Thankfully, “Hang the DJ” is one of the good-hearted ones. I tend to think Black Mirror is most interesting and most effective when it stretches itself to tell stories about technology as a potential good, rather than taking the easy route of “ … and then everything was a monstrous nightmare.” In its own depressing way, that worldview is as simplistic and frustrating a conclusion about tech as its Silicon Valley–fueled “tech can save us all” inverse. It’s meant to be a hopeful episode, an optimistic story of characters valuing love over everything else. It’s also about choosing a partner in the context of a wide world of potential mates, especially after you’ve had previous serious relationships. It’s about love enabled by technological advancement and two people choosing one another over the world they know. “Hang the DJ” echoes many of those same themes. Forced into a decision between old-school death and a virtual, potentially eternal life with a partner, tech lets Yorkie and Kelly live together for as long as they choose. But “San Junipero” features two women making a difficult, painful, beautiful choice to be together, and that choice is enabled by the episode’s featured technology. Like the rest of the series, it plays with ideas from creator Charlie Brooker’s stable of obsessions: death and the afterlife, minds separated from their physical bodies, the complexity of human relationships when combined with paradigm-shifting technology. “San Junipero” is far and away the most hopeful and optimistic of Black Mirror’s anthology-style episodes. In the canon of Black Mirror episodes, “Hang the DJ” is most obviously in conversation with season three’s standout hour “ San Junipero.” In that episode, two women named Yorkie and Kelly fall for each other in a post-death virtual-reality world, and one of them forgoes her earthly belief system, deciding instead to live forever with her new love. In the real world, Amy and Frank look at one another and smile, nervous and excited and hopeful about the prospect of this nearly guaranteed magic relationship. In 998 of those simulations, Frank and Amy feel so dedicated to one another that they decide to rebel against the System, escape everything they know, and choose each other. The Frank and Amy we’ve been following this whole time, we realize, were computer simulations, merely one pair in a collection of 1,000 dating scenarios. They look at their phones, and a dating app informs them that they’re a 99.8 percent compatibility match. They’re in a crowded bar, much less sanitized and sparse than the world-size West Elm catalogue we’ve seen for most of the episode. In the last moments of “Hang the DJ,” we cut to a scene that suddenly registers as the “real” world, with real-life versions of Frank and Amy. They flee to the edge of the compound, climb up a massive ladder while the world around them begins to disintegrate, and then they do as well, surrounded by dozens of dissolving identical Frank and Amy doppelgängers. Near the end of the episode, Amy finally acts on her suspicion that their entire world is working against them, and urges Frank to join her in making an escape from the pastoral compound where they’ve been living.