“What’s your favourite episode of Black Mirror” is a fun and sometimes revealing conversation. People use criteria ranging from which is the funniest, the darkest, the most terrifyingly plausible, or the most bitingly satirical. Some prefer the rougher-around-the-edges, idiosyncratically British early days; others the glossier Netflix-funded American era. The closest to a consensus might be “San Junipero”, episode four of season three, which opens disorientingly in the 1980s and turns out to be the pleasant mind simulation of old people wired up in a futuristic retirement home. It’s interesting this one tops so many best-of lists given it is arguably the most uplifting episode of Black Mirror ever, one of the few that seems to say: hey, technology, it’s not all bad!
The show’s erraticism is part of its charm; a hallmark of how prepared it is to take risks. Some episodes fizzle out, others soar, but they all, pretty much, shoot for the stars. That’s why you respect it, even when you don’t like it. For what it is worth, the criteria I use is something like this: In some episodes, the technology wears the characters like props. In the better examples, it’s the other way around. Judged that way, there is a clear winner: one Charlie Brooker didn’t actually write himself.
“The Entire History of You” was the third and final episode of season one, released way back in 2011. By rights, it should have dated horribly. Written by Jess Armstrong at the height of Peep Show’s run (and long before Succession), its premise sits in the sweet spot between queasy sci-fi and near-future plausibility. Everyone has a microchip implanted behind their ear that records all the eyes see, and allows memories to be played back in real-time like they’re clips on YouTube. It came out at a time when people were still unironically posting pictures of their flat whites to Instagram – which was brand new – and Facebook still felt buzzy and nothing like the ghost train it is today. We were just dipping our toes into documenting every step on social media. It still felt relatively clumsy and authentic; we hadn’t yet become shrewd self-marketeers. “The Entire History of You” arrived in this relatively innocent moment to give us, like all good dystopias, an anxiety we hadn’t quite noticed yet, about how our memories were being packaged and fed back to us.
But “The Entire History of You” isn’t really about technology. It’s about love and jealousy and the eternal dilemma of whether it’s better to know about a partner’s past or remain in the dark (in an era obsessed with ‘body counts’, this feels oddly more timely than ever). At a pitch-perfect middle-class dinner party, Jodie Whittaker’s Ffion brings her new(ish) husband Liam (Toby Kebbell) to meet her old university friends, including a slimy old flame called Jonas (Tom Cullen). The two men instantly hate each other, and every moment of their blossoming froideur is perfectly observed. When an outsider at the table reveals that she - shock horror - has opted out of having a chip, the guests react with a mix of envy, bemusement and patronising dismissal that will be familiar to vegans, polyamorists or anyone who has ever had to reveal an alternative lifestyle choice to strangers. The timelessness of this is clever and comforting: tech will change; how we interact around it may not.
But the heart of the episode is a story that stretches back to at least the middle ages, and Kebbell’s excellent performance as a man consumed by jealousy. When Liam finds out there is history between Ffion and Jones, he replays his memory of the evening on a loop, forensically examining it for signs of romance between them – a glance here and there, an overstated laugh there. The self-righteous, mocking tone and random outbursts of viciousness as he flounders about in his insecurity are painfully real, as is Whittaker’s wounded, worried response. In short, it’s proper drama.
Are there any signs in “The Entire History of You” that Armstrong would eventually create Succession? How a writer from Shropshire went from producing an era-defining sitcom that could only be made in Britain to an era-defining prestige drama that felt like it could only belong to America is a head-scratcher, so it’s tempting to look for clues. The episode opens with a boardroom scene of sorts – albeit a low-level job appraisal – but there is no great effort there to dissect corporate culture. It is ironically the episode’s weakest scene – a little cartoonish, and ultimately mere table setting for the relationship drama.
At a stretch you might say Liam and Ffion’s argument is how Shiv and Tom would have acted towards each other had they been less anesthetised by money and power, or were just more honest people. I’d go as far as to say Succession might have benefitted from more of the emotional rawness in “The Entire History of You” and fewer zingers when building their arc. But in truth, you’re probably better off comparing Succession to Peep Show.
In the epilogue of “The Entire History of You”, we see Liam lying in a now-empty house, endlessly replaying clips of happier times with Ffian. None of it is dramatic: just a small smile as she walks up the stairs or the sight of her daydreaming on the sofa. It neatly develops what the episode has to say about memory and the different ways it can torture us. Liam has lost everything: but is it the tech’s fault, or plain old human nature? The somewhat unnecessary final scene, in which he takes a razor blade to his chip in front of the bathroom mirror would seem to suggest the former, but there’s enough ambiguity there to make it stand out from Black Mirror’s more bludgeoning endings. Across all the seasons, it is the episode most concerned with character over concept. To paraphrase a great writer: in the end, you remember “The Entire History of You” not for what it has told you, but how it makes you feel.
