Question: did the song from 15 Million Merits (which also showed up in another episode) show up in one of these episodes? I thought I heard it but can’t remember when.
Yes, blonde girl was singing it in the soldier episode.
How do you know there’s nothing else beyond it?
What’s kind of being ignored in the whole discussion of the San Junipero episode is that you still die. Heaven, hell, or oblivion still await you. What happens is that your mental essence is captured, copied and placed in an electronically created nirvana. It isn’t you, but one can argue that it’s the “next best thing” because it remembers your memories, thinks your thoughts, and feels your emotions. Or you can argue that it is you, just without all the wetware.
You do still die, it just isn’t as fatal as it used to be.
Sounds like the “the Star Trek teleporter kills you” argument all over again 
Pretty sure Lacie was singing it to herself in episode 1 too.
Love, love, love when they do tie-ins like that. Like Stephen King books that reference each other.
I tried to watch episode 6 twice and fell asleep both times.
There are massive amounts of crossovers between episodes, but for most of them you gotta be quick with the pause button. Here is a list of the ones reddit has found so far.
My thought was that they could jam the procedure by getting a program to vote for Fred Flintstone a billion times or something like that. No such luck.
The thing about San Junipero that I don’t get…
Surely you don’t get to live in such paradise for free, right? I can see how maybe Kelly has enough money to purchase an eternal subscription, but what about Yorkie? She’s been in nursing care for most of her life so she probably doesn’t have a big pile of savings, and it doesn’t seem like her parents would have been onboard with financing virtual heaven mumbo-jumbo. Especially for no stinkin’ lesbian.
I enjoyed episode 6 even though the plot hinged on everyone making stupid assumptions and decisions.
I don’t know, maybe it’s a public service? I mean, lol US and public services, but maybe this is the Good Alternate Future.
This’s actually a very good point. And not one of the better Who episodes, or even one of the memorably awful ones; more like a Partners in Crime-tier episode nobody remembers two seasons later. It would not have been out of place for the Doctor to show up and wave his Sonic Screwdriver at a bunch of robot bees.
Maybe people buy life insurance policies that pay out to the company that runs the servers.
Because it is just a simulation of their brain pattern in a computer. The episode’s end literally shows us this. The people are dead, all they are now is a simulation of themselves.
Okay, but there are multiple interpretations of what “life” means. You can interpret it in a holistic bodily sense, or in the sense of “continuity of consciousness”. While it’s true that their bodies stopped functioning, it’s also clear that there’s a unique continuity of consciousness between the brain and the silicon imprint of that brain.
Obviously, the philosophy of life, consciousness, and so on is a huge, complex philosophical discussion, but I don’t think it’s clear cut that they’re just “dead” and this is some fake horrific simulacrum. It depends a lot on your personal interpretation of “life”, and is arguably more of a semantic issue than one of realism the way, say, the Dualism vs Physical Monism debate is. Especially since it’s not clear what exactly is the “essence” of human consciousness anyway. It would be more clear cut if you could prove people had a soul that did or did not go to heaven due to/regardless of them going to San Junipero, but if you assume all that awaits one after death is oblivion things get murkier.
That was my thought. That’s what the Alcor Life Extension people do. Make them the beneficiary of an adequate life insurance policy and they’ll freeze your head or body to be reanimated when technology allows.
I guess my point is I don’t see a difference between what is in San Junipero and the Simulation in the Christmas episode that (I’ll put it in spoilers since it is a different season)
gets brow beaten into being a slave. In SJ they aren’t being mistreated like that one was but the concept is the same.
If I were just a copy of myself living in a program, it would be fun for a while but eventually the fun wears off and you realize there is nothing else, nothing at all. That’s really empty and scary to me.
It would be like if they somehow found absolute proof this universe was a simulation except in this case I know for sure it is because I volunteered for it.
As I said in an earlier post; technology will advance to the point where they could be moved out of the virtual world back into the real one in immortal android bodies externally indistinguishable from the real thing.
In “San Junipero”, when Kelly makes her little speech about there being nothing after death, and her husband has not rejoined their daughter forever in the afterlife, that’s the writers telling us that for her there is no consideration about whether her presence in San Junipero will be her “soul” or just some simulation of her soul. She doesn’t believe in a soul; what she has in San Junipero is all that’s left of her.
At the end, when they were inserting the device into the giant control panel, I got the impression that the person’s essence was contained within the device. What’s to prevent setting it up so that the device isn’t activated until, say, a year after death. Then you’re resurrected and have the knowledge that they didn’t activate it for a year and you then know whether that year was nothingness or something else. You can then make a more informed decision as to whether to continue.