Meta-Romance and Recasting Desire in Hotel Reverie, by Muskan Soni

Early into the third episode of Black Mirror’s latest (2025), Brandy Friday (played by Issa Rae), a Hollywood actor, tells her manager how she’s tired of her only casting options being “a noble victim or a f******e sidekick.” Fed up with this patriarchal binary, she becomes the only A-lister to take on the role of Dr. Alex Palmer in Hotel Reverie- the episode’s namesake and the title of the film within it. Written by Charlie Brooker and directed by Haolu Wang, Hotel Reverie aired on 10 April 2025 on Netflix as a meta-romance about AI, memory and what happens when you give a woman the keys to a role that was structurally framed for a man. The simulation, powered by ReDream technology, comes with on-screen dashboards tracking ‘narrative stress,’ ‘romantic interest,’ and ‘exposition pipelines,’ allowing both the fictional crew and the audience to register the deliberate contrasts between the original Dr. Palmer (white, male, British) and Brandy’s subverted Palmer (Black, female, American).In the original, Dr Palmer’s pursuit of Clara (Emma Corrin) unfolds through what Laura Mulvey famously termed the male gaze, which frames women as passive objects of heterosexual desire. It is precisely this structure that Friday resists from the outset, declaring early on: ‘I don’t want to be pursued; why can’t I pursue?’  Her question is both an inversion of the gaze and an act of narrative reclamation. In the archetypes of old Hollywood romance, the male lead is the active pursuer and emotional anchor, while the female lead reacts, responds and exists to be desired. By stepping into Palmer’s suit (literally)- Brandy reframes the romantic dynamic, claiming the agency to act rather than be acted upon in a plotline that retains its sapphic tenderness. Interestingly, this shift echoes through the story and Clara too begins to gain a heightened sense of agency- stepping beyond the passivity scripted for her in the original. This recasting therefore functions as a re-centring of desire in a space that has historically excluded women from such roles unless framed as novelty or parody. Clara’s evolution makes this even more apparent: what begins as a subtle shift in her behaviour soon becomes a profound narrative rupture- midway through the simulation, in a moment of unscripted intimacy, Brandy calls her by her real name- Dorothy. This slip collapses the simulation’s boundaries; and as one crew member notes, she seemed to have ‘grown a dimension’ through this. Clara’s programmed identity thus fuses with Dorothy’s lived memories and creates a hybrid consciousness that leads us to a narrative of no return. When a technical error freezes the story in a suspended simulation and shifts the story’s arc, Brandy and Dorothy’s relationship grows beyond anything the AI’s dashboards can measure. Eventually, the suit stops functioning as a symbol of defiance and becomes part of Brandy’s self.  The episode creates space for a reality where a Black woman occupies the structural position of the patriarchal lead and thus shifts the narrative agency to something beyond mere representation by challenging and rebuilding the mechanics of desire itself. The episode’s bittersweet ending of love persisting- even if only as a memory is a sharp reminder that even when the storyline reverts to its old order, the possibilities revealed in its rupture are not so easily erased.

Bio: Muskan Soni is a Researcher at the Department of Sociology at Monk Prayogshala, India. She is particularly interested in interdisciplinary approaches that connect feminist theory, critical digital studies, and public sociology.