Paul Giamatti and Charlie Brooker on “Eulogy” Episode

In “Eulogy,” one of the final episodes of Season Seven of Black Mirror, a lonely man named Phillip (Paul Giamatti) learns that an old flame has died, and he’s been asked to contribute to a unique kind of eulogy wherein an AI guide (Patsy Ferran) pulls his consciousness into old photos to mine memories. Phillip claims not to remember much about the woman, but, over the course of the episode, his blurry memories sharpen, and he admits to himself that he never stopped loving her — that his own hubris kept them apart. 

Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker had just wrapped production on “Eulogy” when his father died. The parallels between real life and fiction were haunting. “I found myself in an unusual position,” he says. “We just finished the post on this episode when I found myself having to read a eulogy at my father’s wake. I was struck by how we were collating photos for a slideshow. They feel like they’re on the same frequency as memories are.”

In the tradition of episodes like 2016’s “San Junipero” (in which two women in hospice fall in love when their minds are uploaded into a digital 1980s resort town), “Eulogy” isn’t quite as dark the dystopian nightmares for which Black Mirror has become a kind of shorthand. But it is a beautiful rumination on loss, memory, and, in some respects, how technology like AI may not be as wholly nefarious as it seems. Brooker and his co-writer, playwright Ella Road, decided “there was a story here that could be heartbreaking and bittersweet, without a villain,” he says. “It’s somebody using technology to revisit the past and come out with a slightly different perspective and put some ghosts to rest.”

“They could have sent me anything and I would have said yes, but they happened to send me this great piece,” Giamatti says. “I was really moved by it at the end, which doesn’t always happen to me — and I thought it was an interesting take on the technology. Maybe AI is a good thing at the end of this, which I thought was interesting.”

While AI tech has become a boogeyman to creatives — leading to myriad lawsuits over big companies mining artists’ work to create what seems largely to be derivative slop — Brooker and Giamatti don’t dismiss it out of hand. “I go back and forth on AI,” Giamatti says. “I talked to a paleo-anthropologist once and his take on everything was that we’d given ourselves over to machines when we invented the wheel. But his positive take was we really have no idea what this stuff is going to turn out to be. It could be something we don’t recognize at all, and it could be something that ends up doing very good things for us, and so, who knows? It’s the people that use it that are the problem more than the thing itself. We have to be better at using it.” The actor adds that he was once asked if a company could use his voice and declined. “I would rather do it myself right now,” he says.

Brooker, for his part, was inspired by more creative uses of AI: namely, the Beatles doc Get Back, which used the technology to sharpen archival footage and the “new” Fab Four track “Now and Then,” which was created in a similar fashion. An old John Lennon demo was transformed into a complete song by isolating his vocals (and George Harrison’s guitar tone) and combining that with new recordings from the rest of the living band. In those cases, then, AI wasn’t used to create a doc or song whole cloth, but as a tool to make something old new again. “We were all watching that doc during a fairly dark point during the pandemic, and it felt like a transmission from the future,” Brooker says. “I was keen for us to slightly channel this sort of interplay between this analog technology of the past, which is quite fragile and evocative and imperfect, and turn that into a very present-day immersive experience.”

“‘Please don’t cut the human out of this equation’ is where my thoughts go,” he adds. “I don’t think it’s a genie you’re going to be able to put back in the bottle. You obviously don’t want the situation in which an executive sits back and goes, ‘Shit three films out, please,’ but I was reading about The Brutalist, where there was a conversation about AI using the actors’ voices to make them sound like they’re speaking Hungarian. Am I outraged by that? I don’t think I am. I mean, admittedly, I’m not a Hungarian voice actor. But again, no one was outraged by actors being Gollum.”

In fact, both Giamatti and Brooker say that given the chance to use the technology in “Eulogy,” they would jump at it. “When I think about pictures of when I was a kid, there’s a place that we used to go [that I would visit] — my uncle ran a hotel up in Maine for many years,” Giamatti says. “I wish it wasn’t gone.” 

Still, both agree that there’s something ineffable about old photos and faded memories that can’t be captured with technology. Like Brooker, Giamatti’s father died — many years ago, in 1989. “It’s always nice to see a picture of somebody, but it’s a little weird,” he says, adding that the memory doesn’t always match the image. “Maybe it’s a more meaningful thing that your memory changes something, and your imagination functions more than the literal thing. I mean, it’s nice to see pictures, but it’s not [my father]. Whatever the hell it is I’m remembering in some buried part of myself is him.”

As for Brooker and his father’s slideshow? “When you look back at old photos, they’re imperfect and they’re a bit blurry, or someone’s got red-eye in them,” he says. “They feel more emotionally resonant than today when you just scroll back through your photo feed and you can see the photos you forgot taking three weeks ago. I found it spooky that not long after we finished that episode, I found myself looking at photos I hadn’t seen for two, three decades — and you’re right back there.”