W&L’s Mudd Center Presents Screening of ‘Black Mirror’ Episode The Nov. 5 screening will be followed by a conversation about AI and grief.

Mudd Center for Ethics
October 29, 2026

The Washington and Lee University Roger Mudd Center for Ethics presents a screening of an episode from the anthology series “Black Mirror” at 7 p.m. on Nov. 5 in Stackhouse Theater in Elrod Commons as part of the Mudd Center’s series, “Memory, Mind and Morality.”

The screening is free and open to the public.

The featured episode, “Be Right Back,” is the first episode of the second season and follows Martha as she navigates grief following the death of her boyfriend, Ash. She initially uses an online service to create an artificial intelligence (AI) imitation of him with whom she can interact through text messages and phone calls. Martha then agrees to participate in the service’s experimental stage, which creates an android version of Ash, and grapples with the unsettling reality of having Ash back — yet not fully.

The screening will be followed by a conversation about what happens when technology allows us to recreate someone we have lost. The episode, which originally aired in 2013, explores the ethical and emotional consequences of using AI to reconstruct a deceased loved one from their digital traces — and predates the current development of AI platforms designed to create “deathbots” and digital companions modeled on the deceased. This intersection of AI and grief raises profound questions about memory, mind, mourning, identity and our moral responsibilities toward the dead.

For more information and a complete schedule of events, visit the Mudd Center for Ethics’ series webpage.

The Mudd Center was established in 2010 through a gift to the university from award-winning journalist Roger Mudd, a 1950 graduate of W&L. By facilitating collaboration across traditional institutional boundaries, the center aims to encourage a multidisciplinary perspective on ethics informed by both theory and practice. Previous Mudd Center lecture series themes have included “Global Ethics in the 21st Century: Challenges and Opportunities,” “Race and Justice in America,” “The Ethics of Citizenship,” “Markets and Morals,” “Equality and Difference,” “The Ethics of Identity,” “The Ethics of Technology,” “Daily Ethics: How Individual Choices and Habits Express Our Values and Shape Our World, “Beneficence: Practicing and Ethics of Care,” “The Ethics of Design,” “How We Live and Die: Stories, Values and Communities” and “Taking Place: Land Use and Environmental Ethics.”