Recap / Black Mirror: Beyond the Sea

Recap: Black Mirror Series Six
Joan Is Awful | Loch Henry | Beyond the Sea | Mazey Day | Demon 79

"A man sleeps in the sky while his mechanical image walks the earth.[...] Defying nature must come at a cost or what will become of us all?"

David: I know the way you look at me.
Lana: At you?

In an alternate 1969, two astronauts — David (Josh Hartnett) and Cliff (Aaron Paul) — on a years-long space mission can link their respective consciousnesses to lifelike robotic replicas on Earth. To keep David from falling into despair after tragedy strikes his beloved family, Cliff and his lonely wife Lana (Kate Mara) agree to let David use Cliff's robotic body for an hour every week. This goes badly.

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Tropes:

• Abusive Parents: Cliff is shown to be a less than ideal parent to his son, whom he is emotionally neglectful toward and later is revealed to have hit numerous times before, explaining his dismissal of David doing the same thing to him while in his replica.
• Alphabetical Theme Naming: The home invaders: Kappa, Sigma, Theta and Epsilon.
• Alternate Techline: Despite taking place in the late 60s and having some very advanced technology that doesn't exist even in the 2020s (like realistic androids or Brain Upload), the rest of the technology seen is pretty standard for the time, such as in the cinema seen when David and his family go to the movies or the printed newspapers.
• Alone with the Psycho: The note the episode ends on: After discovering David murdered his family, Cliff exits the dream machine, and finds David silently sitting at a table, gesturing for him to sit down.
• Artificial Gravity: Onboard the space station, Cliff and David are able to walk around normally as they do on Earth.
• Bait-and-Switch: Toward the end of the episode, David falsely reports a coolant problem and sends Cliff into space to investigate. When Cliff realizes there is nothing wrong, David takes longer than necessary to let him back in, giving the impression that he had abandoned him out there to die. However. after a few minutes, he lets him back in and it's revealed that David's delayed response was due to him being up to something far more sinister — murdering Cliff's family using his replica.
• Beard of Sorrow: Cleanshaven family man David grows a shaggy beard after the deaths of his family. He shaves it off again before murdering Cliff's family.
• Bloody Handprint: The first sign that something is not right at his home is Cliff seeing his bloody hands and finding bloody hand smears around his house.
• Brain Uploading: Essentially how the replicas work. The real David and Cliff are on a space station but are able to transfer their consciousness to an exact replica of themselves on Earth.
• Chekhov's Gun: Early on, it's shown that David and Cliff need to remove their personal items, including the dogtags that they use to transfer themselves over to their replicas, when they go on a spacewalk, which is what David takes advantage of to use Cliff's replica one last time to murder his family.
• Crazy Jealous Guy: Played with; after Cliff finds David's sketches of Lana in the nude, he angrily accuses her of having slept with him, simply because David once mentioned that he "draws from memory". Lana has to repeatedly assert that nothing happened before Cliff finally accepts it.
• Dance of Romance: David's happy marriage is established when he pulls his wife into a romantic dance that turns hot and heavy. He tries the same tactic with Lana.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: The way the hippies expressed disgust towards David's wife having a relationship with a "metal man" and justifying their murders of her and his children for living "unnaturally" have some creepy parralels to real-life racial supremacists, specially white nationalists, who deem those in interracial relationships as "race traitors".
• Downer Ending: The episode ends with David in Cliff's replicant body killing Cliff's family. The two men end up in their normal bodies in the spacecraft loathing each other, but with no recourse in the vastness of space. The episode ends there, leaving it open to interpretation what they do next.
• Dramatic Irony: The bookstore cashier greets "Cliff" and asks after David, not knowing that she's talking to David in Cliff's body.
• Evil Luddite: The hippies who invade David's home, especially the ringleader, are all this - they see his robot body and the technology behind it as an anomaly and offense to the "natural order" and consider this enough reason to kill him. They go as far as murdering the rest of his family, including his children, in the process for trying to "pretend they're a normal family" and having a relationship with a "metal man".
• Faux Affably Evil: Downplayed: After Cliff discovers that David had used his replica to murder his family, he exits the dream machine in near-tears, and finds David quietly sitting at a table. During this tense moment, David merely kicks a chair over to Cliff, and silently invites him to sit down with him. This, barring one final shot of the spacecraft drifting through space to the strains of "La Mer", is how the episode ends.
• Foil: The kind, passionate, and loving David to the much more stoic, uptight, and rigid Cliff. David’s kindness in Cliff’s body eventually leads Lana to develop complicated feelings for the new Cliff.
• Forced to Watch: David's replica is forced to watch his family being slain by the cultists.
• Foreshadowing:
  • David's innocuous, but notable insight into Lana's personality in an early scene aboard the ship.
  • Early on, Cliff comments that his and David's ship requires two people to operate and maintain its functionality, meaning if one of them is incapacitated, both men are dead meat. This plays a part in David's later plan. While David has the option of stealing Cliff's life after leaving him to die in space, he won't be able to enjoy it for long, so he has to settle for slaughtering Cliff's family. Likewise, Cliff is unable to retaliate because he won't live long afterwards either.
• Hands-On Approach: The first hint that David is pushing his established boundaries in the arrangement with Cliff and Lana is that he offers to let Lana paint some leaves on the painting he's making, then leaning behind her to help her correct it.
• Hope Spot: Just as Lana appears to be reciprocating David's feelings, she tells him to back off and reminds him that she only loves her husband and is attracted to David because she sees her husband in him. Cliff eventually returns home after learning of David's attraction to Lana, and they have a confrontation that ends with the couple making amends with each other, suggesting that things will become better for them. The episode ends with David murdering Cliff's family after Cliff coldly reminds him that Lana is his and his alone and lying to him that Lana hates him, thinks he's disgusting and never wants to see him again, even though in reality she admits to Cliff that she was attracted to David but knew that going further than that was wrong.
• Horror Hippies: A bunch of ax-crazy hippie cultists murder David's family.
• If I Can't Have You…: This seems to be David's motive to kill Cliff's wife and son since he just learned that Cliff forbid any further visits.
• Intimate Artistry: David befriends and becomes attracted to Cliff's wife Lana while in Cliff's body (it's complicated). The episode goes downhill after Cliff realizes that David is making nude art of Lana.
• Leave Me Alone!: Cliff tries to comfort David after the death of his family. David screams at him to leave him alone.
  David: I SAID GET OUT OF HERE!
• Machine Blood: To the hippy cult's disgust, David's android body bleeds a yellow-green oily substance when they cut off his arm.
  Kappa: Oh, you don't even bleed right.
• Manly Tears: David, in Cliff’s body, breaks down into tears after seeing Earth again for the first time since his family’s murder.
• Mood Lighting: In the opening scenes, David's happy family life is lit in warm colors, Cliff's unhappy family life in cool colors.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Cliff and Lana decide to let David use Cliff's replica to help him out after the loss of his family. Ultimately, that causes Cliff to lose his own family too. Though it should be noted that Cliff's good deed was also in his own self-interest; he needed David to be stable to help man the spaceship.
• No Historical Figures Were Harmed: The deaths of David's happy but famous Californian family to a bunch of hippie cultists in 1969 is an obvious parallel to the Manson family murders. Rory Culkin plays the ringleader, an analog to Charles Manson.
• No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup:
  • NASA has a six-year mission in a spaceship that requires a minimum of two crew members to operate... so, of course, they only send up two astronauts. Sure hope neither of them gets injured, or sick, or dies unexpectedly during those six years.
  • Similarly, apparently NASA didn't have any extra replicas available after David's was destroyed by the Horror Hippies.
• Nothing Is Scarier: The only clues we are given that show David murdered Cliff's family are the fact that Replica!Cliff's hands are covered in blood, there's several blood smears along the walls leading to the living room, and there's a giant blood puddle on the floor. But with Cliff collapsing in grief and horror, it's easy to imagine what David had done.
• Nuclear Family: David has the picturesque midcentury family life: gorgeous house, beautiful and happy wife, two cheerful kids. It's in contrast to Cliff's gloomier rural farmhouse, occupied by his lonely wife and son.
• Opposites Attract: Austere, reticent, reclusive Cliff and cultured, compassionate, sociable Lana. David's attempt to sell himself as a better match for her ends badly.
• Protagonist Journey to Villain: David starts out as an innocent figure who lost his family in a tragic massacre and grows into a more morally ambiguous but still sympathetic person as his feelings for Cliff's wife and life in general stem from the tragic loss of his own family's death. It explodes into full-blown psychopathy as he kills everyone in Cliff's family after being refused a chance to see his wife one last time.
• Ridiculously Human Robots: Civilians interacting with the robotic replicas of Cliff and David (who have their respective consciousnesses from up in space) comment on how lifelike the bodies are. They are obviously robotic beneath the skin.
• Robosexual: Variation. While up in space, the astronauts send their consciousnesses into Ridiculously Human Robot replicas down on Earth. It's these replicants that sleep with their wives. David's family is killed for it (and his replica destroyed) because the Manson-esque killers find the notion of a woman sharing her bed with a robot abhorrent.
• Robotic Reveal: When the cultists sever David's forearm.
• Sexless Marriage: In contrast to David and his wife, who are obviously loved up, Cliff and Lana have a more frigid marriage. Lana has been lonely ever since Cliff uprooted them to live in a rural farmhouse, and even though Cliff can spend time with her in his replica they are aloof from each other. She briefly entertains the seduction of David-in-Cliff's-body before collecting herself because it felt like her husband was back and actually wanted her.
• Targeted to Hurt the Hero: David tricks Cliff into handing over his tag so that he can fridge Cliff's wife as revenge for Cliff's personal comments towards him and withdrawal of permission to use his body. David wants Cliff to experience the same kind of grief and isolation that he has.
• There Are No Therapists: You would think that after such a horrible tragedy, ground control would do something more for David than advise Cliff to leave him be.
• Titled After the Song: "Beyond the Sea" takes its title from Bobby Darin's "Beyond the Sea" — the original French version, "La Mer", plays in the opening scene while David fingers his wife after a dance in the house. He tries the same trick with Lana later.
• Too Dumb to Live: Cliff, who's just made a bitter enemy of the untrustworthy and unstable David, takes no precautions to protect his person in the dream machine and puts himself at David's mercy in the vacuum of space. His faith is arguably justified, as one of their deaths would doom the other — indeed, Cliff survives — but his family pays for it.
• Too Happy to Live: David's affectionate and adoring wife and kids get the chop to start the episode's dramatic arc.
• Tragic Villain: David winds up becoming this by the end. While he over-extends his bounds in using Cliff's replica, and eventually snaps and murders Cliff's family, these events only happened because David's own family was murdered by a group of Manson-expies.
• Wham Shot: Two-fold in the closing minutes:
  • After being let back into the spacecraft after discovering the coolant problem was a false alarm, Cliff gets out of his spacesuit and begins reacquiring his personal effects from David... only to notice his dogtags are missing. David doesn't respond when Cliff asks where they went, only pulls them out of his pocket.
  • Fully understanding what this implies, Cliff promptly rushes back to the machine to activate his replica. Upon "waking up", he finds himself sitting in the replica's recharging station... and notices his hands are bloodied. He then proceeds to follow a blood trail all the way downstairs... and falls to his knees in horror.

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