Black Mirror Season 7: The moment that made me question if I’m the problem

Black Mirror isn’t just about creepy tech or dystopian futures. It’s also about us. There is a disturbingly familiar reflection of how we think and how we lie to ourselves to sleep better at night. It shows us where technology might take us. But it also shows the most uncomfortable sides of the human psyche.

Season 7 of Black Mirror asks questions that feel pretty personal. And hits harder than we thought it would. The stories become our stories and we start wondering if this has been happening with us. After all we have all, at some point, misremembered things and have had regrets about the past. So this show only heightens it and makes us wonder - what if I'm the problem?

And I had that exact moment.

Let’s talk about what this season really unlocked in us.

Disclaimer: This article reflects the author's opinions. Reader discretion is advised.

The Black Mirror: The Mandela Effect episode messed with my head in all the wrong (or right?) ways

It all started with a fast food joint. Black Mirror Season 7 episode 2 is titled Bête Noire. There we meet Maria who seems like any regular woman trying to go about her office life. But things take a weird and uncomfortable turn when Verity who is her old classmate joins the workplace.

You can sense Maria’s panic immediately. There’s history here and it’s not the good kind. Then comes this moment when Maria calls a fast food joint Barnies. But everyone else remembers it as Bernies. And that moment was when we realized what was happening: the Mandela Effect.

After that there's only more eerie misremembrances. Maria is accused of drinking her office colleague's milk but she’s confident it wasn’t her because she remembers! She even asks to check the CCTV footage to prove her innocence. But there it's her drinking the milk!

That’s when I thought… what if all those things I swear I remember clearly never happened the way I believe? It reminded me of those real-life Mandela Effects: how we all think the Evil Queen in Snow White said “Mirror, mirror on the wall” (it’s actually “Magic mirror”) or how we remember Looney Tunes being spelled like 'Toons'.

Black Mirror forced me to reflect on these things. It left me with more questions than I came with.

The Black Mirror: The episode that made me realize I might be rewriting my own story

The fifth episode of Black Mirror Season 7 is titled Eulogy. There we meet an old man who is pulled back into a past he’s worked hard to forget. His ex-girlfriend has passed away and an AI version of her daughter visits him to collect memories for the funeral. The problem is that he barely remembers her anymore. Not because of time but because he tried so hard to forget her.

It’s painful how he numbed himself from every detail just to move on. So this tech device lets him revisit photos and walk through old memories, literally. Slowly he starts remembering the good and the bad times. And he realizes something he never believed before as he relives those moments. He realizes that she did love him. All those things he blamed her for wasn't the full story. And that shattered him.

Watching it shattered me too. I couldn’t help but wonder how often do we convince ourselves of a version of events just to cope? How many times have we told ourselves that someone didn’t care or that something was broken? When maybe it was just us all along who didn’t look close enough.

Eulogy became a mirror for me. If we had that device, we might see a whole different version of our lives. And maybe it is way more beautiful than we sometimes make it to be.

Black Mirror goes beyond just the sci-fi. It nudges us to look inward. And in doing so, it makes us question whether the real problem is technology… or us.

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