WARNING: Spoilers Ahead
Arkangel
The second installment of the 4th Season of the neonoir/thriller anthology Black Mirror is a much smaller scale, serious family drama than the first episode: USS Callister. Arkangel opens on a woman, Marie (Rose Marie Dewitt) in the bloody middle of a C-section. She gives birth to her baby and immediately the doctors take her to another table and start inspecting the baby. This makes Marie panic about her child's health. This is the first association Marie has with her child and provides the main thrust of the episode.
Storyline
The story moves to the child, Sara, as a preschooler. Her mother briefly loses her one day when Sara follows a cat away from the playground while the mother chats with another mom. Spurred by the trauma of this event, Marie enrolls Sara in a beta launch program, Arkangel, which provides state of the art child monitoring services by implanting a chip inside the child's brain that allows for POV views, health stats, and stressful event filtering, all available on a ipad-esque app.
During the implantation scene at the Arkangel offices, the technician tells Marie that Sara's iron levels are low and she should put her on supplements. The technician also shows Marie how to work the stress filters, and while Marie initially rebuffs the optional filter, she soon finds use for it in blurring out a threatening dog that spiked Sara's cortisol levels every day on their morning strolls and the mother leaves the filter on. One day while Marie's father is looking after Sara he has a heart attack and she can't tell what is happening to him because of the filter. However, the app notifies Marie that Sara has elevated stress levels and she discovers what has happened to her father. The filtering of the event seems to stunt Sara in ways we do not yet know.
This episode did a slick job showing the passing of time in Sarah's life. The most impactful of these is when preschool Sarah swings in and out of the swing set her mother has now bought so she doesn't have to take her to the park, then elementary school Sara swings into frame. We see that the child filter is still on. Sara seems developmentally stunted by the filter, and begins stab herself with her pencil after the blood coming from a picture she drew of a stick man bleeding is filtered. She draws this picture after an older boy, Trick, tries to explain it to her. Marie takes Sara to a psychiatrist, and in this scene we learn Arkangel was never released in Europe and would be out of business before the end of the year. Marie decides to turn off the filter. After the filter is turned off Trick shows Sara porn and beheading videos.
We have another slick transition scene and Sara is now 15 and smitten with Trick, who now works at a furniture store and also sells cocaine. Arkangel has been off all this time until one night when Sara lies to Marie and says she is going to a friend's house to watch the "Breakfast Gang" -- Breakfast Club when in reality she goes to a lake bonfire with Trick. Marie makes calls and finds out Sara is not with her friend and starts to worry so she turns on the Arkangel app. When she turns on the POV camera she sees Tricks face while he is on top of Sara, and even thogu she is a virgin, she says, 'Fuck me harder' which is what the women in the porno she was shown when she was younger said. The mother is clearly shaken but does not say anything when Sara comes home late.
The next time Sara tells Marie she is spending time with one of her friends after school she goes to hang with Trick and she convinces him to let her try cocaine and when the app alerts Marie to possible drug use, she sees Trick again in the POV cam after Sara takes down a fat line of coke. Marie then uses a futuristic face seeker app to track down Trick and tell him to leave her daughter alone. Trick rebuffing Sara at her mother's behest sends Sara into a tailspin. Also at this time Marie receives an alert from Arkangel. We see Marie go to the pharmacy then smash up some sort of pill to put in Sara's morning smoothie (smoothies have been a thing since the tech told Marie to put her girl on some supplements).
Sara later gets sick during class and vomits. In the next scene the nurse informs Sara she threw up a E-C pill which is a plan b type pill and that Sara is no longer pregnant. Sara is freaking out because she did not know of taking any such pill and did not know she was pregnant. She goes through the trash and finds the pill box. Then she ransacks her mothers room and finds the Arkangel tablet and app. Marie comes home and sees the trash. Then she goes upstairs and sees the tablet on the bed, and she picks it up, and she sees someone looking at her back.
Marie and Sara yell at each other then get in a fight over the tablet at which point the tablet turns on the safe filter, and Sara proceeds to beat the shit out of her mother's face with the tablet until the filter turns off. Very poignant, brutal moment.
Sara then runs away and Marie comes, grabs the broken tablet and goes outside and screams for Sara, but she is not there and Marie can't see where she is because the tablet will not work. This shot is similar to a shot earlier in the episode when Marie loses Sara as a preschooler. Also a very poignant moment.
The last shot is Sara hitchhiking and being picked up by a tanker on a bridge with very ominous overtones.
Analysis/Thoughts
Jodie Foster directs a slow burn that while maybe be more rooted in family dynamics and relationships than most Black Mirror episodes, ultimately touches on the darkness of technology that at first seems helpful and how damaging it may be, which is the true essence of Black Mirror. Foster nails the mother-daughter relationship dynamic and all her shots have purpose and build upon each other. No moments are wasted and while the pacing and beats may be more subtle than Black Mirror viewers may be used to, it is a beautifully haunting episode.
Photos: IMDB
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