ArkAngel=]''' | [[Recap/BlackMirrorCrocodile Crocodile]] | [[Recap/BlackMirrorHangTheDJ Hang the DJ]] | [[Recap/BlackMirrorMetalhead Metalhead]] | [[Recap/BlackMirrorBlackMuseum Black Museum]]-]]]]]

An overprotective mother, worried about her child's safety, keeps watch over her through [=ArkAngel=], a brain implant that allows her to know her daughter's location and see what her daughter is seeing at all times.

!!Tropes related to ''[=ArkAngel=]'':

* BothSidesHaveAPoint: In regards to Marie using the [=ArkAngel=] tablet when Sara is 15. It is true that Sara is doing some questionable things (albeit ones fairly typical for a rebellious teenager), including trying drugs, lying to her mother where she's at, and having sex with her boyfriend Trick. However, the measures Marie takes to stomp out said behavior, including going to Trick's workplace to harass him and giving Sara a smoothie spiked with an abortion pill without her knowledge or consent, are clearly crossing a line.

* ChekhovsGun: The smoothies that Marie prepares every morning for Sara's breakfast. When she finds out Sara is pregnant via the [=ArkAngel=] tablet, she secretly slips an abortion pill into her breakfast smoothie to terminate the pregnancy without her knowledge.

** The user interface on the [=ArkAngel=] tablet for viewing recorded history looks very similar to the redo menu for the Grain implant in "The Entire History of You".

* CoverInnocentEyesAndEars: The [=ArkAngel=] tablet has a function to automatically blur out and muffle anything that is causing the child's stress levels to go higher than usual.

* ExtremeMeleeRevenge: After finding out that her mother never got rid of the [=ArkAngel=] tablet, and secretly fed her an abortion pill, Sara unleashes a nasty one on her mother by smashing her head in with said tablet.
* EyeMotifs: The [=ArkAngel=] logo looks like an eye flanked by a pair of wings, representing its purpose of SinisterSurveillance.

* HappierTimesMontage: At the end, Marie briefly remembers Sara as a baby, child, preteen, and teenager saying, "I love you!" while frantically screaming her name, unable to find her after she has broken the [=ArkAngel=] tablet and run away from home for the first and last time.
* IdiotBall: There was no pressing reason for Marie to turn into a KnightTemplarParent upon finding out that Sara had lied to her about where she was going to hook up with a sketchy drug dealer. Even if she didn't want to reveal using the tablet again, she had found out about Sara not being where she said she was going to be through perfectly normal ways - all she had to do was wait up and subject Sara to the time-honored maternal "I am very DisappointedInYou, young lady, and YouAreGrounded" treatment when she got home. The implication seems to be that the shock made all her previous anxieties flare up and she couldn't think straight, or alternatively, that spending the first decade of Sara's life parenting through [=ArkAngel=] hasn't just messed with Sara's emotional growth, it means Marie hasn't ever developed the kind of parenting tools or experience needed to have those kinds of difficult conversations.
* {{iPhony}}: The packaging and charger of the [=ArkAngel=] tablet are almost ''identical'' to those included with Apple products.
* {{Irony}}: Marie decides to get Sara the [=ArkAngel=] technology due to almost losing Sara as a child when she wasn't looking. By the end of the episode, Marie has lost Sara for good because she wouldn't ''stop'' looking after her.

** Sara has one herself after beating Marie to near death with the [=ArkAngel=] tablet before running away from home.

* NoHoldsBarredBeatdown: Sara beats Marie into unconsciousness with the [=ArkAngel=] tablet when she discovers that her mother was not only spying on her after a period of time without the [=ArkAngel=] technology being a part of their lives, but has been interfering with her personal life on top of that.

* PerceptionFilter: The [=ArkAngel=] has one as an option which blurs out any sights or sounds that would cause Sara distress, such as the dog that keeps barking at her whenever she passes by. It also means that she can't perceive her grandfather having a heart attack, or his pleas for her to get the phone. Marie turns it off when Sara is 10, but it briefly comes back on again while Sara is beating Marie with the tablet, so she can't see how much damage she's doing to her mother until the filter turns off again.
* PlugNPlayTechnology: ZigZaggedTrope - while the (by then) 10 years old proprietary [=ArkAngel=] tablet can still interact with a computer built TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture, there seems to be no way to access the signal from Sara's chip from any other device. It's likely that, since the [=ArkAngel=] was banned, the software is also unavailable.

* TheRunaway: At the end, Sara breaks the [=ArkAngel=] tablet and runs away from home to god-knows-where.
* SelfHarm: As a pre-teen, Sara tries to see what blood looks like by drawing it on a piece of paper. When the implant blurs even that out, she gets frustrated and starts stabbing her finger with a pencil. This is the incident that convinces Marie to stop using the [=ArkAngel=] tablet for a few years.

* SurprisinglyRealisticOutcome: Unlike what is par for the course in ''Black Mirror'', the piece of technology in the episode ends up not becoming widely used in society. The massive violation of privacy the [=ArkAngel=] technology presents seems to have been realized within the universe, as it's stated that by the time Sara is a child the chip has been [[BannedInChina banned in Europe and will most likely be pulled from the US as well]].

* WellIntentionedExtremist: Marie put Sara in the [=ArkAngel=] experiment just because she cared about her daughter, but she ended up violating her privacy and free will on disturbing levels.

[[Recap/BlackMirrorUSSCallister USS Callister]] | '''Arkangel''' | [[Recap/BlackMirrorCrocodile Crocodile]] | [[Recap/BlackMirrorHangTheDJ Hang the DJ]] | [[Recap/BlackMirrorMetalhead Metalhead]] | [[Recap/BlackMirrorBlackMuseum Black Museum]]-]]]]]

!!Tropes related to ''Arkangel'':

** One of the first things in the episode is Marie wailing Sara's name in the street after she's disappeared. The episode ends with her doing the same after Sara's smashed the tablet and run away.