Paul Giamatti hive, hit episode 5. “Eulogy,” the most human episode of the new Black Mirror season, stars everyone’s favorite actor as Phillip, a sweet man who we meet tending to his garden. He receives a call from a company called Eulogy, informing him of the passing of a woman named Carol Royce (nee Hartman), a name that strikes a chord in our boy.
He can’t make the funeral in London, but fear not, Eulogy has the solution. The tech company is working with Carol’s family to “curate an immersive memorial,” contacting people who knew her in her youth. They ask Phillip to contribute a memory by uploading his recollections to the Eulogy platform, which will generate the memorial. The kit is sent to Phillip’s house via DHL drone, and the tech guide starts talking. Placed firmly on his temple, the guide asks Phillip to recall his memories of Carol, unable to help him with any visual guides.
The story of Phillip and Carol
He digs up old photographs of the woman we can assume was a former flame and imports them into Eulogy’s technology. His first photo is of himself and Carol, surrounded by a co-op of creative young people on a rooftop in Brooklyn. In this photo, her back is to the camera, so they can’t see her face. Eulogy’s solution? Enter the image—literally transporting Phillip to that rooftop to help fill out his own memory of her. He is surprised to see an engagement ring on her finger, a detail he didn’t notice, or didn’t remember way back when. He suggests leaving this out of the family’s memorial, because duh.
Jumping into the second photograph, we see more members of the co-op at an apartment party. Both Phillip and Carol are missing from the image, but he remembers them being at the party. He remembers the song that was playing, “Fools Gold” by The Stone Roses. Eulogy rebuilds the entire memory for him, the first time he and Carol really connected. (Read: did the deed).
The third photo is of Phillip voyeuristically watching Carol, just out of frame, playing an original piece on the cello in her bedroom. Sweet, but ultimately useless.
Phillip admits to having additional photos of Carol, but says they won’t help. He resurfaces a collection of images of them together with her face scratched over or entirely cut out. You know, like artsy, co-op living, Brooklyn creatives do after a breakup. Here, we get into the meat of this long-buried relationship.
Carol left Phillip out of nowhere after three years, leaving him to sink his sadness in the bottle for the next fifteen years. At this point, we haven’t seen Miss Girl’s face, and not even Phillip can remember it.
Eulogy’s tech guide takes Phillip by the hand, dropping him into these broken images, scratched out faces and all. Trips to Coney Island, shared apartments, gigs they played together in a band, the like. We start to see the cracks forming—jealousy, fights over alcohol, Carol playing the guitar instead of her beloved cello, the famed solo career of their lead singer after he left the band. Phillip is starting to look like a man whose “woe is me” angry vibe is clouding his ability to take accountability for literally anything, at all. Eulogy’s tech guide—in human form during the in-photo scenes—pushes back on Phillip, digging for the inciting incident behind his festering hatred for his former lover.
Finally, he delivers us to a memory in October of 1992. He downs a bottle of champagne at a fancy restaurant in London and proposes to Carol at the table, but girly would rather die than marry a sad sack who probably cheated on her. She falls silent, he makes a scene, she leaves the restaurant, he’s humiliated (his own doing).
Wait, so what really happened with Carol?
Eulogy’s guide, having had enough of his self-pity, shows Phillip the truth—her truth. She is an avatar of Carol’s daughter, and that night at the restaurant, Carol was pregnant. She fills Phillip in on the whole picture of Carol’s life without him, how she shared a child with a conspiracy-peddling deadbeat who died of Covid and tried to reconnect with Phillip over the years.
Phillip finds an old disposable camera holding just one photo of the hotel room he destroyed after his failed proposal. He and the guide step into the photo to find a note from Carol to “Philly,” but he can’t pick it up or read it. He eventually finds the note in his heartbreak box and learns that her pregnancy was a result of a vengeful one-night stand, but she wanted to work it out with Phillip. She asked him to meet her at the stage door of her show the next night, but he never read it. He spent the rest of his life hating her, literally missing the bigger picture.
Using the aforementioned voyeur photo and a recording of Carol playing the cello, Phillip transports himself and Eulogy’s guide back to the co-op. The episode ends with Phillip attending Carol’s VR-powered, immersive memorial, watching her daughter play the cello in her honor. They share a knowing look, and we finally see Carol’s young face as the episode ends.
Congrats! You’ve made it through the tearjerker of Black Mirror season 7. Onto bleaker pastures.
