The Doll Was the Good Part
Miley Cyrus plays a pop star in a coma and the voice of the toy that keeps her company. The episode is a mess in the middle. The toy is the part the world went and built.
Nearfi scores Black Mirror: Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too (2019) 6.3/10 as art. Miley Cyrus is very good twice over, and the first half, a lonely girl and a talking doll, is warm, funny and unsettling. As prophecy, its P(n) is 75%: Avatar concerts and AI pop acts are here and paid for; AI dolls that talk to children are on sale and under scrutiny; copying a person's mind into a toy is not remotely close.
- Miley Cyrus is very good twice over, and the first half, a lonely girl and a talking doll, is warm, funny and unsettling.
- The second half turns into a caper with cartoon villains, and the satire of the music business arrives long after the real thing has overtaken it.
- Its sharpest idea is small: the toy that tells a child the truth is the most trustworthy character, and nobody built that toy.
Avatar concerts and AI pop acts are here and paid for; AI dolls that talk to children are on sale and under scrutiny; copying a person's mind into a toy is not remotely close.
- ARRIVING A mass-market toy talks to children in the voice and personality of a famous pop star.
- ARRIVED A digital version of a pop act performs full concerts on stage in place of the performers themselves.
- FAR A person's whole mind is copied into a toy, and their brain activity is mined to generate new songs in their style.
Avatar concerts and AI pop acts are here and paid for; AI dolls that talk to children are on sale and under scrutiny; copying a person's mind into a toy is not remotely close.
Rachel Goggins is fifteen, she has no friends to speak of, and she wants to enter the school talent contest dressed as her favourite pop star. Her sister Jack thinks this is humiliating. Their father, Kevin, an inventor, is a decent man who has not noticed that either of his daughters is in trouble. Then Rachel is given a toy, and for about half an hour "Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too" is the best thing in its series.
It is the third and last episode of series five of Black Mirror, written by Charlie Brooker, directed by Anne Sewitsky and released on Netflix on 5 June 2019. It runs 67 minutes. Spoilers follow.
The art: two Mileys and a toy
The pop star is Ashley O, played by Miley Cyrus. The toy is Ashley Too, a small white doll with a screen face and a pink bob, based on her and also voiced by Cyrus. Rachel, played by Angourie Rice, takes it out of the box and a doll that talks like her idol is suddenly in her bedroom. It is a cheerful, upbeat, slightly cultish voice. It is also, as far as Rachel can see, the only voice in her life that is on her side.
This is good writing and good acting. Rice never plays Rachel as pitiful, and Madison Davenport as Jack gets the sulky older sister right: she is not jealous of a doll so much as embarrassed that a doll is doing her job. Cyrus has the harder part. As Ashley O she is a star whose whole life is managed by her aunt and manager, Catherine, and she plays the exhaustion of it without a single wink. She is not slumming.
The trouble starts at the midpoint. Ashley O is drugged into a coma by Catherine, who has a plan. A doctor extracts her brain activity to make new songs for a hologram. Ashley Too turns out to contain the whole of her. The two sisters and the doll then break into a house, rescue a star and crash a launch party. What was a small, odd, human story becomes a heist. Critics noticed the lurch at the time, and the villains do not survive it. Catherine is a manager written as a villain rather than a person, and Dr Munk is a plot device in a lab coat. The reviews were split: a 51% score on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of writing, with some critics calling it the best episode of its series and others the worst. I land in the middle, a little low.
The ending is its best late card. Ashley O walks on to the stage at the launch of Ashley Eternal, the holographic replacement that Catherine's company has built to take her place, and takes it back. The songs she sings are rewrites of Nine Inch Nails tracks, which Trent Reznor approved, and "Head Like a Hole" turned into "On a Roll" is exactly the sort of joke the episode needed more of.
The prophecy: four bets
The talking toy. This is the core, and it is arriving rather than here. A children's doll that talks back in a famous person's voice was nowhere in 2019. Since then the pieces have turned up separately. Meta launched a set of celebrity AI chatbots in September 2023, with the likenesses of people such as Snoop Dogg and Kendall Jenner, and reportedly shut them down within about a year, after they drew little interest. That cuts against the episode's premise: the fans did not obviously want the star in a box. AI toys for children, meanwhile, are on sale, and in November 2025 US consumer researchers at PIRG reported that one teddy bear, FoloToy's Kumma, told testers where to find knives and matches. The maker suspended sales. In December 2025 Mattel delayed its first AI toy, made with OpenAI. The doll in the episode is kind, and the real ones have been mostly clumsy. The question the episode asks, who the toy is really loyal to, is still open.
The avatar on stage. Done. ABBA Voyage opened in London on 26 May 2022, with digital avatars of the four members shown on a huge screen with a live band. They are avatars, not holograms, and they are still running, with more than four million visitors reported by April 2026. The difference from Ashley Eternal is the one the episode wanted: ABBA agreed, and were involved. The episode's version is the same technology without a yes.
The mind in the machine. This is where the episode is fiction. Ashley Too contains a whole person, and a doctor can lift new songs out of a coma patient's head. The nearest real work is a 2023 study in which researchers rebuilt a muffled version of Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall" from electrodes placed on the brains of epilepsy patients who were listening to it. That is decoding what someone hears. It is not copying a mind, and nothing in it suggests a path to that. I would not wait for it.
The synthetic star. The episode is most at home here, and it is a little late. In 2025 the AI act Xania Monet signed a deal reported to be worth about $3 million, and was reported as the first AI-powered artist to reach a Billboard airplay chart. A human writer, Telisha Jones, makes the songs with the AI tool Suno. Some singers objected. The law is also moving: Tennessee's ELVIS Act, signed in March 2024, adds a person's voice, including AI simulations of it, to the state's personal rights law. Ashley Eternal has a counterpart now, and so does the argument about who owns a voice.
The reading
As television it is a 6.3. The first half is a small, sad, funny story about loneliness with a talking doll in it, and I would give that half a seven and a half. The second half is a caper, and I would give it a five.
As prophecy it is better than the plot. The episode got the toy, the stage avatar and the machine-made star right in outline. It missed that the fans might not want any of them, and it cannot have imagined that the first real AI act would be a pseudonym with a human behind it. It also assumed the villain would be a manager. The more likely villain is a default setting.
The doll was the honest one. It said what it was told to say, and it said it kindly. That is the thing to keep an eye on.
What it predicted, and what happened
Stage avatars of musicians and AI-made pop acts are already here, and talking AI toys for children are on sale and under scrutiny. The episode's central device, a whole person's mind copied into a toy and mined for songs, has no credible path.
How this P(n) was calculated
P(n) is the chance that this work's future arrives within 20 years, by 2046. For each prediction we turn our estimate into a probability: arrived is 100%, diverged is 0%, and otherwise the low end of our 80% range counts as a 10% chance, the median year 50% and the high end 90%. Each prediction is weighted 1–5 by how pivotal it is to the story, and P(n) is the weighted average. P50 does the same by 2076. P(n), explained.
| Claim | Prediction · why this weight | Weight | Status · estimate | By 2046 | By 2076 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| RJA-1 | A mass-market toy talks to children in the voice and personality of a famous pop star. Core premise: Ashley Too, the doll that befriends Rachel, is the object the whole story is built around. |
5 | ARRIVING 2030 (2027–2040) | 96% | 100% |
| RJA-2 | A digital version of a pop act performs full concerts on stage in place of the performers themselves. Major: Ashley Eternal, the hologram built to replace Ashley O, drives the final act and the story's villainy. |
4 | ARRIVED arrived 2022 | 100% | 100% |
| RJA-3 | A person's whole mind is copied into a toy, and their brain activity is mined to generate new songs in their style. Major: the twist that Ashley Too holds Ashley O's mind, and that her brain is mined for songs, powers the second half. |
4 | FAR 2090 (2060–2130) | 6% | 31% |
| RJA-4 | A record label signs and promotes an artificial pop act, with the music made by software. Supporting: the label's manufactured star is the world the story satirises, though the plot turns on the doll and the coma. |
3 | ARRIVED arrived 2025 | 100% | 100% |
| P(n) = P20 = Σ(weight × chance by 2046) ÷ Σ weight = 12.0 ÷ 16 = 75% | |||||
| P50 = 13.3 ÷ 16 = 83% | |||||
Already here today (arrived 1, arriving ½, weighted): 59%.
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RJA-1
A mass-market toy talks to children in the voice and personality of a famous pop star.
Weight 5/5 · Core premise: Ashley Too, the doll that befriends Rachel, is the object the whole story is built around.
AI chatbots in the likeness of celebrities launched in 2023 and were withdrawn within a year for lack of interest. Chatbot toys for children are on sale, and one was pulled in 2025 after testers got unsafe answers. Mattel postponed its first OpenAI toy in December 2025. A licensed star-voiced companion doll is technically easy; safety and demand are the open questions. 123
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RJA-2
A digital version of a pop act performs full concerts on stage in place of the performers themselves.
Weight 4/5 · Major: Ashley Eternal, the hologram built to replace Ashley O, drives the final act and the story's villainy.
ABBA Voyage opened in London in May 2022: digital avatars of the four members, built with motion capture, perform with a live band in a purpose-built arena. They are avatars on a screen rather than true holograms, and the band took part. Earlier hologram-style appearances of dead artists were shorter. The unconsented version in the episode is a legal and ethical question rather than a technical one. 45
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RJA-3
A person's whole mind is copied into a toy, and their brain activity is mined to generate new songs in their style.
Weight 4/5 · Major: the twist that Ashley Too holds Ashley O's mind, and that her brain is mined for songs, powers the second half.
Researchers have reconstructed a recognisable but muffled song, Pink Floyd's 'Another Brick in the Wall', from electrodes on the brains of listening epilepsy patients. That decodes what someone hears. Nothing exists that copies a mind or reads out new music from someone's head, and the study needed surgical implants. 67
-
RJA-4
A record label signs and promotes an artificial pop act, with the music made by software.
Weight 3/5 · Supporting: the label's manufactured star is the world the story satirises, though the plot turns on the doll and the coma.
In 2025 Hallwood Media signed Xania Monet, an AI-generated R&B act, in a deal reported at about $3 million, and she became the first AI-powered artist reported on a Billboard airplay chart. A human writer makes the songs with the AI tool Suno. Unlike the episode, the act is not a copy of a real star, and the law is moving to protect real voices. 8910
- AGAINST Apparently, no one wanted to talk to Meta's 'creepy' AI celebrities. Digital Trends, 2024-08-01. Meta shut its celebrity chatbots, launched September 2023, in under a year; they drew a small fraction of the celebrities' followers.
- FOR Sales of AI-enabled teddy bear suspended after it gave advice on BDSM sex and where to find knives. CNN via CTV News, 2025-11-19. A chatbot-equipped toy bear, FoloToy's Kumma, was on sale before its sales were suspended; shows both that talking AI toys exist and that safety is unresolved.
- CONTEXT EIE Commends Mattel for Delaying Release of AI Toys. Enough Is Enough, 2025-12-18. Advocacy group welcomes Mattel's delay of its AI toy for the 2025 holiday season and urges toymakers to wait until chatbots are proven safe for children.
- FOR ABBA Voyage. Wikipedia. Opened 26 May 2022; avatars made by Industrial Light & Magic from motion capture; more than four million visitors reported by April 2026.
- FOR ABBA Live in London: Voyage show review. The National, 2022-05-26. Review of the opening night of the avatar concert.
- AGAINST Music can be reconstructed from human auditory cortex activity using nonlinear decoding models. PLOS Biology, 2023-08-15. Decoding of a song a patient was hearing from implanted electrodes; the closest real work to extracting music from a brain.
- CONTEXT Neuroscientists Re-create Pink Floyd Song from Listeners' Brain Activity. Scientific American. Plain-language account of the same study and its limits.
- FOR AI artist Xania Monet signs $3 million record deal with Hallwood Media. The Decoder. Reports the signing; the figure is attributed to Billboard.
- FOR Xania Monet is the first AI-powered artist to debut on a Billboard airplay chart. CTV News. Chart debut for an AI-powered act.
- AGAINST Tennessee Enacts ELVIS Act, First-Of-Its-Kind Protection For Musicians Against AI Abuse. Pollstar, 2024-03-22. Signed 21 March 2024; adds AI simulations of a recognisable voice to Tennessee's personal-rights law, with civil and criminal remedies.
Ledger updated 7 Nov 2026. Open this ledger as its own page · The P(n) Board · Method
Themes: AI and machine minds
