There will be spoilers for Black Mirror season 3, episode 4: “San Junipero.”

I can’t stop thinking about “San Junipero,” the fourth episode of the third season of the British-now-Netflix series Black Mirror. I’ve been hot and cold on Black Mirror, because I love science fiction for stories of hope and Black Mirror is sort of consistently and terrifyingly depressing.  I haven’t even seen all the episode. But when they released the season three trailer and related promo materials, they got my attention.

I’ve been on an eighties kick lately. It’s the decade of my childhood, and as I creep towards forty I’ve been reconnecting with it in unexpected ways. So there’s that. And then there’s the way the two women, played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Mackenzie Davis, are smiling at a guy in the promo shot above. It’s something I’ve seen before. It’s coded. It pinged my gaydar.

And it turned out I was right. But before that, before we were treated to a delightful and rich romance between a bisexual woman of color and a lesbian woman, it pinged a different kind of radar. I figured out almost immediately what this episode’s twist was, from the first scene where Yorkie (Davis) walks by a television playing Max Headroom. Her flinch at the sight of a car flipping over in Outrun just confirmed it for me (as an aside: what a joy to see some classic video games, from Pac-Man to DDR, used as time markers, because video games are an important part of our culture).

So I knew what San Junipero was, another city in The Cloud, walking in the footsteps of many many science fiction stories before it. But despite knowing that, and despite the constant dread that Something Terrible would happen to these two, I found myself attached to them, hoping this wouldn’t be another depressing episode of Black Mirror, hoping it wouldn’t be another sad ending for another queer couple.

What the Black Mirror  did, to great effect, was take a done-many-times science fiction story and make it feel fresh and new. We often talk about how representation matters. While I was watching this I thought of two things: a book (or short story?) I read a long time  ago about a kid who tries to get people out of the Cloud, because What Kind of Life Is That? and The 100, which did a similar story recently and totally (IMO) screwed it up. “San Junipero” felt refreshing for a lot of reasons, not least of which was that Gugu Mbatha-Raw is amazing, but also because it’s about an interracial queer couple that gets a happy ending. How nice. How novel. How wonderful.

But “San Junipero” is also good science fiction, and good science fiction always leaves me with lingering questions and feelings, especially when the themes hit close to home. Here are a few of the ones that hit close to my home in this episode.

The Role of Physical Attraction in Love

At our best, we probably want to believe we love people because of who they are, and what they look like is secondary. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all of that. But I so deeply felt Yorkie’s fear and anxiety when she thought that Kelly would never have even spoken to her if she’d seen her real appearance. And it’s worth thinking about. In San Junipero, everyone is young and nobody is fat. These are the images we choose to project into the world, Kelly even says as much early in the episode; she’s referring to clothes, but she may as well be referring to their entire body images (I wonder if people can also choose the gender they present, but maybe that’s too much for an hour). Their attraction is instant and it’s physical, and it’s not until later that they start to get to know one another and fall  in love.

I’ve tried online dating in the past, but I hate it. I put pictures of myself up on the internet that are carefully curated to present the best image of my physicality: to make me seem closer to acceptable, even though I can’t hide that I’m fat. But I’ve seen the spark of disappointment in the eyes of women I’ve met in person. I’m fat and I feel insecure about it. I want to be judged for who I am, but I have to use what I look like to make that first connection. I know people have been attracted to me despite my outward appearance (or, I’d rather think,  because of it). But overall we are a society that does not allow for any beauty in fatness.

We are also a society obsessed with age. Would two older women even go out to a bar, essentially cruising? I’m sure it happens, but it’s certainly not something we promote as ideal.  So what does it mean that these two women saw each other across a bar and connected? This love story feels raw and deep and real, but would it have even happened if they hadn’t looked like, well. Two Hollywood actresses?

Second Chances, Missed Lives

I just had a birthday, and I’m closer now to forty than I am to thirty. I try not to let stuff like age get to me, but it’s hard. I’m single, and have been most of my life. I don’t have kids. I haven’t had all the cool adventures I thought I would when I was younger. And I’m not dead. Forty isn’t even that old. There’s still time for partners and kids and adventures. But the low level anxiety that I’ll be alone forever is something I live with almost constantly now.

I’ve often said I just want to live long enough for technology to keep me alive forever. I think replacing my body parts with technology seems cool. Nanobots that clear my arteries? Sign me up. And I never got the downside of The Matrix,  other than the idea that humans rejected paradise (I disagree, though I also think it was pretty interesting that the Quagmire greatly resembled the various clubs we saw in the world of  the Matrix movies, and I wonder if that was done on purpose).

The possibility of life after death is something… I don’t really think about, other than in the context of science fiction. But wouldn’t it be nice if you knew there was a world of eternal second chances? Where you could project your best self to others? Where you could meet people you never met in your real life?

I also gravitate towards the idea that there people can have more than one great love in their life, and that a second doesn’t betray the first, if the first is gone. Yorkie was trapped in one kind of life, Kelly was trapped in another. And even though she loved her husband, she cries when she talks about what it was like to never act on her feelings towards other women. In San Junipero, both are free to love.

It Gets Better

Yorkie’s backstory is a very classic trope. She comes out to her parents, they disapprove, and something tragic happens. But because this is science fiction, her tragedy turns into something beautiful.  But it’s more than that. Charlie Booker, who wrote the episode, weaves in real life progress with the technological progress. The world moves forward. “People aren’t as uptight as they used to be,” Kelly assures her, never wondering why Yorkie needs that reassurance.

People are, rightly, praising Mbatha-Raw in her role. But Davis does something great here, too. She’s playing a woman who has ostensibly been frozen at twenty-one, never able to live out the life she tried to make for herself until now, in a virtual environment. She’s never had sex, never had a relationship, but was forced to watch the world turn, confined to her bed.  She was never able to experience the shift in the world that many of us have felt in the last two decades, and that I imagine will only get better and better in the next few.

When Yorkie and Kelly get married, it’s a matter of bureaucratic expediency. But just the fact that they can do it, that it’s legal and affects laws and status, would have been fiction only a few years ago. And nobody bats a damn eyelash.  This was unthinkable when I was a kid, in the real eighties, and most certainly was never a story told in mainstream fiction. Black Mirror  isn’t just reflecting updates in technology, it’s reflecting updates in storytelling. Happy endings and all.