Black Mirror’s season 5 episode “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too” stars Miley Cyrus as adored pop idol Ashley O and Angourie Rice as her adoring fan, Rachel. A connection between the two that starts with Rachel getting Ashley’s branded robot doll for her birthday ultimately leads to a wild ending that involves a jailbreak, a giant hologram, and a car chase in a truck with mouse ears.
Rachel and her moody older sister, Jack (Madison Davenport) are both still hurting from the death of their mother, and their father is too busy trying to perfect an advanced method of pest control to pay much attention to their lives. Meanwhile, Ashley is living a life carefully controlled by her aunt, Catherine (Susan Pourfar), who is also Ashley’s manager and keeps her carefully medicated so she can be bright and peppy at all times. As the latest venture for her brand, a doll called Ashley Too has been created based on Ashley’s own personality, to tell fans like Rachel that they can do whatever they want if they just believe in themselves (and other sugary platitudes).
When Catherine finds out that Ashley has been secretly stashing her medication and writing a notebook full of angry lyrics, she uses extreme measures to control her niece. She poisons Ashley by giving her a massive overdose of the medication, putting her into a chemical coma, and then sets about replacing the real Ashley by stealing song ideas directly from her brain, to be sung by a virtual version of her called Ashley Eternal. However, when Rachel’s Ashley Too doll goes on the fritz, she and Jack use their father’s pest control tech to tinker with Ashley Too’s “mind,” removing a limiting barrier and revealing that the doll actually contains a snapshot of Ashley’s entire personality - anger and swearing included. Ashley Too demands to be taken to Ashley so that she can retrieve evidence of Catherine’s manipulation, but things soon start to unravel.
What Happens at the End of Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too
Upon arriving at Ashley’s mansion, Rachel and Jack are able to drive through the gates before they close after Catherine leaves for the Ashley Eternal event. At the house, Jack pretends she’s been asked by Catherine to deal with a rodent problem to get herself and Rachel through the door, and then Ashley pretends she needs to use the bathroom in order to get away. Ashley Too asks Rachel to watch the stairs, and then pulls the plug on Ashley’s coma support machine, wanting to put her other self out of her misery. Instead of dying, however, Ashley wakes up - the machine was keeping her unconscious rather than keeping her alive.
Ashley’s “doctor” tries to put her back into the coma, but Rachel and Jack attack him and then shoot him up with the syringe, putting him into a coma instead. The three girls then race to the venue to put a stop to Catherine’s plans. Ashley’s malicious aunt us using a motion-capture performer, a scan of Ashley’s body, and a synthesized version of her voice to create a version of Ashley that can be completely controlled. However, her plan crashes to an end when Jack drives their dad’s pest control truck straight into the venue, causing chaos. Police converge on the scene and demand that the girls exit the vehicle - and when Ashley does so, Catherine realizes that she’s lost.
Some time later, Ashley and Jack have formed a band and are playing to a crowd in an underground rock bar. Rachel and Ashley Too are watching the performance, with Ashley Too now decorated with punk rock accessories. Some of Ashley’s old fans are in the crowd, but they’re horrified by the new music and soon flee the venue.
Ashley Too, Ashley Eternal and “Synaptic Snapshots”
Black Mirror first began to explore the idea of artificially recreating someone’s personality in the season 2 episode “Be Right Back,” in which a grieving widow replaced her husband with a living doll of him whose mind was crafted from her husband’s social media posts. In that episode, things ultimately fell apart when she realized that the AI could only ever simulate a public persona, and couldn’t truly be her husband. Since then, however, Black Mirror has repeatedly explored the idea of actually copying a person’s mind in its entirety - for example, in the season 4 episode “U.S.S. Callister,” where a tech genius was able to recreate his coworkers inside a game using nothing but their DNA.
Unfortunately “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too” doesn’t explore all the implications of this; the idea of a version of Ashley being permanently trapped inside a tiny plastic body is kind of horrifying if you think about it. However, while Ashley Too is pure sci-fi, Ashley Eternal is based on real-life technology that’s already in use. For example, there is currently an artificially intelligence called AIVA that can compose classic music, and became the first AI to be recognized as a composer by the French institution SACEM (Society of Authors, Composers, and Publishers of Music). In Japan there is an entirely artificial pop idol called Hatsune Miku, who sings using voice synthesizing technology. In 2012, an artificial recreation of Tupac Shakur performed onstage with Snoop Dogg at Coachella, more than fifteen years after Tupac’s death. Needless to say, the journey towards Ashley Eternal becoming a reality has already begun.
The Real Meaning of Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too’s Ending
At its core, “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too” is about how the bright-eyed and ever-peppy ideal that pop stars are required to live up to is incompatible with being human. For Catherine, the fact that Ashley sometimes gets sad or angry or frustrated is a flaw, and one that she attempts to correct: first by creating Ashley Too, with a forced limitation on Ashley’s brain that only allows her to spew PR-friendly catchphrases, and then by creating Ashley Eternal, who can be made to do and say whatever Catherine wants.
Speaking to EW, Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker said that the episode was inspired by two things: a sitcom he wrote about a punk band who die in 1977 and miraculously return in the future to find that their manager has been selling them out; and the real-life phenomenon of “resurrecting” dead artists like Amy Winehouse and Prince to make more money off their image. Brooker notes that these are often people who died in tragic circumstances or were plagued by depression and substance abuse in their real lives - something that their artificial creations would never fall prey to.
On the flipside of this, however, Ashley’s humanity is exactly what enables her to write the music that her fans love, and that’s the one thing that Catherine can’t fake. Instead, she takes the raw material of songs from Ashley’s brain and changes it to make it more marketable - something that music producers often do, albeit in a less extreme way. Miley Cyrus is more or less perfect casting for the role, since she came from the background of being Disney’s pop princess Hannah Montana, and then as an adult went through a period of making her music and her image far more sexual and aggressive in a way that many people found abrasive. As is so often true of Black Mirror, “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too” has a dose of reality in its fiction.
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