This year it’s an understatement to say that romance took a beating.
Through the inauguration of the president who’s got confessed on tape to intimate predation, into the explosion of harassment and assault allegations that began this fall, women’s self-confidence in men has already reached unprecedented lows—which poses a not-insignificant problem the type of whom date them. Not too things had been all that definitely better in 2016, or the 12 months before that; Gamergate plus the revolution of campus attack reporting in the last few years truly didn’t get women that are many the feeling, either. In reality, days gone by five or more years of dating men might most useful be described by involved parties as bleak.
It’s into this landscape that dystopian anthology series Ebony Mirror has fallen their 4th season. Among their six episodes, which hit Netflix on Friday, is “Hang the DJ,” a heartbreaking hour that explores the psychological and technical limitations of dating apps, plus in doing therefore completely catches the contemporary desperation of trusting algorithms to get us love—and, in reality, of dating in this age after all.
(Spoiler alert: major spoilers for the Ebony Mirror episode “Hang the DJ” follow.)
The storyline follows Frank (Joe Cole) and Amy (Georgina Campbell), millennials navigating an opaque, AI-powered program that is dating call “the System.” With disc-like smart products, or “Coaches,” the antiseptically determining System leads individuals through mandatory relationships of varying durations in a specific campus, assuaging doubts with all the cool assurance at 99.8% precision, with “your perfect match. so it’s all for love: every assignment will help offer its algorithm with sufficient meaningful information to ultimately pair you”
The device designs and facilitates every encounter, from pre-ordering meals to 
hailing autonomous shuttles that carry each few to a tiny-house suite, where they have to cohabit until their date that is“expiry, a predetermined time at that the relationship will end. (Failure to adhere to the System’s design, your Coach warns, can lead to banishment.) Individuals ought to check a relationship’s expiry date together, but beyond remaining together until that point, are absolve to behave naturally—or as naturally possible, because of the circumstances that are suffocating.
Frank and Amy’s chemistry to their first date is electric—awkward and sweet, it is the sort of encounter one might a cure for having a Tinder match—until they discover their relationship features a shelf life that is 12-hour. Palpably disappointed but obedient towards the procedure, they function methods after per night invested keeping on the job the top of covers. Alone, each miracles aloud for their coaches why this kind of match that is obviously compatible cut brief, however their discs guarantee them associated with the program’s precision (and obvious motto): “Everything occurs for the explanation.”
They invest the year that is next, in profoundly unpleasant long-lasting relationships, after which, for Amy, through a parade of meaningless 36-hour hookups with handsome, boring men. Later she defines the feeling, her frustration agonizingly familiar to today’s single females: “The System’s simply bounced me from bloke to bloke, brief fling after brief fling. I am aware that they’re brief flings, and they’re simply meaningless, and so I get actually detached. It’s like I’m not really there.”
However, miraculously, Frank and Amy match once again, and also this time they agree to not always always check their expiry date, to savor their time together. Within their renewed partnership and blissful cohabitation, we glimpse both those infinitesimal sparks of hope in addition to relatable moments of digital desperation that keep us renewing Match.com reports or restoring OkCupid pages advertisement nauseam. By having a Sigur score that is rós-esque rival Scandal’s soul-rending, very nearly abusive implementation of Album Leaf’s track “The Light,” the tenderness between them is improved, their delicate chemistry ever at risk of annihilation by algorithm.