Beyond the Sea

Beyond the Sea.

In an alternative 1969, two men on a perilous high-tech mission wrestle with the consequences of an unimaginable tragedy.

Another great episode of the 6th season that keeps surprising me considering the bad feedbacks it receives .

I bought it even before it was released, this episode staring Aaron Paul one of my favorite actor and his performance was absolutely outstanding, Besides it's classified as Sci-fi that I admire !

It was dark and hard to take sometimes, repetitive in others and that exactly what I felt about the first episode, they could've made it shorter in my opinion and it would've been a lot better.

I really don't have a problem with that ending, it fits for me.

This was a very good episode. I won't give it a 10 because 10 is perfect and this doesn't quite reach that. It deserves an 8.5. All three of the main actors were excellent. Some reviewers are complaining because it is "predictable". Admittedly, after Lana's solution to the issue after the "unimaginable tragedy" I saw the general place this was going. But I did not see the final results. And the writing and acting to get to that point were great. At all points in the process, what happened made sense.

I largely wrote this review to refute others who wrote bad reviews because of a "plot hole" that they do not realize does not exist. These reviewers were not paying attention and/or were not thinking.

(Now I become a little geeky. There are no real spoilers here. The specifics I give are either from early in the episode, or my own calculations of reality instead of things mentioned in the episode.)

These reviewers ask why they did not send Replicas to the space station, instead of sending humans, since the Replicas could do what the humans do. This is explained early on: When fans greet David's (Josh Hartnell's character's) Replica outside the movie theater, he says central to the mission is "the human experience, the survival of the human body, of life".

Remember, this is set early in space exploration. If the Netflix description is correct, 1969, the first time humans were, in the real world, on the moon. At one point in this episode, it was said that Cliff and David were to be in space for 6 years. This mission was to determine the effects on humans of being in space for years. This information would be needed as humans went further into space. (Many of the things the humans did when they were awake were not the purpose of the mission. What they did when awake was just so the mission could continue.)

Replicas need the connection to the human: what the Replica does is controlled by the human. If you think about, Replicas could not go significantly further into space while the humans remained on Earth. Assuming the communication between humans and their Replicas is at the speed of light (it cannot be any faster) humans on the space station in geostationary orbit could communicate with Replicas on Earth in a fraction of a second. So what we saw in this episode is possible. But what about when we want to explore Mars? Even when Mars is at its closest to Earth, it would take a few minutes to communicate that distance at the speed of light. Humans on Earth controlling Replicas could not get much done with that kind of delay. When NASA's probes are landed on Mars, the probe runs a preprogrammed process, and the engineers at NASA wait for several minutes until they find out if it worked.

Aaron Paul and Josh Hartnett play two astronauts on a mission in space. But fortunately for them, they get to still see their families, well sort of, with the use of doppelgangers. One of the two experiences a horrific tragedy with his family which leads to decisions the other astronaut would regret. Once you see what's going on, you'll probably agree it's a bit predictable. However the very ending there's a little curve ball twist moment which caps the episode off nicely.

If you're a Twilight Zone fan, you may notice (as I did) one astronaut is named Stanfield and the other is named Ross. In the TZ episode "The Long Morrow", the astronaut who ages by pulling himself out of hibernation is named Commander Stansfield. And lead astronaut in the episode "Death Ship" from season 4 is named Captain Ross. Maybe just maybe Black Mirror was paying homage to The Twilight Zone.

The acting is great, especially by Aaron Paul.

The overall plot is interesting and could have been great, but I feel that the writers wanted a final twist so bad that they wrote this ending despite the fact that it's absolutely unsatisfying and makes no sense for David's character.

Very disappointing, something more predictable but more in line with what we had seen of David's character up until the ending would have been better.

Sometimes predictability is good, so long as it's not 100% obvious. But this really looks like they went out of their way *only* for the sake of making it end in a way that most wouldn't expect up until a minute before it happened.

And why would most not expect it?

Because it does not make much sense.

It's like having a "whodunnit" end with the culprit being a character that only comes up at the very end of the story: disappointing.

If, in this future, they are able to make replicants that feel, smell, see, hear and act like their real counterparts, why wouldn't they send the replicants into space instead and keep the real humans on the ground? That wouldn't trigger weird cults either. Nobody thought of this?

This weak premise makes it hard to swallow this story. Some things need to be thought through and covered for, even if it's just a SCI-FI show.

The acting is great. The direction is equally wonderful. The story is predictable but still good. I just hope that writers spend a little bit more time covering for core issues like these.