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Black Mirror, the franchise that added ‘techno-paranoia’ to our collective vocabulary, now moves away from the unsettling mix of anxiety and excitement it instills within us to explore a topic we have rarely witnessed from the creators before: what if the future isn’t chilling, but instinctively heart-wrenching?
The gentle revelation of “Eulogy,” season 7’s fifth episode, takes a different turn. It now features an attic filled with memories, an Alzheimer’s afflicted Paul Giamatti attempting to remember the visage of his lost lover, and gentle reminiscing, devoid of any surveillance, shapeshifting, sadism, and sadistic compassion of a video game-style dystopian future.
And this somehow hurts more than any of the episodes have ever affected viewers.
A future that feels like the past
In “Eulogy,” we follow Philip (Giamatti), a withdrawn individual who is emotionally frozen in time. His loneliness is shattered when a drone drops a package right outside his doorstep. It is a letter from Eulogy, seeking to include his memories in a digital monument for his ex-girlfriend, Carol, who died not too long ago. He refuses at first, saying he doesn’t remember her. He might even believe that is true.
Nonetheless, grief can hit us when we least expect it. So can memories.
Similar to the style of Black Mirror, where they use technology like the sleek, disc-shaped Nubbin shown in season four’s USS Callister, Philip begins the process of uploading his memories to relive them.
But he doesn't watch them; he actively experiences them. Instead of snapshots, each moment is transformed into a 3D hyperreal scene, heartbreakingly grainy like a living Polaroid. An AI assistant who is annoyingly cheerful (wonderfully acted by Patsy Ferran) steps in to help with the process.
While browsing the digital shards of his memories, looking for the details lost with time, he comes across Eulogy and begins to strip away the remnants of his life that dominate an unfulfilled existence.
Giamatti’s elegy
Let us get this out of the way: Paul Giamatti is nothing short of magnificent. In an episode that is, for a long stretch, mostly one prolonged monologue self-contained in silence, he fashions a complete human form - sighs, glances, and the occasional cracked joke.
Philip is not easy to like, and the show does not ask us to. But seeing him recall the dinner where everything came crashing down, or the party where it all began, we are invited to empathize, even if his lack of absolution remains unforgivable.
Giamatti performs this episode as if it were a one-man stage drama, and it works because Eulogy is not concerned with the capture of marvels but with the hushed catastrophe of absence.
The tangibility of memory
What Eulogy captures—and what is so moving about it—is that memory is not static. It shifts. It deceives. It masks the worst and blunts the harshest realities. The future of grief, as painted here, isn’t a cold upload or an algorithmic resurrection. It’s remembering as an act of digging—using technology not to escape the past but to face it.
Where prior episodes with their “better” pasts (San Junipero, Be Right Back) leveraged nostalgia as a weapon, Eulogy hands us no solace in thinking we’re able to bring the dead back to life. It gives a harsher, and some might say, a kinder, human notion: that we can, if we so choose, understand them—and ourselves—much better.
Final verdict: A softer Black Mirror, still sharp
For quite some time, Charlie Brooker has compared the show to a 'box of chocolates'—some of which contain dark surprises while others are unexpectedly sweet. Eulogy might be the richest of all. It does not pretend to be a Black Mirror episode, and it does not pretend to be one.
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By taking the show's foundational concept, our discomforting relationship with the technologies we create, and wrapping it in feeling instead of fear, this show delivers something we rarely expect from it: hope.
Not an unearned, childlike kind of hope. Rather, the kind that stays in your mind after the credits roll. The kind that suggests, perhaps, that technology has the potential to aid us in preserving what is most important for us— if we allow it.
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