Black Mirror's Miley Cyrus episode was the best of Season 5, despite widespread criticism that it was the worst

Observer

The other two episodes were underwhelming and mediocre at best, but Cyrus' “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too" episode was Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker at his best, says Tim Brinkhof. Fans have pointed out the untapped potential and underdeveloped concepts such as cloning and artificial intelligence in Cyrus' episode. "But," says Brinkhof, "the changes these complaints would propose, of disrupting the narrative and altering the tone, would evidently detract from what Brooker is trying to accomplish here, and what he has been trying to accomplish with the show since its earliest conception: to expose the lies and hypocrisies of society. In this case, his target is the music industry. Ashley O does not exist; she is an artificial personality, created not by Ashley herself but by her aunt. Her songs don’t communicate what Ashley feels inside, rather what extensive market research has proven sells. The conflict between the artistic integrity of the artist and the financial interest of their producers might as well by now be regarded as one of storytelling’s most archetypal relationships, one that Brooker chose to represent literally by having Ashley’s aunt induce her into a coma, extracting songs from her head without resistance, suiting them to her own needs....'Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too,' may tell its story through a slightly different voice, but the story it imparts undoubtedly belongs in the cruel world of Black Mirror, and represents the best of Brooker’s talent as a writer: a continuous desire to reinvent himself, and a consistent capacity to surprise his audience."

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• The Miley Cyrus episode was a sly critique of empowerment feminism: "Its analysis of the way capital-centered empowerment feminism has encroached into culture to the detriment of women and non-binary femmes is dead-on, even sophisticated in the fashion of the best Black Mirror episodes," says Julianne Escobedo Shepherd. "Ashley O, played by Cyrus, is a pink-haired teen pop icon whose songs, and message, are that girls can do whatever they want if they just stay positive and put their minds to it. This maxim has been a deceptively apolitical facet of feminism for at least 25 years—in the mid-’90s, after the political momentum of the third wave was subsumed into Girl Power t-shirts sold at big-box chain stores; in the somnambulist folds of Obama’s second term, when the illusion of progressive mobility manifested into the rarefied corporate aspirations of Lean In; and more recently in the months leading up to the 2016 election, in which the concept of feminism seemed flattened into representation and visibility (usually of white women) at the expense of inclusive collective action and engagement."
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