Hollywood A-list actor Brandy Friday is thrown into an unusually immersive high-tech remake of a vintage romantic movie. She’s got to stick to the script if she ever wants to make it home.

Directed by: Haolu Wang

Written by: Charlie Brooker

Previous episode: Bête Noire

Next episode: Plaything

I just watched th3 episode and finished with tears. I love black mirrors disturbing episodes but this was a nice change. That moment when they got contact again and they just counted down to 5 to roll back with the main character not knowing what to do was so saddening.

I wish they send her a sort of portable system so she could go back in. But the telephone was nice.

This was a 10/10

I’m unsure whether or not this opinion is popular, but I generally disliked this episode in season 7.

For starters, the story felt really unnatural - from the strange time limit that the crew had, to the main character’s confusing role as an actor - I mean was she famous or not?

I guess I might be overly complaining, but the whole episode felt very Netflixy and not much like a black mirror episode.

I personally loved the dynamic between the two main characters, their connection felt relatively organic and really emotional, but the whole ‘dystopian’ element that we see in this series felt lacking here.

I’m talking about the AI element of the story - they really could have further explored Dorothy’s understanding of herself once she is told who/what she really is.

I feel like the best black mirror episodes balance well the emotional story and the dystopian aspect of the narrative (I think San Junipero is a really good example of this)

Anyway just wanted to put this out there, this really felt like the least appealing episode of the season 🥲

Did people not like this episode? I just finished watching it and checked out some reviews, but the majority of the feedback doesn’t seem too positive. I really liked it personally. What did you think ?

Few shows are able to make me feel such strong emotions. Capture what it means to be alive.

When done well, black mirror can make you feel alive. The true escapism from our day to day lives we so dearly need.

Hotel reverie is soaked with depth, actresses and actors capable of transferring that profound emotion. How it keeps you on edge the whole time and yet pulls you deeper into the hopeless romance is much beyond me.

I wish I could rewatch, having forget the episode, and feel that emotional journey again.

Thank you to the writers of hotel reverie

A new startup wants to cheaply remake movies by putting actors in a simulation. Okay, fine, pretty classic concept. We're putting a twist on an old classic romance movie by genderswapping the main character since a famous actress is the first one to volunteer. Okay, sounds interesting, and it makes me happy to see gay characters in mainstream places like this. Beside the new black female actress now in the main role we are changing nothing else about the movie and in fact the entire goal of the simulation is to be as close to the original movie as possible, and when inevitably things go differently from the original movie, everything breaks, the character AIs become sentient, and we trap an A-list actress inside a frozen black-and-white old movie world for multiple months and run the risk of killing her or leaving her there forever. What? Did we lose a thread here?

I just don't understand the point of the technology. I can understand the theming and the satire of bad remakes or whatever but in what world is this going to be something that somebody considers putting in the time and obscene amount of money into producing? Especially when it's so ridiculously prone to error--both the software itself and the things they probably should've thought through for more than two seconds? Did they at no point consider double-checking that Issa Rae could play piano, seeing as it's an important plot element and it screws up the entire movie when she can't? They didn't consider giving her a little direction or making sure she knew her lines before she entered the movie, seeing as the tiniest mistake butterfly effects into the entire plot breaking down? Why did they even bother to make AI characters that realistically react to everything and a world with internal logic that changes based on what happens, if they're just going to desperately try to stick to the plot of the original movie anyway? Who is going to go see a movie in theaters that is just the same exact old movie, black-and-white and everything, except now the main character is a different actress? What is the point of a bunch of nerd characters sitting outside going "exposition delivered", "romantic tension rising", are these metrics we're measuring? Are these statistics we're keeping track of? What is the point of saying "character backstory delivered" like it's some big operation when she's literally just reading the line off the script? Hello? Can anybody hear me? Why is my wife's boyfriend so much more attractive than me? It's just so full of plot holes and inconsistencies and it killed what I think could've been a very good love story otherwise. Like, I love the love story. It was genuinely heartbreaking, and I do think it was fairly well-acted, especially on Issa Rae's part considering the script she was given. But every time something sad happened all I could think about was that stupid nerd dude going "exposition delivered" and spilling his coffee and then I was too busy laughing to actually feel something. Just ridiculous all around

EDIT: unrelated but seeing balatro did make me jump out of my seat and point at the screen like a wojak so at least the episode had that going for it

EDIT 2: Lots of people are condescendingly telling me that this is a sci-fi show where ridiculous things happen which was something I didn't know when I was writing this post or watching this episode or the entire rest of the series, so thank you all for keeping me informed. ❤️

It's not the sci-fi that's the problem for me, guys. Almost every other episode in the series makes sense to me. This one specifically doesn't make sense because, in my opinion, it's poorly written and has no internal logic behind the central concept whatsoever. I would not have made it through the entire rest of the show multiple times if the sci-fi was the issue.

I am sitting here writing this through tears, that broke my heart in fucking two.

I know a lot of people are calling this episode unwatchable or skipping it entirely, but Hotel Reverie did something to me that I honestly can’t explain and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

It gave me a feeling I haven’t had since Hang the DJ or San Junipero… but maybe even more bittersweet. This wasn’t just another love story it felt like a dream I somehow stumbled into. One of those vivid dreams where, when you wake up, you lie there with your eyes closed, wishing you could go back… even though you know you can’t. The world moves on, but you remember. And the memory hurts, but in a beautiful way.

There’s this one line Kimmy said “Don’t worry, it’ll reset to the scorpion scene. She won’t remember a thing.” That shattered me. It made me think about how love, time, and memory can all exist in such fragile little bubbles and how sometimes, the person you loved doesn’t even know it ever happened.

I know people are saying the acting was off but honestly? That awkwardness is what made it work for me. It gave the episode this weird, uncomfortable realism, like a vintage romance trapped in a digital space. It was awkward, but still intimate like watching something that wasn’t supposed to be perfect, but wasn’t trying to be. It kept me hooked in that quiet, aching way.

I found comfort in this episode even in the sadness. I felt connected, in awe, melancholy, full of reverie… all at once. It gave me a kind of emotional ache that I almost want to hold onto, because feeling something that deeply even from fiction reminds me I’m alive.

Hotel Reverie wasn’t just an episode to me. It was a feeling. And I wish I could replay it in my heart like it was the first time over and over again.

I just truly wonder if anyone else felt this way as well with this episode.

I'm usually a bit apprehensive because bi characters in shows and movies tend to be very stereotypical and annoyingly written, but here I think the relationship between these characters was very engaging and well done. Also, Issa Rae and Emma Corrin are awesome in it. I was at first a bit wary from the "female remake" part of the plot, but it ended up becoming something quite a bit more interesting.

This season is sensational, and this episode was absurd, splendid, incredible, with such subtle tact and impressive genius.

SPOILER ⚠️

This episode managed to address so many things with such subtlety that you simply contemplate it and its development.

The narrative is slow and gradual, it manages to leave you in doubt, euphoric, contemplative, and in the end makes you digest something far beyond everything that has been presented so far: a romance between a human and an AI

I personally think that robots (of any kind) are tools and that's it, but I notice in my perspective a potentially "conservative" tone in a few years or decades, because everything the plot shows is common to our contemporary reality, but the ending itself is not, and that's where the genius of this episode lies.

Her (2013) has a similar narrative, but the ending is the conclusion that a human could not relate to a machine, because we are different in so many ways and on so many fronts that this difference makes our expectations converge towards the impossibility, since a machine is not a human being.

But in Her, Samantha is a commercial operating system, with access to the internet and other human beings, while in Hotel Reverie, Clara (or Dorothy) has access to nothing, lives in a "Sand Box" and provides Brandy with what Samantha couldn't provide Theodore: exclusivity

The love of Clara and Brandy happens like that of two human beings and in the necessary time, the accidental failure makes both have time for all sorts of discovery and the episode develops as a common love story, and that, my friends, is what allows depth for this plot.

The episode of just over an hour allows us to contemplate weeks of a relationship between a person and an AI developing, and the plot leaves all the loose ends well tied up, allowing you to suffer with the protagonist and have a feeling of a happy ending with the photo scene.

Anyway, this episode is fantastic and left me very reflective about the possibilities of our future as humanity.

Issa Rae was a terrible casting choice that made this episode unwatchable. She was awful, not sure if it's because she can't act or because she didn't want to put any effort into it, but she wasn't even trying.

I liked the story, the rest of the cast was also good, but Rae just ruined it.

They set rules only to immediately break them. Each second in the real world is "6-7 hours" in the movie, yet in the very next scene we see characters in both worlds interacting in real time with each other. Then after establishing a long time has passed, the studio heads are confused and frustrated that after being frozen for months the actors would be disoriented?? It's more than a plot hole it's a plot cavern.

Dreadfully awful and got worse as it went a long.

I think the premise was great, the execution was terrible. There would be zero people in the world who would want to see that movie and I feel the "classic" just was poorly done - supposed to be a Casablanca type movie but came across as a bad "doesn't think seem like an old timely movie?" that was awful. It felt forced.

Also the lead actress was not a good actress and couldnt pull that part off - some of her scenes in the old movie were cringeworthy.

I think the premise was great. I would have liked to have seen it done differently. And don't get me wrong, I support LBGTQ 100%, this just was just not good.

Just my opinion. I'm good with teh downvotes

When the company sends Brandy a way for her to communicate with Clara again, it's not even Clara she's talking to, it's Dorothy.

At the start of the episode, Brandy researches Dorothy Chambers before landing the role of Alex and watches a video. You can see the company recreated the footage (from the ending) of a video called Dorothy Chambers Screen Test, so it's not even a version of Clara she's talking to, but a version of Dorothy playing her role as Clara. It's not even a semblance of the character Brandy managed to fall in love with, but of the actress who hasn't even started playing the role in the movie. Same face, but totally different person. Makes the ep's ending more bleak in my opinion.

(realized this when I was writing it in a comment)

First of all, I adored it. One of my favorite episodes. I cried. It was like watching San Junipero for the first time again. But one thing ruined it for me, and when I saw people’s reaction on social media I realized I wasn’t the problem.

Issa Rae cannot act. Hurts for me to say but man… I saw someone saying Tessa Thompson or Lashana Lynch and it won’t leave my mind it left an open scar on my heart. Emma’s acting was marvelous, to the point where I wanted to teleport myself onto the Hotel and stay with her forever.

At first I thought it was on purpose. Issa’s character Brandy was supposed to feel out of place for the anachronism to work but it was too much. How can she be considered as an A-List actress in her universe if she can’t deliver simple lines like this… Even when the cameras were off the chemistry was one-sided.

Her hairstyle was also a bad choice. Natural hair or braids, bun,cornrows would’ve been better. It bugged me the entire time.

Thankfully the episode was still amazing, but man… Lashana Lynch was right there. Issa felt super straight. She’s not made for Queer roles.

Edit : I edited the hairstyle part of my post as I can see that it offended some of you. I’m french I do speak fluent english but sometimes I can’t find the right words to express myself!! I’m a proud black woman and the hair matters to me that’s all!

it feels so melancholic and moving for me, and it gives references to San Junipero (and I loved that!) the wlw relationships portrayals on Black Mirror is so emotionally tender to me, so bittersweet. I know there's mixed reactions to this and some people didn't think the casting for Brandy is great but I loved it and I enjoyed their acting. it made me feel like a real vintage film! the actress who played Dorothy is amazing.

the plot is also giving me AI-ran sites irl like c.ai, where people would get so emotionally attached to these things and so did Brandy. girl was invested in the story! and she got sad when they got the machine running again and the simulation would go back to the 'scorpion kiss' scene, where Dorothy would forget everything. this reminds me of when characters on c.ai or AI roleplay sites would forget things and "lose memory" so easily when you restart the plot or chat. basically Brandy fell in love with the AI portrayal of Dorothy in a fictional universe, and it's bittersweet. a bit relatable to c.ai, but it feels somehow uncanny. overall I loved it, and it's okay if you don't. I wonder if anyone else loves this as much as I do!

edit: as I mentioned, it's okay if you don't like it! everyone has different tastes and thanks for sharing all of your opinions. appreciate it.

Black Mirror

Season 7 Episode 3: Hotel Reverie

Directed by: Haolu Wang

Written by: Charlie Brooker

A lot of people hated the episode because of Issa, which is understandable cause her acting stood out like a sore thumb. But what pulled me out from the story was the premise. This has been mentioned a lot, but what's the point of the remake if it's literally just the original movie with one character transposed with a modern actor? It makes no sense.

What infuriated me the most was the tech they were using. Why would you make the AI models think for themselves?? The whole "the narrative integrity is collapsing because the characters are doing their own 💩" is so stupid. You're making a movie, not trying to finish the storyline of some video game! The way the tech works makes no sense. So advanced and for what??

I know this might go against the grain, but I genuinely believe that Hotel Reverie was a standout episode, and Issa Rae’s portrayal of Brandy was spot-on. Many critics argue that there was a lack of chemistry between Brandy and Clara, but I think that’s missing the point.

Brandy was thrust into a simulation without prior knowledge or preparation. There was no chemistry test, no rehearsals just raw, unfiltered interaction. This wasn’t about watching a polished film; it was about witnessing two individuals genuinely getting to know each other in real-time. The awkwardness and hesitations weren’t flaws; they were authentic reactions to an unprecedented situation.

Clara’s decision to stay ‘unknown to the memories’ within the simulation, even after gaining awareness of her reality, speaks volumes. She chose to follow the script, sacrificing her newfound consciousness to ensure Brandy could return to the real world. And that’s why her death was so poignant because she was also aware of the long time they spent with just one another. This act wasn’t just about love; it was about understanding, sacrifice, and the complexities of identity.

Both characters, navigating their own journeys of self-discovery, found solace in each other. Their relationship wasn’t a scripted romance it was a genuine connection formed under extraordinary circumstances. To say that Issa was not playing a good actor is thinking it in the wrong way because we aren’t watching someone filming we are watching a real budding connection.

Sorry I’m the number one hotel reverie defender