Black Mirror very often makes scathing and pointed critiques of technology and how it is integrated into modern society. “The Entire History of You”, the episode we watched, is certainly no different. It proposes a near future where we are able to save our memories in a mental implant, and access them at will either in our minds or on a screen. The story revolves around a specific group of friends, where a man named Liam grows increasingly suspicious of his wife’s relationship with a man named Jonas. As the episode progresses, he uses this technology to force the information out of Jonas and his wife, ultimately concluding that the child he had with his wife was not in fact his.

What struck me about this episode wasn’t so much how the technology factored into the plot, as black mirror tends to intend, but how Liam, for all his correct suspicions, still ultimately destroys his life. His behavior is reprehensible throughout the episode; He insults his wife on a mere suspicion of wrongdoing, assaults Jonas and forces him to (quite literally) forget Liam’s wife, and then forces his wife to recall her affair with Jonas on screen so Liam can inspect it for use of a condom, helping to decide whether or not their child is truly Liam’s. Yet, despite all of the show’s critique (and rightfully so!) of Liam’s behavior, it ultimately shows that all of his suspicions were correct. This leads me to wonder if a deeper point is being made here. Perhaps the episode suggests that we shouldn’t want to know what others think of us. We are all complex people, and have complex thoughts. A fact of this complexity is that we often have very mixed feelings and relationships with those around us, particularly those close to us. Even those we love, we all too often fail to think of kindly. And we do love them, of course, but we do not always think or do what we ought to should we love them. And this is not a fault, this is human. But in order for ourselves to be happy, we need to control our negative opinions of those around us, keep them close, and not let them destroy our relationships, romantic or otherwise. “The Entire History of You” presents a world in which this is no longer possible, and our full complexity is laid to bare for the entire world to see. Can we be faulted for not always thinking or behaving kindly to the ones we love? I would say not. Perhaps, instead, we should just be moderately afraid of knowing, since we will inevitably be disappointed.