Black Mirror season 6 episode 3: Josh Hartnett on shock ending
Here’s a quick summary of what went down here. David (Josh Hartnett) and Cliff (Aaron Paul) are both astronauts aboard a deep-space mission, who are also able to transmit their human body into robotic avatars back home to feel less alone. However, David’s family is murdered by radicals early on, which leads to a situation here where Cliff decides to allow his co-pilot use of his own body and life for a time. However, things get chaotic when “David” in Cliff’s body starts to forge a connection to Cliff’s wife Lana, played by Kata Mara.
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Eventually, Cliff grows wary of these interactions and bans David from seeing Lana again … which then leads to David trapping Cliff outside the ship before heading down to Earth to kill Lana and her son with Cliff.
So why do this at the end of such a large mission? Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, here is how Hartnett justified the choice:
“I had to think about this a lot before we even came to rehearsals, because I have to make it work … I don’t get to decide what he ends up doing. That’s what he does, and now I gotta figure out why. So in my opinion, it was a choice in his mind between killing himself, killing Cliff and assuming his role on Earth (but thereby killing himself, because you can’t operate the ship with one person), or doing this. Those were the three things.
“[He] doesn’t expect to feel anything again. He wants to kill himself, clearly. But when he puts himself in the airlock and Cliff brings him back and then offers him this new possibility of hope and a semblance of something that feels like humanity, this little fire starts to light inside of him again after this horrible event when he thought it was all over. But then it’s taken away. When Cliff tells him ‘Lana thinks you’re a creep and doesn’t want to see you again,’ that light gets snuffed out and something snaps. It’s like, ‘I want you to feel what I’m feeling so that then you’ll understand what it feels like to have that light snuffed out. That is the only way that we can actually connect.’ I think that’s what he does.”
All of this serves as a reminder that Black Mirror is a really dark show, one that dives into everything from technology to loneliness to mental health. Even though “Beyond the Sea” took place decades ago, it stillholds a lot of resonance in the present.
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What did you think about the overall events that we saw on Black Mirror season 6 episode 3?
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(Photo: Netflix.)
This article was written by Jessica BunBun.