Black Mir­ror is the per­fect anti­dote to the ​‘Bury Your Gays’ trope

Near the end of episode four of the new sea­son of Black Mir­ror, there’s a line that painful­ly cap­tures every­thing that has come in the bliss­ful pre­ced­ing 50 min­utes. It is seem­ing­ly inci­den­tal, shout­ed in the heat of the moment of an argu­ment with no pause after. It’s a plea, a des­per­ate attempt to make some­one stay, a gnaw­ing need to vocalise some­thing after years of keep­ing it buried some­where deep inside. ​“It’s not a trap!” Yorkie (Macken­zie Davis) yells at her new wife, Kel­ly (Gugu Mbatha-Raw).

The ​‘it’, first and fore­most, is San Junipero, a sea­side par­ty town in the near future that is repli­cat­ed from neon-drenched nos­tal­gia for 1980s, ​’90s, and even 2000s. There’s a poster for The Lost Boys on a street cor­ner, and Belin­da Carlisle’s ​‘Heav­en is a Place On Earth’ fills the elec­tric air. The inhab­i­tants of this town have their con­scious­ness uploaded to a bank of servers after they die, allow­ing them to live young, wild and free for all eter­ni­ty. But more­over, ​‘it’ is the real­i­ty of Yorkie and Kelly’s lives. Just this once, the world is what it appears. No strings attached, no need to be afraid of what’s lurk­ing around the cor­ner if you’re just being your­self. Here, the neon city which nev­er sleeps is exact­ly what it seems. For once, Yorkie and Kel­ly will turn out okay.

That their sto­ry plays out so pain­less­ly on screen engen­ders a mixed sense of dis­be­lief and sus­pi­cion. The trope of queer (par­tic­u­lar­ly female-iden­ti­fy­ing) char­ac­ters dying on screen under the guise of every­thing from advanc­ing the plot to offer­ing emo­tion­al moments, known as the ​‘Bury Your Gays’ trope, has been talked about a lot this year. On The 100, a show set in a post-apoc­a­lyp­tic, Hunger Games-esque world, Lexa (Aly­cia Deb­nam-Carey) is killed min­utes after hav­ing sex with her girl­friend Clarke (Eliza Tay­lor) for the first time. Then there’s The Walk­ing Dead​’s Denise (Mer­ritt Wev­er) and Orange Is the New Black​’s Poussey (Sami­ra Wiley), just name just two of the 23 queer women killed on tele­vi­sion so far in 2016.

It comes as some­thing of a sur­prise, then, that the most tragedy-free of queer rela­tion­ships should come from Black Mir­ror, a show which typ­i­cal­ly focus­es on telling cau­tion­ary tales about the dan­gers of mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy and cer­tain pre­vail­ing social trends. Tech­nol­o­gy can be a form of vig­i­lante jus­tice, tor­ture, or pun­ish­ment, the machines tak­ing con­trol over their cre­ators. It’s the type of melo­dra­mat­ic hys­te­ria that works well in some sit­u­a­tions (sea­son two’s ​‘White Bear’ remains one of the show’s most ter­ri­fy­ing episodes) but not oth­ers, with jokes about its unre­lent­ing pes­simism fly­ing around. One was even turned into an episode for the cur­rent sea­son.

The clos­est cousin to ​‘San Junipero’ in the Black Mir­ror canon is ​‘Be Right Back’, in which a woman (Hay­ley Atwell) recon­structs her hus­band (Domh­nall Glee­son) after his trag­ic death. It’s one of the show’s less sin­is­ter episodes, con­sid­er­ing our rela­tion­ship with machines from the per­spec­tive of emo­tion­al attach­ment rather than phys­i­cal threat. But while there’s an ele­ment of psy­cho­sex­u­al hor­ror at play in ​‘Be Right Back’, there’s no such twist in ​‘San Junipero’. The most omi­nous moment in the episode occurs when it is revealed that this seem­ing­ly per­fect world can only be accessed for five hours a week while alive, and one can only per­ma­nent­ly live there, for­ev­er young, after death.

It may be lit­er­al, but it’s a wel­come inver­sion of the ​‘Bury Your Gays’ trope which has plagued so many sto­ries before this one. Kel­ly and Yorkie are not pun­ished for being who they are, find­ing each oth­er in the process. There is no flip side, the tech­nol­o­gy is almighty and ever­last­ing but main­tained by noth­ing more than friend­ly-look­ing robots in a qui­et ware­house. San Junipero doesn’t just mean an end to the phys­i­cal pain that comes before death, but the emo­tion­al bag­gage that comes with it. The inten­tion is to final­ly belong, a sec­ond chance at liv­ing the life one yearns for with­out the social norms. Yorkie may need to break down a bar­ri­er when first pur­su­ing Kel­ly, ask­ing to ​“make it easy for me” to take that first step out of the shad­ows, but once she has, you can see hap­pi­ness bloom in her face immediately.

It’s in that moment of des­per­a­tion lat­er, where Yorkie implores Kel­ly to look and touch and just believe in this safe and beau­ti­ful place they once could only dream of, that Kel­ly hes­i­tates. But then, almost imme­di­ate­ly, she sees that it’s not a trap. At last, their hap­pi­ness can be believed. They can ride off into the sun­set with their Hol­ly­wood end­ing, left to explore this sanc­tu­ary and love freely. For once, heav­en is a place on earth.