Netflix’s Black Mirror has just dropped one of the most heartfelt and quietly devastating episodes of its entire run.
With Eulogy, episode five of the new seventh season, the trippy anthology series from creator Charlie Brooker trades its usual dark dystopia for something much more approachable: The soft, dreamlike ache that accompanies revisiting the past, and the way modern innovations like AI can make old things new again. The result is a standout episode reminiscent of emotional highs from the show’s past, like San Junipero (the episode from Black Mirror’s third season, in which two women fall in love when their minds get uploaded to a kind of resort-like digital afterlife).
Normally, Black Mirror is a reflection of our darkest techno-nightmares, where innovation turns sinister, and human failings are encoded in code. But here, in a rare moment of tenderness, technology becomes a conduit not for horror, but for connection to past lives. And to the kind of sorrow that lives quietly beneath everything we’ve left behind.
Eulogy stars Paul Giamatti as Phillip, a lonely, middle-aged man who learns about the death of an old flame. An AI company invites him to participate in an immersive funeral experience, one that requires him to literally step into old photographs in order to extract the memories they contain. A drone delivery drops off the necessary kit at Phillip’s door; he opens the box and removes a small nodule. Once attached to his temple, the tech works its magic. Faded Polaroids transform into real life. Nostalgia becomes corporeal.
Phillip initially waves off the whole thing, protesting that he’s only kept a few unremarkable photos, but the blurs of his memory eventually crystallize into the reopening of an old wound — and the realization that he never stopped loving Carol, the free-spirited cello player who stole his heart and who’s just died, long after she and Phillip separated.
In one of the photos, we watch Phillip re-enter a party from decades ago. Fool’s Gold by The Stone Roses spins in the background as Phillip steps deeper into what was once a frozen, static image. Now, the image surrounds him completely, the track’s hypnotic beat underscoring a moment so vivid and alive that the cigarette smoke, clink of glasses, and thrum of music in the air no longer have to be merely imagined. He’s in it now — memory made real. And there’s Carol, leading young Phillip up the stairs.
The deeper down the rabbit hole he goes, the more it all starts coming back to him. “Talking with her was easy,” the older version of Phillip reminisces to the AI avatar accompanying him, his voice brimming with emotion. “She was funny … she was like no one I’d ever known … Nothing else existed, just us. That’s all we needed. We made plans.” He whispers: “Man, we were so young…”
The whole episode unfolds like that. It’s a ghost story wrapped in the complicated warmth of nostalgia, regret, and what we lose when time outpaces the people we once were. Bit by bit, Giamatti’s monologues and the episode’s accompanying score put the pieces of the couple’s relationship back together, forcing Phillip to relive the breakup all over again. And in so doing, it gives him an unflinching close-up into how and why it all started to go wrong.
This was easily one of the most affecting episodes Black Mirror has ever delivered. What makes it so remarkable, especially for a sci-fi series, is how it reimagines AI not as a threat, but as a quiet companion gently guiding a man through the wreckage of his own memories. Technology isn’t the villain; it’s the vessel, allowing him to stand at the edge of the past and watch the person he used to be drift further out to sea.
Eulogy isn’t just about lost love. It’s about how we carry our grief in crooked places. It’s about missed letters, unreturned phone calls, and how technology, for all its cleverness, can only ever simulate what’s already gone. “Eulogy broke me in a very particular way I wasn’t expecting,” one viewer wrote on X, while another user added: “Truly incredible from every standard possible. I’ve been crying for the last 5 minutes… Heartbreak can’t even scrape the surface of what this has made me feel.”
