Black Mirror's Common People

a few thoughts (and spoilers)

Black Mirror has released a new season. I just finished the first episode and I have… thoughts. This show has steadily gotten worse over the years, but I still always like to check it out. Season 7’s premiere is called, “Common People.” It centers around the life of a couple, Amanda and Mike. When Amanda suddenly suffers a neurological event at work, leaving her comatose and unlikely to wake up, Mike goes for a drastic solution. The hows and whys of this tech aren’t important here. Think of it as a cognitive implant to replace the damaged areas of Amanda’s brain. It comes at a steep price (not a big lump sum, monthly payments, forever) but Mike would do anything to get Amanda back, so he agrees.

Amanda begins to recover and the treatment feels like a miracle, but it isn’t perfect for long. She soon begins to deteriorate and have strange side effects, resulting in her having to leave her job. This makes the finances even tighter. The biotech company that created the implant keeps upselling Mike and Amanda on better treatment plans, promising relief and better quality of life, but neglecting to divulge the fine print. Eventually, the upgrades and costs become too much. Mike is using a twitch-stream style website to do whatever nasty thing his viewers want for cash, whether that’s drinking his own urine or pulling out a tooth (This felt shoe-horned in to make this episode pass the “edgy” test. It failed.) Eventually, they just can’t afford the quality of life Amanda wants or deserves. She tells Mike she’s ready to go. Mike smothers her with a pillow. The end!

If you eliminate the cognitive implant of it all, this episode looks eerily similar to my life. Amanda is always sleeping, her brain needs a ton of rest. She initially balks at the doctor telling her she needs twelve hours, meanwhile my neurologist says I need fourteen. The way Mike takes care of her, the quiet tenderness, it all felt familiar to me. The way he worried, the particular ways in which Amanda was worn out from her health issues, it felt true to my experience having epilepsy and mild brain damage. Amanda goes into convulsions at one point in the car and I just watched like, “Been there, babes.”

At first glance, this episode could be an interesting representation of healthcare and disability in America. A byzantine system where the sicker you are, the more expensive it gets, and on and on and on, until death do you part. This could’ve been instructive, useful even, to show people how it feels to live on razor thin margins for the sake of something as crucial as your health, how it feels to think of yourself as a burden in your relationships, or just how frustrating it is to deal with our cold, expensive, complicated medical system. But they ruined it with the ending.

The solution to neurological decline can’t possibly be to just kill her. I know she asked him to, and this situation is a heightened one, but this episode wasn’t a portrait of decades of brutal decline. From my understanding, this was only over the course several years. Her decline was marginal, but keeping her alive was expensive. Mike getting $35 to stick his tongue in a mousetrap over webcam doesn’t actually tell us how desperate he is for money (Him doing crazy shit online for barely any money seemed to be the only way he was trying raise funds. Aside from him working hella overtime on a job he got fired from because a guy from work saw him online doing disgusting shit.) Financial burdens on the disabled are all too common, but it did not feel like it was time for him to smother her with a pillow. (I think they added that to pass the “edgy” test too. Possibly also the “tragic” test.) Upon further reflection, it feels like this episode might have been infected with some ableism. A disability bias, at least. It feels like the people who wrote this story think of disability as something so horrendous, so shitty, that they’d rather die. (Or perhaps whatever AI was involved learned ableism from the training data.)

If this episode were done right, it could’ve had me on my knees! It could have made me feel seen, it could’ve made me feel like the disabled aren’t basically a forgotten population. It could’ve made me feel like there are people out there who give a fuck about these issues!

But it didn’t do any of those things. Instead, they just killed her.

I’ve seen people call this episode “the darkest story in years.” And to that I say…

Some people are living it.

That’s it. Bye!