I binged the new season of Black Mirror in one hungry sitting, expecting the usual parade of near-future nightmares and twisted tech scenarios. And, to be fair, it served all of that up in abundance, but it wasn’t the dystopia that stuck with me: it was Eulogy.

A quiet, aching 47 minutes nestled among the chaos, episode five feels very different from anything that’s come before it. Starring Paul Giamatti, the Netflix drama weaves a tale about Phillip, a lonely and embittered man who lives very much on his own – and in his own time, too. Unlike so many other Black Mirror settings, his home is almost devoid of ultramodern tech: there’s a cord phone hanging on the wall, a pinboard filled to the brim with notes and a desk covered in wires and papers. In fact, save for the computer console in the background, it could be an office from any point over the last few decades.

This setting, touched by golden light and floating dust, makes it all the more shocking when a drone arrives at his door with a package: a woman he loved a very, very long time ago has died. A company called Eulogy has requested he ‘upload’ his memories of her so that her family and friends can enjoy a truly ‘immersive’ funeral experience in London.

With friendly prompts from the mysterious and perpetually chirpy Guide (Patsy Ferran, Miss Austen), he attaches a sleek white disc to his temple – only to realise he can’t recall Carol’s face anymore. Phillip is forced to dig through boxes in the attic, where he has all but buried the woman he lost, and pore over sun-damaged Polaroids and grainy photos in a bid to bring Carol to life in his mind’s eye once more… but in the process, he unearths plenty of old hurts and a few surprises.

While this episode absolutely zigs where you think it might zag, it isn’t here to pull the rug out from under anyone’s feet. What it is here to do, though, is hit viewers with an emotional gut punch unlike any other. And while I’ve no doubt millennials will draw parallels between Eulogy and indie favourite Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, it’s dealing with a far cleverer – and potentially more painful – concept than the use of tech to erase old memories; instead, Phillip is able to rewatch, replay and sometimes even reprogramme. He is able to step into the photographs themselves, to home in on old details he had once forgotten, all as The Guide steers him ever closer to his ultimate goal.

It got me thinking: many of us don’t keep photo albums anymore, and hardly any of us ever take a roll of camera film to be developed at our local Snappy Snaps. Instead, we carry hundreds of photos on our phones, ready to summon a moment with a swipe. And while that means the past is always in our pocket, it also means memories get buried under selfies and screenshots. We don’t hold them in our hands. We don’t lift them to our faces to take a closer look at a previously unnoticed detail. We simply don’t treasure photos the way we used to.

That being said, there’s no denying that modern technology can do some unexpected good, especially when it comes to poring over the past. For people who grew up in a time before the Cloud, photos and videos could become lost or damaged; my own family, in fact, lost a fair few photo albums (and the backup rolls of film) when our childhood home unexpectedly caught fire one night and the blaze ripped through the loft.

Now, children’s baby photos are stored in cyberspace forevermore. We are constantly increasing storage space on our phones to make room for the seemingly ceaseless stream of snapshots that pour in each day. We share the very best of them with the world via social media. And I’m sure I’m not alone when I say that my phone pings me with daily ‘memory’ notifications about photos I took last year, last month, last week – even yesterday.

Somehow, forward-thinking tech has made it easier than ever to look back, to be nostalgic. And, honestly, it’s for this reason that Eulogy feels less like science fiction and more like a reckoning. For millennials and Gen X – who grew up straddling two worlds, learning to let go of Polaroids and corded phones even as we embraced smartphones and cloud storage – this episode hits a uniquely tender nerve. It speaks not just to the ache of losing someone, but to the ache of losing something: the tangibility of memory, the warmth of analog, the slower, quieter way we once captured the world around us.

But unlike so many other Black Mirror stories, Eulogy doesn’t warn us about tech gone wrong. It dares to imagine what it looks like when technology offers solace instead of horror – when it helps us confront the pain we’ve buried and reconnect with the people we once were. Phillip’s journey is one of grief, yes, but also one of healing. Of reckoning. Of remembering.

Because memory isn’t just visual. It’s layered with feeling, with sound, with regret and with love. And Eulogy understands that. It honours it. And in doing so, it offers us something rare: a kind of tech-fuelled therapy for anyone who’s ever mourned a person, a place or a moment in time.

Images: Netflix