This episode deals with how man-made technology could undo millions of years of evolutionary optimizations when it comes to memory. There is a reason why the past often seems golden. Our mind tends to smooth out the rough edges of our past. What may seem to be an ageing mechanism wherein we slowly lose our memory retention maybe a good thing for us. Maybe an eidetic memory is so rare because it is a curse. If you don't forget the awful, how would you move on and yet make something good of your life? The famous Russian Solomon Shereshevsky who had an incredible memory later struggled to forget things!
The protagonist Liam is a lawyer who has had a difficult day at work. He returns home to a party in which he suspects something. His misgivings take a darker hue when his wife keeps avoiding his casual questions about a guy from the 'old gang'. The technology device which lets you record every memory of you is taken ample help of to probe more into the evidence.
Double-edged
Not only this capability to 'redo' a past incident does not let him heal, he keeps on reliving them to the point that he almost become trapped in his insecurities. Being a lawyer, he is able to keep his feelings separate from the cold truth of the memory device, and inch by inch he uncovers the horrible truth about his wife's affair.
The story shows that technology may give us abilities which may not be good for us in the long term. Having an everlasting memory is useful in many scenarios, but it also comes at a great personal cost. An obsessive person will be able to exploit it to increase their paranoia. A couple who have fights will use it as a weapon to prove points.
Context-free
Technology gives us a filtered reality. It is devoid of context. When Liam uncovers the affair, Fi reminds him that they were in a rocky period in the marriage at that time. This context calms him a little, but he remains unhinged on other details.
The point here is that technology is an inherently flawed medium because 'to err is human'. Whoever created this technology could not capture how the human mind takes a memory into account. The memory does not exist as a video in reality, it is more like poetry flowing into the mind's receptacle of thought, mingling with earlier impressions and conclusions. When you think about a certain event, you are also thinking about related events in the entire timeline. This blurs the edges of a single incident into something more connected and whole. Also there exist various coping mechanisms in the mind which either block or dull the edges of a nasty memory. A technology like the one showed in this episode treats a memory as a video file, which is fundamentally a wrong way to represent such abstractions. It undoes the various inbuilt protections of the mind by blandly keeping them stored in a chip behind your ear.
...to forgive divine
Empathy is a basic tenet of humanity. Technology robs us of empathy. We are unable to treat a video image as an actual person, a person who could in reality be a loved one, a person made up of flesh and bone who could make mistakes, a human being whose entire history we cannot ever know (ironically this is the opposite of the title of the episode).
This is because technology is monochromatic, it processes only a select set of signals from the real world's infinite signals. It is a flawed human invention, so much so that we become more machine-like when we interact with it. This is perhaps what adaptation looks like in action. It takes over our lives, we adapt to its single tone-deaf noise, and become robot-like in our thinking as well. We forget all the beautiful variations of nature around us--because nature is indeed about abundant diversity--and only choose to see what technology shows us. Technology does not let us forget, and it does not let us forgive. It is a lens which we created to fool ourselves, so that reality does not blind us.
Never enough
Is the world ever enough? In the final scene, Liam realizes that he does not need the memory device after all. If he never had the device, perhaps he would never have uncovered the dirty secret of his family.
In our quest to play God, we keep on inventing devices which always fall short of reality. For us, the world as it exists, must be changed into something else, in order for us to call it our own. Our imperfections, our insecurities, our ambitions drive these modifications. People could have made love to each other looking into each others' eyes before, but with this memory invention they now get the option to relive their 'greatest hits' during the act, making the entire act devoid of any feeling or meaning. It is changed into a gross and perverted act--without substance; a mere shell.
The search for truth
There is an undercurrent of this theme throughout the episode. Technology is used as a tool to discover the truth. Liam, as a lawyer, uses his memory device to validate every hypothesis. He is able to uncover the truth ultimately that his child is actually not his own, but the truth shatters him. As a tool for investigation into the nature of truth, technology itself is a highly doubtful medium. This is because technology has limitations, and could lead to the wrong conclusions if not properly scrutinized. Truth exists in the infinite signals of the real world, technology being a subset would only be useful to see a single side of the truth, never the whole truth. Liam is able to use it only because of his sharp deductive skills.
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