Hi Everyone, welcome to another instalment of my Black Mirror series analysis.
Today we’re going to be explaining and analysing the episode The Entire History of You.
The story is set sometime in the near(ish) future where recording and storing all your
memories via a small implant behind the back of your ear, a so-called grain, is commonplace.
The grain in conjunction with a small remote control allows people to playback and review
everything that has ever happened in their past, either privately in front of their eyes,
or more publicly, on a screen. These playbacks are dubbed re-dos.
The episode opens on lawyer Liam’s appraisal.
The interviewees mention that they think his office could take on retrospective parenting
cases where individuals would be able to sue their parents for bad parenting and the resulting
negative impact on the rest of their lives.
Liam questions whether the firm is OK with that, perhaps voicing his own doubts about
the way grains allow people to review the past again and again when making judgements
about present relationships.
The interviewees are surprised by the question and make it clear that they find these cases
acceptable and Liam hurriedly agrees that he is OK with it too.
They then let him know that they would like to do an extensive re-do of his memories for
the quarter and ask him if there have been any major deletions, indicating that in this
world there are certain limits on how much memory a person can delete from their grains
without raising suspicion.
After the interview Liam jumps in a taxi and asks to be taken to the airport. He uses his
grain remote control to pay for the ride.
Liam then pulls out his recording of the appraisal and his eyes become milky as he reviews the
footage - he's unsure whether it has gone well or not.
At the airport, before Liam can board his flight he has to go through security which
involves him playing back his last 24 hours and then his last week. Satisfied, that there
is nothing suspicious, the security personnel let him proceed.
We then join a group of friends at a dinner party where one of them, Jeff, is showing
the others a re-do of a recent holiday and he’s complaining about a frayed carpet.
He’s annoyed that he will now have a memory of that carpet for the rest of his life.
One of his friends, Jonas, points out that Jeff will only be bothered by the frayed carpet
if he keeps looking at it and keeps focussing on the negative.
A little later Liam arrives at the party and he sees his wife Ffion engaged in conversation
with Jonas and his suspicions are immediately raised.
When Ffion spots him, her easy expression and manner changes but she masks it with a smile
and approaches him.
She asks about his appraisal and when Liam hints that it didn’t go perfectly they agree
to discuss it later when they have privacy.
She introduces Liam to her friends and Liam’s dislike for Jonas increases as he finds the
other man over-familiar.
There’s clearly some tension in Liam and Ffion’s marriage and that becomes even more
apparent when a new guest, Colleen, arrives and Liam introduces himself to her as a
‘soon-to-be-unemployed-slash-unemployable-lawyer.’
Ffion is unimpressed that Liam has chosen to share this information with a virtual stranger,
out of the blue.
When the hostess asks Liam about his appraisal, he tells the group that he’s unsure as to
how it went and they urge him to throw a re-do up on a screen so they can critique him.
Liam and Ffion are again on different pages as Liam seems OK with the idea but Ffion is
uncomfortable. Just as Liam also thinks better of it and is about to refuse, Jonas interrupts
and tells the group to back off and leave Liam alone.
This magnanimous gesture grates on Liam - he didn’t need Jonas to step in and ‘rescue’ him
from his predicament.
At dinner a new person joins the group, Hallam and she sets herself apart when she reveals
she doesn’t have a grain.
Everyone reacts with surprise and disbelief as having a grain is so much a part of the
society they live in.
Their reaction is similar to how people today would react to someone declaring they don’t
have a smartphone or any form of social media.
When asked if her decision was politically motivated she says no and tells them that
her grain was stolen, she was attacked and the implant was gouged out.
Joans asks to see Hallam’s injury and he pulls back her hair to reveal deep scarring
from her attack.
He jokes that she doesn’t have brain damage and Hallum says her sight also remained
intact so clearly having the grain removed in this way is dangerous and could have had
serious repercussions.
There’s a black market for these grains and Hallum jokes that some Chinese pervert
is sitting watching re-dos of her most intimate moments.
After her gouging Hallum decided she quite liked not having a grain and decided not to
get another one implanted. She’s clearly happy with her decision but it makes the rest
of the group uncomfortable - it’s an alternative position.
Colleen who works in grain development talks about how organic memories aren’t accurate.
Her point is that the footage recorded by the grains are exact recordings of what happened
whereas organic memories can be manipulated and even falsely implanted.
Hallum listens politely but she’s not convinced.
Hallum prefers to live in the moment and she doesn’t need her grain technology to look
back on the past.
As Liam and Ffion ride home after the dinner party, he shows her a re-do of his appraisal
and we get a glimpse of how they can function quite well together.
He’s looking to her for reassurance and she’s watching the interview attentively.
She even notices one of the interviewees marking down a tick while Liam is talking. She sees
it as a positive sign but Liam dismisses it and here we see how insecure and paranoid
Liam can be.
Throughout the episode he’s been replaying his appraisal and when he’s not doing that,
he’s been replaying Ffion and Jonas’s tête-à-tête at the dinner party and questioning
in his mind what could have been nothing other than an innocent conversation between two
old friends.
He then starts to complain about Jonas and how arrogant he found him and Ffion is visibly
annoyed by his comments. She asks why Liam invited Jonas over and we realise that Jonas
is indeed following Liam and Ffion home.
The pair asked him to join them for a nightcap and he agreed.
Liam asserts that he only invited Jonas to join them because Ffion was keen and she immediately
pulls out a re-do proving that it was Liam who explicitly invited Joans over.
Ffion tells Liam if he doesn’t want Jonas to join them all he has to do is take back
the invitation and this results in a very awkward encounter outside the couple’s front
door where Liam proceeds to disinvite Jonas.
Ffion backs her husband and Jonas takes the hint and leaves.
Once home, Ffion relives the babysitter of her duties and then settles down to watch
a recording from their baby’s grain to ensure everything was OK
while they were away at dinner.
It’s interesting that grains are so widely accepted in society that even babies who can’t
decide whether or not they want one can be implanted if their parents choose. Similar
to how parents in this day and age can choose to upload and record their children via social
media without their consent.
Liam has poured both of them a drink and domestic bliss appears to have been restored but while
Ffion watches the footage Liam can’t help but return to his questioning about Jonas.
His interrogation and inability to let his suspicions of Jonas go illustrate how Liam
is quite well suited to be a lawyer.
As Liam continues to push, Ffion reveals she and Jonas dated for about a month, years ago
in Marrakech.
Liam has heard of this Mr Marrakech and he asks Ffion to confirm that they dated
for only a month and when she does, he immediately jumps on her statement and reveals how she
had initially told him it was only for a week.
He throws up on screen, the first time they ever had sex and Ffion is seen telling Liam
about Mr Marrakech and saying that they dated for a week.
Liam comments how their first time used to be a nice memory but it’s now marred by
Mr Marrakech.
His jealousy has ruined something that was a beautiful memory of the couple’s first time.
Ffion tells him that he’s getting obsessed and she reveals that the couple has gone through
something similar in the past when Liam became jealous and obsessed over some guy named Dan
- so Liam has some form when it comes to this type of behaviour.
As the argument escalates Liam says Ffion can ‘sometimes be a bitch’ and he’s
immediately contrite as he realises he’s gone too far.
He attempts to apologise and asks her to erase that encounter but Ffion refuses and replays
him calling her a ‘bitch’ over and over again, omitting the word 'sometimes' so that
it makes Liam appear even worse.
Each of them use the re-dos to catch each other out and punish each other just as jealous
and warring couples use social media and text messages to one up their partners during arguments.
After things cool down Liam apologises to Ffion who sincerely tells him she loves him.
The couple then proceed to make love but the moment of connection is false as they are
both watching re-dos of earlier sexual encounters in order to get in the mood. This is a further
illustration of the poor state of their marriage.
The next morning things are no better. Liam has spent all night, drinking and watching
re-dos of the dinner party.
He also used the lip reading functionality to reveal what Ffion said to Joans when Liam
first spotted them chatting the night before.
On the face of it, the conversation wasn’t anything too sinister. Ffion tells Jonas she
was nervous when she found out he would be at the party but that could have been down
to any number of reasons, not least of which is knowing that her husband, who is prone
to jealousy, may be attending the party.
When Gina, the babysitter, who had stayed overnight, comes to say goodbye Liam doesn’t
let her leave and ropes her into viewing his re-dos. He wants to know if a joke that Jonas
made the night before is funny or not.
Ffion found the joke funny but Liam doesn’t feel the joke was good enough to warrant her
enthusiastic laughter.
Ffion comes into the room and sees what Liam is up to. She realises that Liam still hasn’t
let go of his obsession with her past relationship with Jonas and she’s also embarrassed that
Gina is witnessing all this.
Liam then pulls up his and Ffion’s conversation with Jonas when they invited him back to theirs
and this time we see the re-do from Liam’s perspective.
Ffion does indeed seem reluctant to call an end to the night, which results in Liam inviting
Jonas back.
This illustrates how, contrary to what Colleen was suggesting the night before, that even
when the past is recorded, events can be viewed differently by different people.
Luckily for Gina, her Dad arrives to pick her up, and she’s saved from having to offer
any more opinions on the night before.
After Gina leaves, Liam makes Ffion sit down and go through all the little things he’s
noticed from the night before.
How her mood changes when she sees Liam arrive at the party, how she has a soft look
when she listens to Jonas’s stories and how her expression immediately changes when
she looks over at Liam and sees him observing her.
He then confronts her with footage from a re-do that was played by the host at the dinner party.
The footage shows Ffion’s group of friends, back in their heyday having fun and Liam zooms
into a clip which shows Ffion and Jonas kissing in the background. They are clearly not in
Marrakech and he demands to know how long Ffion and Jonas actually dated and she confesses
that it was six months.
So far Liam’s obsessiveness and paranoia have been very over the top and our sympathies
have tended toward Ffion who is having to deal with a borderline abusive husband but
her lie about the length of her relationship with Jonas makes her less of a sympathetic character.
Liam’s actions then get even more extreme as he goes drink driving to Jonas’s house.
Jonas lets him in but he knows something is wrong and after Liam asks if a lamp he has
in his house is from Marrakech, Jonas realises that Liam knows about his past relationship
with Ffion.
He tries to get Liam to leave but Liam refuses.
Hallum then joins them, she’s spent the night with Jonas.
When Joans physically tries to get Liam to leave, Liam smashes a bottle of alcohol over
Jonas’s head causing Hallum to scream.
In the next scene we see Liam has crashed his car and once he wakes up he plays a re-do
of what happened at Jonas’s house.
After Liam hit Jonas with the bottle the pair fought and Hallum tried to call for police
assistance but when she told the operator she didn’t have a grain feed to show them
what was happening they hung up.
Liam then went onto demand that Jonas delete all memories of Ffion from his memory bank
and when Jonas went to do it, via his eyes, Liam wouldn’t allow it and orderd Jonas to
throw up the memories on screen so that he can see the deletion for himself.
After Jonas complied, Liam yelled at him to stay away from his home and family
before leaving.
Liam plays the scene over and over again and he bends over horrified at what he's seen
and while we may at first think it’s because he realises his behaviour was out of control
and completely unacceptable, there’s something else … something more.
Liam returns home and asks Ffion whether she and Jonas used a condom when they slept together
and whether their baby is really his.
Ffion is shocked by his questions and insists their daughter is Liam’s.
This is when Liam shows her his re-do of what happened at Jonas's house. He zooms into the
screen where Jonas has pulled up all memories of Ffion and 18 months ago there’s a thumbnail
of the pair of them in Liam and Ffion’s very own bedroom.
An unusual painting that Liam gifted Ffion hangs in the room and the thumbnail shows
that very same painting in the background, damning Ffion and revealing her infidelity.
Ffion desperately explains it happened when Liam had previously walked out on her when
they were fighting about Dan.
Liam demands to see her re-do of when she and Jonas slept together, he wants to know
whether Jonas used a condom or not and Ffion tries to surreptitiously delete the footage
behind her eyes, but Liam catches her and stops her.
He insists on seeing the re-do and Ffion desperately refuses, knowing that if Liam were to see
with his own eyes, exactly what happened the couple would never be able to get past it
but Liam won’t listen and finally Ffion gives in and plays the footage for him.
After this incident the episode shows a flashback to when Liam and Ffion were happy.
The memory we are shown occurred only a day before the appraisal as we see a snippet of
it when he was showing the security at the airport a re-do of his last 24 hours.
Even though they had a troubled marriage the couple had moments of togetherness throughout
the episode.
Examples include when Ffion asked about the appraisal and the pair employ the kind of
shorthand communication that develops over long-term relationships to agree that they
would talk about in length later, when Ffion tries to point out the positives of Liam’s
appraisal when reviewing his re-do in the taxi ride home, and when she agrees to disinvite
Jonas from their impromptu after party suggestion.
At the end of the episode Liam is lying alone in their bed. The artwork that he gave Ffion
is nowhere to be seen and as Liam wanders through the house everything is a mess and
there is missing furniture.
Although it’s not obvious what happened to Ffion and their baby and some have even
speculated that Liam might have killed them, Charlie Brooker has clarified that the ending
was meant to indicate that the marriage ended and Ffion had moved out with their child - hence
the missing furniture and general disarray in the home.
Liam thinks back to all the good times in his relationship and finally seems to recognise
that his jealousy and inability to leave the past alone has led to him losing his family.
Yes, Ffion was dishonest and unfaithful but in his quest to find out the truth, by any
and all means necessary he has lost everything that meant anything to him.
We don’t know if Liam was always jealous and possessive or if it was triggered as a
result of Ffion’s actual or imagined affair with Dan but we do know that the grain technology
exacerbated the situation.
It allowed him to review re-dos again and again, to find hints of an affair.
His behaviour reflects how sinister the behaviour of jealous partners
can become, when they stalk their other half, be it on social media or by going through
their phones or in this case by going over re-dos of their past again and again.
Liam’s obsession is an extreme extrapolation of Jeff’s similar obsession with his frayed
carpet earlier in the episode. Jeff’s carpet stopped him from remembering an amazing luxury
holiday and Liam’s determination to uncover his wife’s affair stopped him from
taking a step back and viewing the value and importance of his relationship in its entirety.
In the final moments of the episode Liam cuts out his grain in a brutally graphic scene.
As he pulls out the implant a series of happier memories flash through his brain before the
screen cuts to black.
We don’t know the damage done as a result of his 'at-home surgery' but we have been told
the dangers by Hallum earlier in the episode.
Although the episode of the Entire History of You chooses to focus on the impact of grain
technology on personal relationships there are indications of how the technology has
changed society as a whole.
At Liam’s appraisal he’s expected to show his re-dos to his employers. When he jumps
in a taxi he uses his remote control to pay for it and when he gets through airport security
he must present his recordings from the week before. It makes you wonder how people like
Hallum can function effectively in this world.
Her decision not to have a grain shocks her fellow dinner party guests and Colleen even
commented how hookers often opt to go grainless - for obvious reasons.
People engaged in behaviour they would rather not record don’t have grains but everyone
else does as the people who go grainless in this society, do not have all the advantages
available to them.
A stark example of this is when Hallum attempts to call the police while Liam and Jonas are
fighting and the operator hangs up on her when Hallum reveals she doesn’t have a grain feed.
In our present day world, we know that all our technology, our phones, our computers,
our social media, gives the authorities unprecedented levels of access to our private information
and whereabouts and we have allowed this encroachment because if we don’t have our technology
we lose out on all the benefits.
But the problem with this is, that as our privacy continues to be chipped away at,
we lose our boundaries and if the authorities chose to, they could exploit our information
in all sorts of ways.
The security personnel at the airport, if they were so inclined, could have twisted
anything in Liam’s re-do to be suspicious and not allowed him to board his plane.
People in power can easily abuse their position in a surveillance society and following that
a Big Brother state is not too much a stretch of the imagination.
Although the episode does indicate how society is affected by this grain technology the focus
is very much on the domestic drama that is Liam and Ffion’s crumbling marriage.
The main question posed it whether ignorance is bliss and in this case the answer appears
to be a yes.
Liam’s final decision to cut out his grain is his recognition of his own extreme behaviour
and it is a gesture of atonement.
And that brings me to the end of my explanation and analysis of The Entire History of You.
A gut-wrenching domestic drama that exposes some of the ugliest aspects of relationships.
As always guys I hope you enjoyed this video and look out for more upcoming Black Mirror
episode explanation and analysis videos.
Thanks so much for watching and make sure to subscribe!