I found myself, the other day, strolling toward the county fairgrounds on an evening walk, listening to Timecop1983’s Neon Lights.

Actually, “found myself” is a poor choice of words. I’d been planning this since March. This place; this moment; this song. I had it all mapped out. I knew exactly the memory I wanted to make – the nostalgia I wanted to manufacture, and then save for a later date. The fair is the climax of my year – easily my favorite event. It marks the passage of time, and divides the season of anticipation from the season of reflection. I planned to bottle some of it up and enjoy it, a sip at a time, in perpetuity.

I didn’t plan for the fairgrounds to be empty, for the tiniest monarch in history had declared war upon the world.  There was supposed to be a Himalaya here, and a Ferris wheel – a sea of illuminated food vendors, staining the distant sky with kaleidoscopic haze. Where were they? Where were the neon lights? And, if they weren’t there, why was I heading toward them?

Old friend of mine it’s been a while; you don’t know me, and I don’t know you

Timecop1983 belongs to the relatively young genre of “dreamwave”, an ethereal-sounding, analog-synth-heavy sub-genre of the wider retrowave, a modern music form which tries to recapture the auditory oddities of 80’s pop music, refined by hindsight and 40 years of development in composition technique. Counter-intuitively emerging out of the union of an obscure internet subculture and an even more obscure video game, it has grown into a mature meta-genre, now stretching from the minimalistic, Kraftwerky chiptunes of Nullsleep, to the sax-soaked, Eddie Money-esque sensuality of The Midnight. It’s been on my playlist for a while, and has been gradually creeping into my own musical work. It’s a warm embrace – a callback – to the childhoods of millions.

Only, I’m a 90’s kid. It’s not my childhood. I’m embracing an older man’s past.

Childhoods unite across time and space to play, as children do. What, in 2020, is the difference between ’85 and ’95? Are they not both objects? Abstractions? Things to gaze upon alike for their distinct beauties, and yet mourn, as an ex-lover, that your arms will never again enclose their bodies? What voyeurism is this? Whose nostalgia am I entitled to? And why am I going out of my way to artificially create nostalgic moments for consumption by a future me?

Derrida coined the term “hauntology” to describe the haunting, apparitional presence and temporal incontingency of a past ontology – a “way things were” which we can’t seem to escape from. He used the term to describe the titular “Specter of Marxism”, a dead philosophy that continues to appear as a faint, glowing orb in the found-footages of Western society, and leaves breathy, bone-chilling messages on our answering machines. His thoughts on the temporal properties of language (from which it co-emerges) warrant a future post of their own, but the term has come to be re-imagined in the fields of music and aesthetics as of late to describe a related but different phenomenon. It has also, on occasion, been ripped from its postmodernist foundation and redeployed as a critique, assertively wondering why, if everything is socially constructed, the past keeps on popping up, over and over again, in the form of concepts, norms, and artistic movements.

I wonder where you are, so close, but so far

Electronic music (theretofore considered the soundtrack of the future) started, around the turn of the century, to notice that it no longer sounded futuristic. Moreover, it noticed that it had forgotten how to sound futuristic. After 50 years as the music of a future age, it had become the music of a present type. It was now a genre – a style. It had formulas, and rules, and patterns and structures. It sounded like itself. Worse, it sounded, in 2005, more or less like its 1995 self.

Culture followed swiftly, with the “oddly satisfying” execution of a domino-esque chain-reaction machine that culminated in a very unsatisfying present: The death of futurism. The future, in the words of gravetender of futurism Mark Fisher, has been “cancelled”. While previously, technology and culture existed with each other in what game designers call a “flow state,” whereby the perfect, reciprocal interplay between them was the engine of relentless and open-ended creativity, the cultural constituent of the pair seems to have stagnated. Technology now “progresses” into the present, confined to an endless series of thematic and conceptual repetition. We’re still watching 20th-century culture, only now in HD.

The buzzing, clumsy, experimental optimism of the early internet has collapsed into a pile of corporate sameness – a sea of digital retail with all the variety of its chain-store-strewn, brick-and-mortar counterparts. Tech “innovation” now amounts to placing a fresh new interface on top of a 20 year-old social media format and then omitting a vowel in the product name to make it “edgy”. In Hollywood, the reboot and the origin story reign, and coming this summer, the robots will turn on their makers, again, in We’ve Done This All Before 3: The Final Beginning.

Neon lights and “electric” color palettes are still, arguably, the most widely-recognized symbols of futurism in art, long after we, as a culture, have abandoned the naive expectation that the workplace of 2070 will be a disco club with task chairs. Even our open-concept, environmentalist urban utopias of the future were lifted from the 60’s. Modernity is confined to the paradoxical fate of reaching into the past to grasp a time when we reached into the future, lest we resign ourselves instead to the Sisyphean repetition of old and stale cultural themes. Stagnation, or paradox? Red pill, or blue?

The past, as a virus, uses us as a host for its own replication, and we consent in order to, for once, experience the sensation of being infected with something. Best-selling 8-bit throwback games like Shovel Knight run on octo-core CPU’s and graphic cards with floating point units numbered in the thousands. Advanced audio workstations intentionally limit themselves to the soundbank of a Yamaha DX7 in order to reproduce a 40 year-old sound. The resources of the future, leveraged, diverted, to reimagine the past.

I watch the sun go down, here in London town

Never in modern history was the future more cancelled than now. Never in modern history was the past more present. New episodes postponed, tour dates to be announced, sports matches pending, travel suspended. All we have are archives and time, and so we consume, and wait. The “oppressive weight of the past” hangs over us like a stale air, and yet, this air sustains our life. The future keeps failing to arrive, and so we find one in the past. What 2020 affords us is not a deviation from this pattern, but the time to reflect on it. Instead of merely being stagnated, we’re forced to feel it too.

That gated reverb now mocks me just a little bit. Those saxophones peer at me with a sly gaze. It’s as if they know, that I know, that they’re all I have. My plan, hatched all the way back in March, has been put on hold. I’ll have to wait another year to go back to the past. The worst part is, I’ll enjoy it all the more for having had to wait so long. That’s what this virus has done to me – it’s what both of these viruses have done, to all of us.

I’ll even nod in agreement when people say “Once this vaccine gets here, in the near future, we can finally go back to the way things were”. I’ll pretend that statement implies something far more innocent than it does. I’ll head to the Neon lights. I can’t justify.

We get our first glimpse of Roy McBride’s character from the inside. These internal monologue are a regular presence in the film. An astronaut for the quasi-military US Space Command, his psychological fitness for duty requires frequent reevaluation, and so, in advance of each mission, he documents (and submits for approval) his self-assessed mental and physical well-being. As mission-readiness is always the goal he seeks, we can never be quite sure how truthful are his words. Here is today’s liturgy:

I’m calm, steady, slept well, 8.2 hours, no bad dreams. I am ready to go, ready to do my job to the best of my abilities. I am focused only all the essential, to the exclusion of all else. I will make only pragmatic decisions. I will not allow myself to be distracted. I will not allow my mind to linger on that which is unimportant. I will not rely on anyone or anything. I will not be vulnerable to mistakes. Resting BPM, 47. Submit.

These words are spoken over a shot of his wife, bag in hand, placing the house keys on the table near the front door as she exits his life. Pragmatism, it seems, has a price.

Roy has dedicated his life to the exploration of space. He does high-altitude repair on the International Space Antenna, a massive, space-elevator-like structure which extends into the thermosphere. A stoic man with a stalwart work ethic and a BPM that famously never rises above 80 no matter how tense the situation, this work suits him. He also has the sort of familial lineage which opens doors, and were he only to avoid upsetting the established order, he could retire a celebrated public servant, regarded by the world as a continuation of his father’s grand legacy.

You see, his father was a hero – an exploratory pioneer. He was leader of the Lima Project, a mission to set up a research station in orbit around Neptune, where solar interference was weak, in order to search the galaxy for extraterrestrial life. Lima was capable, for the first time, of delivering a definitive answer to the question: Are we alone? Roy’s father was confident the answer was “no”, and that we’d get that answer in very short order.

A father… who resides in the heavens.

Communication from Lima went dark some time ago. Roy’s heavenly father has gone silent. “I was 16 when he left, 29 when he disappeared,” he says. Roy tortures himself with old video messages from his father, recorded  in the space between estrangement and silence. Orphans are made of children and souls in the space between estrangement and silence.

So, it came as some surprise when, after all this time, God broke his silence. Or did he? Powerful and deadly electrical surges began to emerge from the Neptunian system and wreak havoc on human life and civilization. Roy himself barely survived one such surge, which blasted the aforementioned antenna in the middle of a repair, knocking him off and sending him careening to the surface of the Earth. These events would prompt a closed-door meeting with space command brass, who would tap him for a mission that it’s thought only he could fulfill. These energy bursts are the result of an antimatter chain-reaction that grows more powerful as it advances from its Neptunian origin. The Lima project was powered by antimatter. An uncontrolled release could destabilize the entire solar system, and destroy all life therein.

The subject turns, naturally, to Roy’s father. “Can you tell us how you handled your father’s absence?” A quick glance over to the resident psychologist, pen in hand, makes it understood that Roy’s perceived fitness for this mission is riding on this answer. He responds with calculated dispassion, stating that it distressed his mother, but that his father was dedicated to his work and it was no doubt hard on him too. Platitudes. You see, when the soul lies, it’s usually by omission.

“We believe your father is alive,” they would tell him. Insofar as surprise can grace the face of a stoic, it did. Unfortunately, they don’t know exactly where Clifford McBride is; even when limited to the Neptunian region, the heavens are “a vast area to cover.” Roy’s mission, should he choose to accept it, would be to first transit to the moon (commercially, so as not to attract too much attention). On the dark side of the moon (or is it the dark night of the soul?) awaits a ship which will carry him to Mars, the site of the last remaining secure communications facility. From there, he will deliver a “personalized” message to his heavenly father (contradictingly prepared for him in advance, of course). The hope is that a direct plea, from son to father, might elicit a response which can then be used to extrapolate a source.

The gravity of the situation is expressed plainly, as Job might have expressed it: “What is happening up there is a crisis of… unknown magnitude.”

Roy’s climactic arrival to the moon would prove anticlimactic – a far cry from eagles having landed and giant leaps for mankind. Aside from the alien-themed tourist kitsch, this could be Hartsfield-Jackson. DHL and Subway sandwich shop adorn this extraterrestrial world with the all the corporate banality of our terrestrial one. “All the hopes we ever had for space travel,” Roy monologues, “covered up by drink stands and T-shirt vendors; just a recreation of what we’re running from on Earth. We are world eaters. If my dad could see this now, he’d tear it all down.”

The moon greets passengers at the terminal entrance with a plaque and a motto: “Earth’s Moon: Where the world comes together.” The irony is at once vapidly cheesy and darkly ironic. Indeed, if the peoples of Earth had it in them to come together, they wouldn’t need to leave the Earth to do it. It’s not even true, as the moon is revealed to be a battleground of murky borders and conflicts over mining rights that turn violent on a dime. Roy would find himself embroiled in one such battle when his travel party would later be attacked en route to the launchpad for the final leg of the journey.

What happened to my dad? What did he find out there? Did it break him? Or was he always broken? My father… the most decorated astronaut in the history of the program. U.S. Air Force Academy… his doctorate at MIT. He promised me that one day I could join him in his pursuits… that he’d come back for me. And I believed him. First man to Jupiter. First to Saturn. And then… nothing.

Roy is greeted on Mars by Helen Lantos, director of operations, who escorts him to the communication facility, commenting that he’s lucky to have landed. The surges have been assaulting the red planet too. They lost three astronauts in the landing attempt, but “nobody knows what’s causing them.” Space Command is keeping that secret close to their chest.

Under the watchful eye of three Space Command executives, Roy begins his transmission:

This is Doctor McBride’s son, Roy. Father, if you can hear me, I’m attempting to communicate with you. SPACECOM wants you to know that they are aware of the disturbances, and that it cannot be your responsibility. They would like all information about attempts that you are making to ameliorate the situation.

It is a scripted prayer, and it has the feel of one too. No response is forthcoming. Perhaps God is dead? Or, perhaps the prayer is too dead for a living God? “We’ll try again next cycle”, an exec assures him.

“They’re using me”, Roy monologues, in the interim, “Goddamn them. I don’t know if I hope to find him, or finally be free of him.”

After a brief hesitation, Roy would go off script for the second attempt:

Dad, I’d like to see you again. I recall how we used to watch black and white movies together… and musicals were your favorite. I remember you tutoring me in math. You instilled in me a strong work ethic. “Work hard, play later,” as you said. You should know I’ve chosen a career that you would approve of. I’ve dedicated my life to the exploration of space And I thank you for that. I hope we can reconnect Your loving son, Roy.

Roy waits in earnest for the response – a sign from the heavens – but the Earth would be the first to deliver. The established order had everything it needed from him. “Thank you so much major, for all your help; we’ll be returning you to the Earth in short order.” Roy’s agitation begins to mount, and his famously low BPM begins to climb. “He answered, didn’t he!?” Only patronization and dismissiveness are returned to him, as the execs comment on his accelerating pulse and aberrant bio-rhythms, both of which will “need to be addressed” before his return to Earth. His “personal connection” has made him “unsuited for continued service.” It’s a clue as to the real purpose of this mission. They had no use for the contact; they only wanted the coordinates.

The pieces come together for Roy, shortly after, when Helen would meet with him privately, wondering why she the spacecraft he had arrived on was ordered to be requisitioned for deep space and armed with nuclear munitions. “It’s for a search and destroy mission,” she says. She’s responsible for the lives of over 1,000 people on that base, and she needs to know what threat she’s being asked to take on. She pieces together that he is Clifford McBride’s son. “We are both victims of the Lima project […] You and I share a great loss,” she says. Her parents left for the Lima project; she knows the plight of the orphaned soul too.

Roy confesses what he knows, and how he’s been determined unfit for the ongoing mission. “I believe your father is alive,” she ventures. “They never told you what happened to him out there, did they?” She reveals to him a recorded, classified mission briefing sent by his father some years ago. It opens with a series of distorted screams before cutting to his father:

This is Clifford McBride, reporting from the Lima Project. I’m disclosing a tragedy. Here, on the edge of our solar system, some of our people have been unable to handle the psychological distress of being so far away from home. They desired to return to Earth, and I could not permit that. And I have to report the reality that they mutinied… committed acts of sabotage trying to commandeer my ship. I was forced to react with equal severity. I disabled one section of our station’s life support system, and without doubt, I did punish the innocent along with the guilty. We will not turn back. We will venture further into space. We will find alien intelligence. I am forever driven on this quest.

“SPACECOM would never allow their image to be shattered… so they made him a hero to protect themselves,” Helen says. “Your father murdered my parents. That monster threatens us all. And now it’s your burden.” Roy promises that, if she can get him aboard that ship, he will deal with his father.

With help from Helen, Roy would sneak aboard the ship through an underground lake which gave access to the launchpad. His presence would provoke an immediate hostile response from the 3-person crew during the boost phase. Between the dangers of inertia and oxygen deprivation caused by the accidental discharge of a fire extinguisher in the closed capsule during the struggle, Roy would find himself the only survivor. In sullen tone, he records the tragedy into the flight recorder and, with equally sullen tone, expresses his resolve to complete the deicidal mission.

The journey is the most reflective period of the film – a guided tour through the dark night of the soul. He is a man unmade, in the blackness of space. Here, darkness bathes him from the outside, and consumes him from within; man is only a membrane now. Palpably isolated and reeling from the physical and mental effects of extended space-travel, Roy survives on old video recordings from the father who estranged him and the wife whom he estranged. “I feel like I’m looking for you all the time, trying to connect,” his wife’s image would say. This is his commandment, that he hurt one another, even as he has been hurt.

At long last, Roy’s ship comes to rest in orbit around Neptune. He has reached the abode of God. But, the triumphal catharsis fails to arrive. Something is terribly wrong with this place. Where is St. Peter? Where are the pearly gates? If there were one word to describe this heaven, it would be… lonely. It’s profoundly, maddeningly lonely.  

Neptune herself provides some small respite from the oppressive emptiness, but it is cold comfort. She is a foreboding and unforgiving world – a ghostly blue ocean of death. Roy spots his father’s space craft, hovering over the surface of the deep. It is just a pinprick against the intimidating blue backdrop; fragile and impotent, it is far and away the lesser of these two gods. Further, its orbit is degrading which has caused it to drift from expected coordinates. Roy must depart from his craft to maneuver around Neptune’s rings in a small transport capsule. Even with all the distance he has traveled, this gap seems impossibly wide.

His spacecraft slowly fades into the distance outside the transport window as a monologue fills the void: “All my life I was terrified to confront him; I’m terrified even now. What do I expect? In the end, the son suffers the sins of the father.”

Another antimatter surge flares up on approach to Lima, striking the transport. His request for docking clearance goes unanswered. It would have been in vain anyway, as we soon learn. “Craft damaged, unable to dock,” reports the flight system. Sometimes the symbolism is a bit too obvious. Roy now watches his transport craft fade into the distance as he spacewalks to the Lima airlock.

Roy’s slow descent to the belly of the beast is at once spellbinding and haunting, doubling as a metaphor both for a stolen past and the slow progression of pathological obsession. The corpses of angels hang weightless in the passageway; God never even bothered to bury his  dead. An old Time magazine announcing the Lima project with the cover title Is Anyone Out There? is taped to the wall, a black marker having scribbled a frantic series of yeses over it.

Roy gradually makes his way to the antimatter reaction chamber, gazing into the luminescent enclosure as he drifts closer. It pulses haphazardly, as if struggling to breath. This machine is dying… scared, and alone. It is no wonder he shouts at his nurses. Heaven is a palliative ward, and it is woefully underfunded. A war of attrition between pragmatism and empathy is waged in the heart as Roy arms the portable nuclear charge that will bring a final end to the heavenly threat. It is then that he hears a voice, speaking out of a whirlwind: “Roy? Roy, is that you?

I have cataracts, I don’t see very well.
Hi dad…you alone?
Oh yeah; captain always goes down with his ship. Been here quite a while, alone. Tried to stop this goddamn surge.
What happened?
My last loyal few tried to escape. And they started all this. They caused a meltdown out there, Roy. We fought, and our struggle caused catastrophe.
It’s why I’m here. I’m going to stop it. Get the two of us back home, maybe.
Home? This is home. This is a one-way voyage, my son. You’re talking about Earth? There was never anything for me there. I never cared about you, or your mother, or any of your small ideas. For thirty years, I’ve been breathing this air, eating this food, enduring these hardships, and I never once thought about home.
I know, dad.
I knew this would widow your mother, and orphan you, but I found my destiny. So, I abandoned my son.
I still love you, dad. I’m taking you back.
I have work to do. I have infinite work to do. I must find intelligent life.

We were prepared, upon meeting God, to feel awe. We were prepared for terror, and majesty, and wonder, and humility, and amazement. We weren’t prepared… for pity. The cannon never prepared us for disappointment. “It’s time to go,” Roy answers patiently, stretching out his hand for his father’s grasp. God pulls back, reduced now to the image of a timid animal – reduced, to the image of a man.

God goes on to narrate his obsessive pathology, and recount the angelic rebellion that occurred so many years ago: “I admire your courage for coming alone, Roy… travelling all this way… following me here. Makes me wonder what we could have accomplished together. But I guess the fates have deprived me of the partner I should have had. If we’d had more people like you, we could have pressed on, could’ve found what we’re looking for. My crew examined all the data… discovered no other life out there. No other consciousness. They quit.”

Sometimes the human will must overcome the impossible. You and I have to continue on, Roy. Together. To find what science claims does not exist. You and I, together, Roy. Because the Lima project has told us… that we’re all alone in the knowable universe. I can’t fail. You can’t let me fail, Roy.

Dad… you haven’t. Now we know we’re all we’ve got.

One suspects Roy isn’t referring to humanity generally, but to the pair of father and son. Indeed, here they are, alone, two men after each other’s own image, impossibly far from the sight of Earth. Certain judgement, it seems, awaits both back on Earth. Both followed an obsessive journey to bring them here, leaving a trail of death, destruction, and broken relationships in their wake. The son doesn’t merely suffer the sins of his father; he also commits them.

The two exit the craft tethered to each other, both literally and metaphorically. Somewhere along that tether is the vertex of reality itself; it is where the finite meets the infinite – where a man coming to terms with his future meets a man coming to terms with his past. A reconciliation between heaven and Earth is at hand! That’s why, when Clifford would activate his suit’s propulsion unit to dart off into the blackness, he wasn’t just committing suicide; he was tearing the cosmos asunder, stranding humanity on Earth, forever. A brief struggle would ensue, Roy desperately trying to reclaim his father, but his father insists: “Roy, let me go.” The son, at last, relents.

To think how close we came to having the blood on our hands. Then again, in the race to seal the fate of man, we lose even when we win.

Roy would make it back to Earth a new man. Or, should I say, an old man partially erased? Destruction is a form of creation. Another reconciliation (this time with his wife) is also implied. Her name is Eve, lest we assume the next chapter of this story is unwritten. A final monologue closes us out:

I’m steady, calm. I slept well. No bad dreams. I am active and engaged. I’m aware of my surroundings and those in my immediate sphere. I’m attentive. I’m focused on the essential, to the exclusion of all else. I’m unsure of the future, but I’m not concerned. I will rely on those closest to me. And I will share their burdens, as they share mine. I will live, and love. Submit.

It’ll have to be enough. If it’s not, God help us.

Gentle waves, tinted with pale, orange and purple shadows, caress a nocturnal beach. Transition. The shadow-caster comes into focus: a distant, seaside town, night lights crawling upward in search of flat land, mourning the passage over sea. Cut. Club district: streets vibrant with life, but ghostly in every other way. A Lost Boys poster rules over the midtown kingdom of washed out neon and youthful exuberance as Yorkie drifts, faintly disoriented, to the window of an electronics shop, quizzically beckoned by the antics of Max Headroom. Belinda Carlisle drives past on a sports car’s radio, loving in the key of E major, her bright and playful vibes crashing unsettlingly against the scene’s ambient, melancholy backdrop of musical and visual chords. Welcome to San Junipero.

Yorkie stumbles into the arcade room of a local club. She inserts a quarter and the machine Bubble Bobbles to life. An ambitious suitor approaches, frizzy-haired and bespectacled; only a bow tie would complete the package. A cloud of awkwardness descends upon the scene. “It’s got different endings, depending on if you’re in one or two player”, he says. His interruption prompts a premature game over and he invites Yorkie to a game of Top Speed. She considers the proposition, but an on-screen car crash startles her and she declines.

Yorkie settles into an empty booth to get her bearings straight. The Platonic form of awkwardness herself, bearings misalign easily. A second controller drops in next to her. “Whatever I say, go along with it”, Kelly says. Yorkie proves exactly the distraction Kelly needs to drop a recent fling, clearly looking for something more permanent than she. “My friend’s dying soon,” she says, “we need to catch up.” The chemistry between the two is apparent, and flamboyant Kelly is comfortable enough in her skin for the both of them.

Kelly takes the boundaries of Yorkie’s comfort zone to be a sort of implicit challenge, but it’s more than that. She also finds something novel – something substantive – in Yorkie’s awkward authenticity. Kelly’s met a thousand people who are right at home in this place. Yorkie is alluring precisely because she’s not at home in this place. She coaxes Yorkie onto the dance floor (apparently Yorkie’s first ever visit to a dance floor) and, while it appears at first that the ice may be breaking, Yorkie becomes overwhelmed by the situation (not to mention the sexual energy) and retreats abruptly, having gotten in way over her head.

What’s interesting about this introduction isn’t just that the setting is so intimately well-crafted (both narratively and visually) as to constitute a third character in its own right, but that it hints that there’s something crucial to learn about these characters from the different ways in which they interact with the setting. These seeds of mystery will germinate over the course of the episode.

Yorkie is spellbound by the setting; it has a kind of power over her. Her speech and even the motions of her body seem intensely considered and pregnant with consequence, as if the fate of the entire world hung on every choice she made. Kelly, by contrast, is effortless and fluid. She’s a master of this domain, and has spent so much time bending it to her will that she almost seems to have become bored by the project. Her environment is a place where nothing ought be taken too seriously, and every moment is a free-spirited mission to extract frivolity and enjoyment from her circumstance. She disparagingly mentions “The Quagmire” to a bemused Yorkie, later revealed to be a BDSM club frequented by people who are “desperate to feel something”, and comments that she had met her aforementioned fling there. The implication is that even BDSM, the final frontier of extreme stimulus, has lost its allure. Kelly’s reached the outer rim of hedonism. Where does an explorer go once the map is filled?

All this being established, the closing scene of the first act can present itself as an exchange between two people, while functioning as an exchange between two modes of being.

Kelly finds Yorkie outside in the rain, basking in conflicted resignation. Yorkie expresses reservation over the public image of two girls dancing together, alluding to some historical baggage related to her being gay. Kelly playfully dismisses these concerns and apologizes for getting inpatient; “Saturday nights, once a week – it’s, like, no time.” Yet, Yorkie persists with more concerns. Yorkie, as we suspected, has never been on a dance floor. Never. As far as her family’s concerned, she can’t do anything. It’s clear what she wants to do now, and Kelly opens the door by inviting her back to her place. “Midnight’s only two hours away”, she says. “Oh, that’s not long”, Yorkie responds.

Time. What is all of this time doing here?

Again Yorkie breaks, but it’s clearly more complicated than it first appears. She has a fiance, she says, and he’s “really nice”. Sounds like true love. The two part, and Yorkie is last seen standing, defeated, in the rain, mouthing a self-critical “shit” to herself, a neon sign hanging symbolically over her head. We don’t know exactly what defeated her, but we know it didn’t come from outside herself.

From this point on, time and setting begin to toy with us, upsetting whatever comfort we’d managed to extract from the episode thus far. “One week later”, opens the scene, but a decade has passed in that time. Sequin and denim have come to power, with tiki decor vying for the throne. A montage suggests that, despite Yorkie’s hang-ups, Kelly’s proposition is growing on her. Yorkie returns to the club to find Kelly and, after a bit of stalking, manages to connect. “I don’t know how to do this,” Yorkie confesses, “can you just make this easy for me?”

Kelly’s house is secluded, and sits uncomfortably close to the coastline – almost a testament to impermanence. The stillness of the location is striking. Set under moonlight, the scene has a haunting, unearthly quality. There’s a melancholic irony in setting a love scene in a place that feels like purgatory. From pillow talk we learn that Kelly had a husband whom she was in love with, but he “chose not to stick around”. As for Kelly, she’s just passing through, and before she leaves, she wants to have a good time. Midnight ends the scene…on the dot.

Another week, then another, then another. Every week Yorkie looks for Kelly in another decade and comes up short, until she eventually turns up, unexpectedly, on a DDR machine, Kylie Minogue playing in the background. “You hid from me!” Yorkie exclaims. Kelly denies this, and emphasizes that, in any event, she owes Yorkie nothing. The scene carries into the restroom, and the dialogue, as you’ll come to see, is a brilliantly concise summary of the central conflict of the episode:

Yorkie: It’s not about who owes who, it’s about manners. You don’t know who I am. You don’t know what this means!

Kelly: This means fun – or it should. And this? This is not fun, okay? This is not fun.

Yorkie: So, you don’t feel bad? Maybe you should feel bad…or at least feel something.

Yorkie retreats from the room in heartbroken frustration. Kelly punches a gaping crack into the bathroom mirror – a trademark in the Black Mirror series – and a broken reflection of herself stares back at her. She gazes down at her fist to find no blood, and then back up at the mirror, now in perfect repair only seconds later. None of it mattered. We now see the understanding advance across Kelly’s reflected face. None of this…matters.

Kelly tracks Yorkie to a rooftop to apologize and come clean about the state of her soul. “In the time I’ve been here,” she says, “I promised myself I wouldn’t do feelings. I didn’t want to like anyone. It’s just, I don’t know how long there is. I wasn’t prepared for you. I wasn’t prepared for wanting somet…” Yorkie interrupts her with a kiss. The allusions to Dostoevsky are just getting started. Back at the beach house, Kelly reveals that she’s dying of cancer. Further, she has no plans to stay in San Junipero after she’s dead, hinting that it has something to do with her late husband. Yorkie reveals that, without San Junipero, she’d never have met anyone like Kelly. “If we met,” she says, “if we really met, you wouldn’t like me. “Try me”, Kelly responds. She’s dying, after all. What monsters are left to fear?

The next act opens to the present day, and the pieces quickly come together. Kelly, in fact, is an elderly woman, living approximately in the year 2040. San Junipero is a cloud-based, virtual reality program for the dead and dying. An individual can choose, before passing, to have their consciousness uploaded into the cloud and live out an eternity as a virtual avatar of themselves in the prime of their life. For the dying, it’s “nostalgia therapy”. For the dead, it’s heaven. Living users are limited to 5 hours a week for fear that too much exposure may spawn dissociative disorders. 7 p.m. to Midnight, every Saturday.

Yorkie, also elderly, has been in a comatose state since the age of 21. After coming out to her disproving parents, a fight ensued. She stormed out of the house and, eventually, into a car accident. Being her only means of exercising basic autonomy, to say nothing of falling in love, Yorkie wants to expedite her entry into San Junipero, but euthanasia requires a family member’s consent and her family refuses to give it. Enter her fiance, Greg, a staff member at the nursing facility who has offered to become her family, and sign off on her passing.

As Kelly, for reasons we don’t yet know, has decided to refuse digital immortality and intends her 5 hours a week in the town to be a “last hooray” of drink and merriment, the chance meeting between the two was mutually inconvenient. Yorkie gives Kelly something to live for. Kelly gives Yorkie something to die for. If both of their plans come to fruition, the relationship is severed. They exist – meaning (qua relationship) exists – in a state of paradoxical tension, already fated by their choices to unravel in short order.

Upon learning simultaneously of Yorkie’s medical, matrimonial, and existential condition, Kelly opts to do something that matters: she proposes. If Yorkie’s going to get married, she figures, it might as well be to someone she loves. Kelly and Yorkie complete two ceremonies in that nursing home room: one of eternal union, and one of earthly separation.

The honeymoon takes place in San Junipero. Yorkie has an eternity to honeymoon. Kelly has 5 hours. The newlywedded bliss proves even more short-lived than that, however, when Yorkie realizes that Kelly was serious about her decision to die at the time of her death. The specter of mortality now steps in to rob Yorkie of her dreams at precisely the moment when immortality has granted them to her. Worse (so she thinks), it isn’t fate that’s to blame…it’s a person. It hurts so much more when it’s a person.

An argument ensues and Yorkie accuses Kelly of abandoning her. The language of manners comes into play once more as the two, again, argue over the nature and priority of their obligations. Yorkie trains her sights directly on the ultimate focus of Kelly’s perceived commitments: her late husband. “What is it? You feel bad because your husband isn’t here? He left you!” Yorkie charges. “You can’t see it, but what he did, it was selfish actually!”

An incensed Kelly responds with a smack across Yorkie’s face, followed by a devastating monologue that completes the final piece of the puzzle. They had a daughter. She died at 39, far too young for death, but also too young for the invention of San Junipero. “How can I!?”, said Kelly’s husband, when offered immortality in his final days, “when she missed out, how can I!?” Kelly wishes she could believe that her husband and daughter are united in eternal life, but she doesn’t. She believes they’re “nowhere”.

Kelly doesn’t believe in an immortal realm. She just believes in honor, and commitment, and dedication, and love, and moral obligations to the dead, and marital bonds that outlast time, and the transcendent value of relationship. For Kelly, suffering, mortality, and the bonds of promise and obligation give life meaning. “You want to spend forever somewhere nothing matters?” she asks Yorkie, rhetorically, “go ahead, but I’m out.” Kelly has chosen to follow the people she loves into permanent death, precisely because it matters. You see, to say that meaning is a great good isn’t to say that all meaningful things are good. That’s the uncomfortable truth of Kelly’s story. You want a meaningful life, you say? Are you sure?

Heaven was the place Kelly went, for 5 hours a week, to escape the oppressive, crushing weight of meaning. In a world where everything matters, heaven is a place where nothing does. Oh, glorious heaven.

Yorkie’s meaninglessness, by contrast, is found on Earth – or, better put, is thrust upon her by the Earth. Honor? Commitment? Dedication? Love? The very earthly things that gave Kelly a lifetime of meaning are precisely the things that the Earth has withheld from Yorkie. For Yorkie, heaven is a precondition for these, and therefore, a precondition for meaning. Mortality was a chain around her neck, tying her to an existence where she could do nothing, and for that reason, where nothing she did, could matter. 

Heaven was the place Yorkie went, for 5 hours a week, to escape the oppressive, crushing weight of meaninglessness. In a world where nothing matters, heaven is a pace where everything does. Oh, glorious heaven.

How about you, dear reader? What is your heaven? Does the world crush you with its meaninglessness, or does it crush you with its meaning?

The scene closes with Kelly driving off and, with utter and complete deliberation, straight into a concrete barrier. It’d be an act of suicide if it wasn’t San Junipero. So, what was it? Midnight strikes just as Yorkie reaches out to lift her to her feet, and Kelly’s avatar disappears. Back in present day, we find a Kelly now evidently in the late-stages of cancer. “I’m ready,” she tells her social worker, “for the rest of it.” Credits roll in San Junipero with Kelly and Yorkie driving into the sunrise to the tune of “Heaven Is a Place on Earth”.

The first and final tragedy of the San Junipero saga came off-screen when, in an unexpected twist, show creator Charlie Brooker effectively canonized the “happy ending” interpretation in interviews with E! News, among others. This had the effect of transforming an ambiguous and thought-provoking irony into something far less interesting. Through his work on the series he’d theretofore demonstrated himself a devastatingly incisive commentator on the twoness inherent in the human condition. I can’t, however, bring myself to begrudge the man his heaven. I can forgive him this slight, for the world is crushing him with meaning too.