Review_1 : Black mirror season 4, episode 2, Arkangel

 Before reading my first review, I hope you to refer this..!

<<<ABOUT MY REVIEWS>>>

 Since this is my first review, I'd like to suggest how I write my reviews.

I briefly summarize the story, mention the questions that the story throws and explain what I think. I hope my ideas can help you analyze or consider some morals or points that the story suggest us..! 

 Here's additional explanation for my rating system using stars total 5.

I consider these when I rate : 

- Is the flow of the story fluent enough to fully understand the story easily?

- Are the morals or the points it suggests worthy enough? 

  (Since moral is the most important one I think I should consider from the story)

- Is the story accessible understandable to anyone? (on the viewpoint of feeling relevant)

 Black mirror, the TV series about Charlie Brooker's near-future fictional stories, was returned with a lot of expectations as season 4 around 3 months ago. The relevance I felt toward this episode as a daughter made me expect more compared to other episodes.

 The story is about Sara who used experimental program ARKANGEL, which can offer her GPS information of her daughter, signal her emergency, and ables her to see what she looks at and sets a filter on her vision and listening whenever it's something violent or aggressive in order to protect her daughter Marie. But as she grows up, they realize that ARKANGEL can be a problem for Marie's normal life and decides not to use the iPad which allows her to handle all the things mentioned above; however, the problem happens she uses it again as Marie lies to her and goes to meet her boyfriend and has sex with him when she was 16. Because she thought Trick, her boyfriend is insane, she makes him not stay close to her and forces Marie to take contraceptive without telling her. Marie was shocked by her mother who saw her period of sex and by all the works she did and hits her aggressively and runs away.


 The points that we should focus on this episode are two: whether Sara's works are understandable as part of a nurturing process as a mother and whether Marie's insanity was caused by ARKANGEL.

  For the first point, Sara is understandable though the fact that she was immoderate. If I was Sara, who was threatened to lose my daughter when she was really young, I would also be more protective of her and might try to rely on the high tech program to get some information about her emergency. But, well, if someone asks me whether I would also use ARKANGEL if I were a mother, hmm... I definitely wouldn't. Even though GPS information and the notice of her emergency are important, I wouldn't choose to install a program on her body because if I imagine how it feels if I know that someone (even though it's my mother) continuously knows where I am, what I'm doing, looks and listens just as I do, I would feel like constantly being watched and observed no matter how far I am from the observer. It would feel like being a doll. Have you ever watched the movie 'the Truman show'? I don't think there's any difference between ARKANGEL and the Truman show on the viewpoint of being constantly observed, which clears the idea that ARKANGEL is the pervasion of privacy hidden under the excuse: it's for protection.

 For the second point, Marie's insanity cannot be wholly blamed by ARKANGEL. Her insanity shown through her actions like trying a drug and hitting her mom violently with iPad cannot be explained by the oppression and the interruption of privacy that she felt because of ARKANGEL. Especially, hitting her mother violently at the very end of the episode was really shocking that even though the filter was off and she was able to look at the blood as it is, she didn't get surprised by what she did and stop immediately. This clearly shows that the filter wasn't the cause of her not being able to recognize violence and aggressiveness. Therefore, I'd like to say that ARKANGEL cannot be justified, but we cannot blame it as the cause of all her insanity.


 If you are a parent, I strongly recommend you to watch this episode. It makes us think about the right way of expressing love, the range and extent of the protection of kids. ARKANGEL is not just a fictional story, but the near future we might face soon. The points they suggest us are worthy enough to consider and I hope we could take time to think about it at least once after watching it..!

 Therefore, my evaluation for Black mirror episode, ARKANGEL is : ****
* BUT! If it's hard for you to watch few violent scenes, I recommend you not to watch this.:)