Black Mirror creator on Beyond the Sea’s connection to real-life crime
Charlie Brooker spoke with RadioTimes.com and other press about the episode's tragic opening.
*Warning - contains full spoilers for Black Mirror: Beyond the Sea*
Fans of Black Mirror have been devouring the latest season of the Netflix anthology series, with many particularly enjoying the third episode, Beyond the Sea.
Beyond the Sea stars Aaron Paul and Josh Hartnett and is set in an alternate 1969, where two astronauts on a space mission are able to virtually inhabit mechanical replica bodies on Earth.
Near the start of the episode, the family of Hartnett's character David are killed in an attack by a cult, who call his situation unnatural. They also destroy his replica, meaning he can no longer return to Earth.
Many fans have noted a resonance of the sequence with the real-life murder of Sharon Tate, who was tragically killed in 1969 by the Manson Family cult.
Brooker recently spoke with RadioTimes.com and other press about Black Mirror's new season, and revealed that in thinking of the Manson case, he decided to set the episode in the 60s, making the story for the episode fall "into place".
He said: "I knew about it, I’ve watched lots of true crime documentaries in my time. And so I’m obviously aware of the Manson case. When I thought 'Hang on, what if I set that story in the late 60s?', it occurred and that seemed to unlock a lot of things.
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"A lot of things seem to fall into place - they come in, they’re incredibly judgemental, they’re incredibly violent and brutal. It’s sort of a deranged world view that seems more scary than a natural disaster, which was what I’d envisaged originally."
Brooker also explained that he had initially conceived of the episode being set in the present or future, with a "forest fire created by climate change" wiping out David's family.
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He continued: "I think there was something about shaking up my own thought process a bit and thought ‘What if I set it in the past?’
"Then that led me to think of the hippy cult, and the other interesting thing is it means the characters are behaving like characters of their era rather than of now or the future. So it made it an exciting thing to explore.”
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