Have you ever imagined being with an old Hollywood star? “Hotel Reverie,” the first (but not the last) lengthier-than-usual episode of season seven, plays on that century-spanning fantasy. This time, the revolutionary new tech is called ReDream, and it allows Kimmy (Awkwafina playing both opportunistic and sincere) and her team to remake old classic films with contemporary stars in the lead roles. Imagine Glen Powell stepping into Breakfast at Tiffany’s to kiss Audrey Hepburn in the rain, or Jennifer Lawrence enrapturing Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart with her Katherine Hepburn impression in The Philadelphia Story.

Enter Judith Keyworth (Harriet Walter) of Keyworth Pictures, who reluctantly agrees to let Kimmy have access to her back catalogue in order to pay off the studio’s debts and resurrect a dying brand. Kimmy wants to remake Hotel Reverie, an old black-and-white noir thriller about a charismatic doctor, the tragic heiress with whom he falls in love, and the husband plotting her death. Most of the A-listers they ask to play doc Alex Palmer are busy or uninterested, but there’s one bite: Brandy Friday (Issa Rae), who’s sick of playing lead roles in bleak indies and flat supporting roles in big-budget fare. She wants to play Palmer herself.

Once she gets the job, Brandy starts on prep for the movie: taking notes, learning her lines, and watching charming screen tests for the famously troubled actress Dorothy Chambers (Emma Corrin), the icon who played heiress Clara Ryce. It isn’t until she arrives in England the next week that she realizes she’ll actually be acting opposite Dorothy, or rather acting opposite an AI representation of the character of Clara, as acted by Dorothy. They’ll run through Hotel Reverie once, like a play, and hopefully scrap together an entire movie in the two hours they have access to the stage, entirely from within this “self-sufficient fictive dimension.” It doesn’t take much to convince Brandy, who submits to going under with the assurance that she’ll be pulled out if she goes too far “off arc.”

My problems begin here: Would people really want to see a reboot like this, more or less following the exact same script with all the same visuals as an old classic, except with Ryan Reynolds’s “I’ve seen an iPhone” face transposed into the 1940s? I get the appeal of experiencing yourself in an old movie and getting doted on by a Marilyn Monroe type, but the idea of watching Miles Teller put his hands on Rita Hayworth just feels wrong, not to mention boring for anything more than a meme. This is the same problem I had with “Joan Is Awful” last year: The AI/deep-fake inspiration is believable, but the actual content itself isn’t. Besides, why is ReDream sticking with only swapping one actor out? Why not recast Clara in addition to Palmer? But I guess that would cost more, and then we’d just be right back where we started, watching a normal remake.

Brandy acclimates to the simulation quickly. Even when she screws stuff up — she can’t play the piano, which makes the “Clair de Lune” scene difficult, and leads to Madam Roban’s dog drinking the poisonous Black Rose instead of Roban herself — she’s able to recover nicely and hit the same plot beats a different way. Slipping up and using the name “Dorothy” instead of Clara triggers an echo, distantly reminding the character of the depressed actress who portrayed her, but Brandy is able to turn the error into a conversation about Clara’s lonely marriage and connect with her on a deeper level. Even anachronisms like “life shit” play into Clara’s building attraction to Brandy, which feels distinct from her attraction to the usual male Alex Palmer.

The way this is all presented, with Kimmy and her team watching the simulation play out remotely and radioing her like ground control, can be exciting. It’s also a bit cheesy, though, especially with complex, indefinable metrics boiled down to glowing bar graphs depicting “narrative integrity” and “romantic interest.” And would Brandy’s multiple verbal flubs (like when she responds to Kimmy instead of Clara) really make the final cut? Will this be edited like a normal movie or truly presented as Brandy experienced it? The stakes here don’t feel fully thought out. There’s no real reason the team should only have two hours to shoot this movie, no real reason they shouldn’t be able to reset and start from scratch or piece together different takes like a normal production. It just can’t happen that way because it wouldn’t be as suspenseful as the plot demands it to be.

The story works less as a Hollywood satire than as a survival thriller. If Brandy gets more off track and doesn’t hit the famous “I’ll be yours forevermore” line at the end to trigger the credits, she could be stuck in this world forever while her body dies on the outside. She’s definitely capable of pulling this off; Palmer’s sightseeing trip with Clara ends in a seduction like the original movie, albeit with a little more heat and more agency for the love interest. But then someone on Kimmy’s team spills his coffee on the equipment (rookie mistake, truly), and they lose the live feed, plunging Brandy and Clara into a strange, scoreless silence where everyone else is frozen in place. After a few minutes of panic, Brandy comes clean to Clara about the nature of her reality, totally upending everything for this AI who has just realized she’s an AI.

Black Mirror has really begun to reach the limits of its beloved “self-aware AI and/or digital clone deserving of life” motif in recent seasons, but at least this episode presents a slightly new take: Brandy and Clara start falling in love for real over the course of months, time apparently passing much faster than on the outside. An eerie trip to the void beyond the edge of the set allows Clara to integrate some memories of the actress who played her, an actress who clearly struggled with the effort of staying in the closet and carrying on PR relationships with male co-stars while having affairs with women. But the question remains: Does Clara only love Brandy because she was written to feel this way?

When Kimmy’s team reconnects and comms get reinstated, Brandy is abruptly pulled back to the last save spot: the seduction scene, which she filmed months ago from her perspective. Clara has no memories of the very real (well, kind of real) love story they just shared, and Brandy is understandably hurt by how quickly that length of time was erased. She might be insane to briefly consider abandoning her life to stay with Clara in the simulation forever, but Kimmy shouldn’t be so confused about why Brandy is taking a while to get back into the groove; romance aside, this woman’s consciousness just spent months completely disconnected from the world, which could be traumatizing to anyone. In general, despite a solid enough performance from Awkwafina, Kimmy’s precise role and framing in the story are a little confusing here.

Brandy manages to get back on track, though, carrying out the newly pitched third-act rewrite to visit the police station across the street to warn Inspector Lavigne about the murderous Claude and set up his recognition in the dramatic rooftop final scene. But when she gets back to the roof, the ending plays out far differently from the original movie: Clara shoots her husband dead to save Brandy/Palmer, then Brandy wants to take the blame to save her from jail time. When the police arrive, Clara shoots Lavigne instead of letting him deliver his original line about recognizing Palmer, in turn getting shot and dying in Brandy/Palmer’s arms. Now Hotel Reverie is a tearjerker.

Brandy hits the final line and wakes up in real life, and from there, the episode jumps to an epilogue in the lead-up to the movie’s release. She gets a package from Kimmy: a phone so she can connect to ReDream and call Dorothy, using a simulation of the blooper of the actress acting out a phone call. It’s a nice gesture, I guess, but … also kind of weird? This isn’t the same person Brandy fell for in the simulation, exactly. More importantly, it’s not a real person at all. It’s the equivalent of a photorealistic ChatGPT visualization of an old actress responding to Brandy’s prompts the way that actress conceivably might, which is hardly groundbreaking. Does Brandy get to contact her whenever she wants, and is this version of Dorothy even accumulating memories?

“Hotel Reverie” is another fun-enough episode of Black Mirror, but the narrative shagginess and plot holes prevent it from becoming a definitive standout of the season. Those ending moments have some emotional resonance, sure, but this is no Her, and it’s certainly no “San Junipero.”

• I didn’t talk nearly enough about the performances in this episode, but Issa Rae makes for an endearing protagonist, as you’d expect. And I’m always a fan of Emma Corrin, who nicely conveys Dorothy/Clara’s complicated internal journey as she becomes self-aware and confusion mingles with recognition. Harriet Walter doesn’t have all that much to do, but she’s a nice presence to have around too.

• Jack specifies that seven hours are passing in the simulation for every one second on the outside, but is that accurate? When they briefly tune in and see Clara playing piano for Brandy, the movie isn’t much later in time than them.

• What do Brandy and Clara (or Dorothy) even talk about? Did Brandy acknowledge the time period she’s actually from? I would’ve liked to see some of those conversations play out to form more of an emotional attachment to the two.

• Kimmy’s package at the end comes from Junipero Drive.