Her songs don’t communicate what Ashley feels inside, rather what extensive market research has proven sells. Ashley O does not exist she is an artificial personality, created not by Ashley herself but by her aunt. In this case, his target is the music industry. Fans point at its underdeveloped concepts such as cloning and artificial intelligence (both of which have been explored thoroughly in previous episodes, such as “Be Right Back,” and “White Christmas”), and accuse its feel-good ending of being a symptom of the infamously bleak show losing its uncompromisingly sinister edge, despite the fact that there are several episodes, including “USS Callister” and “San Junipero,” that also concluded with a positive note.īlack Mirror‘s Season 5 episode ‘Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too.’ Netflixīut the changes these complaints would propose, of disrupting the narrative and altering the tone, would evidently detract from what Brooker is trying to accomplish here, and what he has been trying to accomplish with the show since its earliest conception: to expose the lies and hypocrisies of society. Starring Miley Cyrus as the titular Ashley, known cringe-worthily to millions of teenage girls as ‘Ashley O,’ the episode is a sharp critique on the ethics of stardom, one that eerily mirrors the real child actress’ escape from her confining role as Disney’s child-friendly Hannah Montana and subsequent change into her very own music icon.ĭespite being the undisputed best of what Brooker has to offer this time around, “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too,” has, far from being praised for its originality, been lamented for its untapped potential. If the season will be remembered for anything, it is its third and final episode, “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too,” about a young pop star looking to take back control of her career, art and indeed her life, all of which are carefully groomed by her evil entrepreneurial aunt. Subscribe to Observer’s Entertainment NewsletterĪnd to top that off, two of the season’s three episodes prove to be underwhelming and mediocre at best, introducing neither gripping narratives nor intriguing themes, and certainly not showing us anything we haven’t already seen.
Against all expectations, the fifth season only contains half that number, reminding us of the days when writer Charlie Brooker’s now world-dominating dark creation was but an obscure independent production, occupying an equally dark time slot for three episodes per season on Britain’s Channel 4. Technically, the number of episodes per season is not set in stone until the air date, but ever since the aforementioned streaming giant took over production in 2016, that number appeared to be fixed at six. The next meal they were waiting for turned out to be a meager one. Only last December, Netflix hoped to satiate hungry viewers with the innovative interactive feature “Bandersnatch,” but unfortunately this unorthodox if not unengaging piece of entertainment proved little more than a sub-par appetizer, one that made fans increasingly impatient for the main course. Historically, production on the show has always been sporadic and inconsistent, as deliberately enigmatic and existentially unreliable as the nightmarish societies reflected in its stories.
#What is the black mirror about series#
The fifth season of the critically acclaimed dystopian sci-fi anthology series Black Mirror finally arrived on Netflix last Thursday, but fans aren’t that happy with it, and for good reason.