As parents, you must start letting go from the moment your child is born. You ensure that your children get the right skills, but they only learn by gaining experiences and making mistakes. However, that is not always easy because at the same time you want to protect them against everything. So it’s a balancing act in which you also learn and gain experience yourself. In Arkangel, Black Mirror looks at the upbringing of a child in combination with technology and, of course, how this sometimes doesn’t go as intended.
In this episode, a mother (Rosemarie DeWitt) decides to take part in a trial done by the company Arkangel after she couldn’t find her child for a short period of time. The company has developed a chip that is injected and allows a parent to see where the child is, to ensure that shocking images are automatically filtered and view everything from the child’s perspective. When Sarah is young, it gives the mother a lot of security, but automatically filtering images by making them vague and being able to watch along with your kid at any time creates problems as Sarah gets older.
When you are a parent yourself, this is an episode which you’ll watch with mixed emotions and that makes you feel uneasy. You think of all kinds of scenarios, imagining what might happen. Will the chip be hacked or will it break? Writer Charlie Brooker, however, decides to focus on the mother / daughter relationship and how it changes when Sarah gets older. The chip increasingly becomes a violation of privacy, even though the mother actually acts from her instinct to protect her daughter. What are the right choices from an ethics point of view? Jodie Foster directs this episode and does so convincingly, with an eye for how a child becomes more curious. When Sarah is about nine years old she wants to know what blood is, which violent images other children watch at school. Her mother is overprotective resulting in a child who may not be able to deal with the real world and is seen as strange by others. Letting go and allowing a child to do things by him or herself is difficult and if you do not dare to do that as a mother, as is the case here, the consequences can be huge. An episode with a lot of emotion.
