Encountering the Deceased through Data

Introduction Dystopian science fiction is known for exploring themes around technology and immortality, particularly the idea of transcending death through digital life, as seen in works such as Black Mirror, Westworld, and Electric Dreams. This genre also engages with related issues—such as digital privacy, informed consent, and access to the personal archives of the deceased—which reflect broader cultural imaginaries and anxieties surrounding digital technologies (Dinello 1–17). In doing so, it reveals how such technologies are used, understood, and critically negotiated in the present. This article examines the Taiwanese series On Children, focussing specifically on the two-part story The Last Day of Molly (茉莉的最后一天, moli de zuihouyitian). Through this case study, the article explores questions of digital archives, memory, and subjectivity. In these two episodes, a mother repeatedly accesses her daughter’s final memories, before suicide, through a memory-harvesting technology, in an attempt to understand the reasons behind her daughter’s death. We argue that the series reconstructs personal memory as a digital archive that can be accessed and interpreted by others, rendering the deceased ‘re-presented’ while simultaneously depriving them of control over their own memories. In this process, the repeated replay of memory alters the temporality of mourning, transforming it from an emotional process oriented toward closure into an ongoing interpretive practice. As a result, digital immortality no longer belongs to the deceased themselves, but to those who can access and control their memory archives. The Last Day of Molly in On Children On Children is a dystopian sci-fi series comprising five stories in two parts, each across ten episodes, and was concurrently released on the Public Television Service in Taiwan and on Netflix in mid-2018. Its original title, “你的孩子不是你的孩子” (nidehaizi bushi nidehaizi) translates to “Your child is not your child”, with episodes based on the novel by Taiwanese author Xiaole Wu under the direction of the award-winning Chen Hui Ling. Netflix describes the series as follows: “the uncanny tales reveal a world where individuals face the tragic consequences of social pressure, parental oppression and family dysfunction” (Netflix). The official trailer for the series begins with a voiceover that sets the tone for the stories: children are pure and blameless. [But] they're unable to make the right decisions. There's a need for strict parents [虎爸虎妈, huba huma] to become gatekeepers. (Netflix; original in Mandarin, translated subtitles by Netflix) Here, huba huma refers to the stereotypical “tiger dads” and “tiger mums” in East Asian parenting cultures who demand strict academic excellence from their children at all costs. The series has been dubbed an “Asian Black Mirror copycat” that “explore[s] different slices of Asian culture” by one critic review (Wheeler), and described as using “elements of sci-fi and horror to examine Asian familial relationships, highlighting the severe stress of both responsibility and expectation" (Wilson) by another. This article focusses on the third story, The Last Day of Molly, with a synopsis as follows: when her daughter takes her own life, a mother uses nascent technology to delve inside her mind and better understand the reasons behind her death (Netflix). The protagonist is high school student Molly, who, together with her younger sister Kelly, suffers under the strict household regime and stressful academic expectations from their “tiger mum”. After Molly suddenly commits suicide due to the pressure, her mother digs deep into Molly’s material possessions and social network in search of reasons for her demise. The mother eventually encounters an experimental technology that allows her to access Molly’s memories through a combination of surveillance footage from hidden cameras around their house and a microchip inserted into Molly’s corpse’s brain. The storyline is driven by frustratingly partial memories, agonisingly emotive flashbacks, unreliable toggling between perspectives, and obsessively constant replays, in the mother’s bid to understand the events leading to Molly’s last day. Throughout these two episodes, Molly’s sister, classmate, and psychologist are also variously depicted searching through material keepsakes and mental memories to piece together an archive of Molly’s last days as they mourn. Digital Memory as an Archival Paradox In an increasingly digital world, the ways we remember and relate to the dead are quietly changing. Dystopian science fiction often imagines technologies that allow us to remain connected to those who have passed, raising unsettling questions about what happens to personal memory after death. No longer confined to the mind, memory can now be recorded, stored, and replayed—becoming something that can be revisited, shared, and even reinterpreted. When memory becomes a digital archive, it reshapes not only how the dead are accessed but also the conditions of consent, agency, and privacy that once defined personal remembrance. Through The Last Day of Molly, we explore what it means to encounter the dead through data: while digital memory makes the dead present, it also places their stories in the hands of the living, raising difficult questions about control, responsibility, and the ethics of remembering in the digital age. Technological and Narrative Device As digital technologies become increasingly embedded in everyday life, a striking paradox begins to emerge. On the one hand, personal memory is recorded, stored, and circulated in unprecedented ways—digital networks render memory a continuously flowing and linkable object (Hoskins 91–101). On the other hand, the status of these memories after an individual’s death remains deeply uncertain. This tension not only points to the externalisation of memory but also reveals how memory is reorganised through processes of datafication into a resource that can be accessed, mobilised, and reused. As research on digital death and memory has noted, the persistence of personal data beyond biological life raises a series of unresolved questions concerning ownership, access, and responsibility (Leaver 45–6). However, these issues do not arise merely from the existence of data themselves, but from the ways in which digital memory is incorporated into platformised and archival logics, thereby becoming an object that can be managed, retrieved, and reinterpreted. Within this process, the capacity to access, interpret, and mobilise such memories increasingly becomes central to determining their meaning and boundaries. At the same time, this transformation is reshaping the relationship between the living and the dead: digital traces render the deceased both absent and persistently present within media environments (Brubaker et al.). In this context, digital memory is no longer simply a means of preserving the past but is reconstituted as an archival form subject to ongoing governance. It is precisely within this tension—between preservation and disappearance, presence and absence, accessibility and control—that the meaning of digital memory becomes unstable, continuously redefined through technological systems, institutional frameworks, and everyday practices. Replay and Temporality The Last Day of Molly brings into question the role technology plays in the process of mourning. While the characters in the episode are situated in a fictional setting and utilising technology that does not exist, the characters’ experiences resonate with contemporary desires and anxieties around the use of technology and digital archives owned by people who have passed. Indeed, one critic describes the series as “filtering universal anxieties through outlandish ideas and technologies” to the effect that “they become more understandable, more real” (Wilson). In this story, Molly’s mother suffers from recurring nightmares following her daughter’s death, with scenes comprising a mash-up of actual memories from when Molly was alive and fictional projections of how Molly might be suffering in the afterlife. The integrity and temporality of the mother’s memory is cast as suspect. The mother fixates on piecing together a linear story of Molly’s last day, by combing through surveillance footage from hidden cameras throughout the house, going through Molly’s possessions at home and at school, and speaking to her peers. Each time she discovers a clue, the mother’s memory of Molly toggles across different points of view as she attempts to reconcile contradictions and guesses at Molly’s mental state. For viewers, these episodes jump between the present after Molly’s death, and her “memories” in the days just prior. These constant replays of Molly’s last days, of her memories stretching back in the days and years before her suicide, serve not to resurrect her. Instead, they allow her mother to access fragments of her memories without restoring Molly’s agency. Unlike scholarly stances in performance studies that describe replay as a reinstallment of the self, or a “re-embodying” of the self (Goodman), in the episode, the replays render Molly’s posthumous self visible but not active. As discussed in a review of media scholar José van Dijck’s work on digital memory and mediated communication, digital technologies transform memory into data that can be stored, accessed, and manipulated (Landsberg). This episode premises this entirely, when replay technology converts personal memory into a digital archive, a dataset, a memory bank that can be revisited by others. The narrative driving the storyline is that Molly’s mother cannot think beyond the crucial period of time before Molly’s death, and this scenario acts as a visual and temporal intervention where she accesses and replays Molly’s memories in her mind. The narrative arc of the episode stalls when Molly’s mother plays and replays Molly’s last memories and indicates to viewers that that closure is suspended. While this scenario is not technically possible in contemporary society, it chimes with our ability to attach to personal digital archival material and to return to and replay digital material in temporal loops and echoes. Privacy and Agency The Last Day of Molly connects with many themes and tensions common to the dystopian sci-fi genre, where privacy and agency are threatened through increased digitisation and surveillance. When the mother discovers medication for depression among Molly’s possessions, she tracks down her psychologist and confronts her. The mother directly violates the privacy of her dead daughter when she pressures the psychologist for information about their confidential sessions, asserting that she had parental authority to do so, but the psychologist denies her. Later on, the mother recalls that the son of a friend was researching experimental technology that could guess a person’s thoughts and feelings based on a survey of their daily routines. She tracks him down and enters what appears to be a large, abandoned, and dingy warehouse, populated with just a small cluster of high-tech machinery under bluish-green lighting. He explains that the research is still in progress, and there have been no volunteers due to the risk. The conversation tells viewers that all of this is illicit and perhaps illegal. But the mother decides to hand over the surveillance footage from her house and insists on piecing together Molly’s last day. While these memories are portrayed for the viewers to learn along with Molly’s mother, there is also a visual indication to viewers that they replay in Molly’s mother’s mind afterwards; she ruminates, runs through, and repeats the memories that she’s acquired in order to get closer to understanding Molly’s perspective. But the mother is not sated by the partial memories. Then, under the “approval” of Molly’s mother, the rogue scientist inserts a microchip into Molly’s corpse’s brain, connects a series of wires to the machine and to her mother, and the mother is depicted “mining” through Molly’s memories from her point of view, tracing back the moments before she threw herself off the balcony of her bedroom. We then see the mother going through more of Molly’s possessions, then returning to the rogue scientist to be reconnected and “taken” to specific moments/memories in Molly’s past. Here, Molly’s experiences become property to be accessed, replayed, and shared: These intimate details are accessed, of course, without Molly’s consent prior to her death, and so in the episode her personal memories become a commodity to be accessed, profited from, and potentially shared, and her agency, privacy, and consent are diminished. These dynamics are not only narrative devices but reshape the very conditions under which mourning takes place. Archive, Interpretation, and Authority Traditionally, mourning has been understood as a gradual process moving toward emotional detachment and closure, a linear trajectory deeply shaped by the psychoanalytic framework associated with Sigmund Freud (Person 31–46). In lived experience, however, mourning rarely unfolds in such a definitive way, but instead persists in ongoing forms. This persistence does not imply stability; rather, it is often marked by repetition and uncertainty, as individuals oscillate between confronting loss and returning to everyday life (Stroebe and Schut). In some cases, this state may be further prolonged or even stalled. The concept of “ambiguous loss” further captures this condition: when loss itself cannot be clearly defined, mourning becomes difficult to resolve, leaving individuals suspended in an unresolved state (Boss 7–13). For the mother in The Last Day of Molly, this unresolved loss stems not only from her daughter’s death itself, but also from the expectations, sacrifices, and sense of identity she had long invested in her daughter’s upbringing. Throughout the series, she repeatedly refers to the career opportunities she gave up for her family and expresses concern about how others might judge the family and her children’s performance, remarking, for example, that “there are so many people waiting to see how the two of you turn out” and that the family “cannot afford to lose face” (translated by authors). Even after Molly’s death, she continues to pressure Kelly to study, insisting that “your father is a department chair, and I have a master’s degree from the US. If I hadn’t had children, I would be a professor by now” (translated by authors). Such statements suggest that her expectations for Molly’s and Kelly’s academic achievement and future success extend far beyond concern for their personal development. Instead, they are deeply intertwined with her own sense of self-worth, maternal identity, and social recognition. When Molly’s life trajectory ultimately deviates from these expectations, what is disrupted is not only the daughter’s future, but also the system of meaning that the mother has constructed through years of sacrifice and investment in motherhood. This dynamic is not unique to Molly’s family, but is closely connected to broader patterns of familism, educational competition, and parental responsibility across many East Asian societies. In these contexts, children’s achievements are often understood not merely as individual accomplishments, but as important reflections of family reputation and parental responsibility. Individuals understand themselves through networks of social relationships, with family occupying a central position within this social order (Fei et al. 69–79). Comparable dynamics can be observed elsewhere in East Asia. The South Korean television drama SKY Castle (also on Netflix) depicts parents who regard admission to elite universities as a marker of family status and social success (Jung). Similarly, the death of a child resulted from extreme academic pressure, with the adults repeatedly referring to her throughout the series. Mourning as Archive In The Last Day of Molly, Molly’s death initiates an ongoing search centred on the traces she leaves behind. Her mother repeatedly searches through her belongings, reviews surveillance footage from their home, and attempts to access Molly’s memories through an experimental technology in order to reconstruct the final moments before her daughter’s suicide. At the same time, other characters draw upon different sources of information in an effort to make sense of Molly’s death. Her classmates read a short story she had written to better understand her inner emotional world; her sister recalls intimate moments they shared while lying in bed telling jokes, while also searching through Molly’s possessions stored in her school locker; and her therapist reflects on the self-harm wounds she had observed and the advice she had previously offered. Each individual attempts to piece together a complete picture of Molly from the fragments of memory available to them. Yet, these fragments never coalesce into a unified narrative. Instead, the memories held by different subjects overlap, contradict, and at times conflict with one another, continually reorganising and reshaping understandings of Molly’s past. In this sense, Molly is not remembered as a coherent and unified subject but persists as a collection of dispersed memory materials. Mourning, therefore, ceases to be a retrospective engagement with a fixed past and becomes an ongoing process of collecting, organising, and interpreting fragments. For Molly’s mother, what matters is no longer simply accepting the fact of death but repeatedly returning to these memory traces in an attempt to understand, explain, and reconstruct the meaning of her daughter’s final days. Memory is thus externalised into an accessible archive, while mourning becomes an ongoing archival practice. This situation reflects broader transformations in how memory operates in the digital age. The traces left behind by the deceased on digital platforms enable them to persist in datafied form after death, creating an archive that can be repeatedly accessed and revisited (Gibbs et al.). This phenomenon is no longer confined to fictional narratives and is increasingly evident in contemporary digital culture. For example, generative AI can produce new textual, vocal, and visual content based on an individual’s accumulated digital records (Morris et al.); griefbots integrate chat histories, social media posts, and behavioural data to simulate the communication styles of the deceased and sustain ongoing interactions with the living (Hollanek et al.; Jiménez-Alonso et al.); while synthetic media employ deep learning technologies to reconstruct the voices, appearances, and behavioural characteristics of the dead, enabling them to “reappear” in the form of digital avatars (Fanti et al.). Digital media, therefore, not only extend relationships between the living and the dead but also reshape the very operation of mourning itself. Such practices echo broader concerns surrounding digital immortality and the continued circulation of the dead through technological systems, a dynamic discussed in Sanjay Kaushal’s “Digital Immortality: Maurice Blanchot’s Right to Death in the Era of Artificial Intelligence”. Mourning gradually shifts from an act of letting go toward an ongoing practice of engaging with archives. Mourning as Interpretation In The Last Day of Molly, replay transforms mourning into a form of interpretive labour. Molly’s mother repeatedly returns to her daughter’s final memories, searching for explanations within the archived fragments of her life. Rather than accepting loss, she actively reconstructs meaning through repeated viewing. The continuous replay thus shifts mourning from emotional processing to interpretive engagement with the archive. The act of grieving becomes inseparable from the act of reading, selecting, and reinterpreting stored memories. In this way, the archive does not merely preserve the past—it structures how the past can be known through a posthumous construction of the dead. This process is illustrated in the series when the mother returns to the therapist for a second time, this time requesting consultation as a “client”. She admits that she has been continuously “watching” Molly’s memories. The therapist is perplexed—despite everything that has happened, the mother still fails to recognise her own harsh treatment of her daughter. The therapist then suggests that she try to revisit the final days of Molly’s life from Molly’s perspective, and to consider how Molly might have perceived her as a mother. Throughout this process, the mother continues to interpret Molly’s actions and emotions through fragmentary recollections of memory, while the therapist’s intervention further highlights the ongoing and uncertain nature of this interpretive process. She repeatedly searches through Molly’s belongings, investigates her social relationships, confronts her psychologist, and repeatedly re-enters fragments of Molly’s memories in an effort to uncover the “true” cause of her suicide. Yet, each return to these memories generates new interpretations and new uncertainties rather than a definitive answer. More specifically, every re-entry into Molly’s memories becomes another encounter with Molly herself. Digital technology places Molly in a condition of simultaneous absence and presence: although she is physically dead, she continually reappears before her mother in datafied form. Through these preserved digital memories, her mother attempts to understand her daughter’s death and attain a sense of emotional closure. However, each replay merely opens up further questions and alternative interpretations rather than bringing the mourning process to completion. As family therapist and loss scholar Pauline Boss argues, when a loved one remains psychologically present despite being physically absent, individuals may experience a state of “ambiguous loss”, becoming suspended in an ongoing search for meaning and resolution (7–13). For Molly’s mother, the digital archive does not bring mourning to an end; instead, it continually prolongs and intensifies this unresolved state of loss. As a result, mourning no longer leads to a clear understanding of the past, but instead unfolds through the continuous interpretation of incomplete memories. Mourning as Asymmetry The digital archive renders the dead visible while depriving them of the capacity to speak. Yet this process is not neutral; rather, it is structured by a fundamental asymmetry. Media actively filter, organise, and construct the past rather than simply recording it (Landsberg). Within this structure, Molly has no control over the extraction, storage, or replay of her memories. Her experiences are accessed without her authorisation, and she cannot intervene in how they are selected, interpreted, or recomposed. Memories of her aspirations to become a writer, her act of shoplifting, and the moment she jumped from her bedroom window—experiences that originally belonged to Molly’s private experiential world and were never disclosed to her mother—are repeatedly retrieved and revisited after her death. Although the archive enables repeated access, it simultaneously detaches memory from the subject who once inhabited it. This produces an uneven distribution of agency between the living and the dead: the living can access and mobilise the memories of the deceased, while the dead can no longer challenge, revise, or reshape their own representations. As the influential cultural historian Raphael Samuel observes, the preservation of memory is increasingly delegated to electronic media, while growing awareness of the constructed nature of representation raises doubts about the documentation of the past (57). Here, the digital archive does not preserve memory in its original form; rather, it renders memory accessible through selective and mediated processes. Significantly, following Molly’s funeral, her body is preserved in a coffin so that her memories can be accessed through a memory-reading technology. To initiate the retrieval process, Molly’s mother authorises a technician—her friend’s son, who possesses expertise in the technology—to insert a needle-like device into Molly’s skin, visually depicted as a sharp instrument piercing her forehead. The series subsequently presents a dramatic image of Molly’s terrified expression inside a transparent coffin. This visual motif reinforces the paradox of digital immortality at the centre of the narrative: Molly remains visible yet cannot express her wishes; she is continuously observed yet cannot determine how she is seen. The scene not only symbolises the penetration of bodily boundaries through memory-extraction technologies but also reveals how the authority to access memory shifts from the deceased to the living and the technological systems that mediate such access. Molly can neither refuse this process nor determine which memories are retrieved, how they are viewed, or how they are interpreted. Her body and memories become objects available for access and use after death, while control resides in the hands of others. Thus, while the digital archive makes the dead visible, it simultaneously deprives them of voice and control. This asymmetry is not incidental but constitutive of the way digital memory reorganises the relationship between access and authority. More importantly, within this asymmetrical structure, authority over memory becomes a form of ownership. Molly’s mother does not merely authorise the retrieval of her daughter’s memories or revisit them; she reinterprets them, reorders them, and constructs new narratives of causality and responsibility. Through repeated replay, she imposes meaning upon Molly’s past, effectively rewriting the story of her life and death. To access, interpret, and mobilise archived memories is to exercise authority over how the dead are known. In this sense, digital immortality does not belong to the deceased, but to those who control the conditions under which their memories are accessed and understood. The question “Who owns the dead?” therefore becomes a question of who controls the archive. Ethical Implications Media scholars have explored ethical issues around privacy, access, and consent around digital property after we die (Leaver; Meese et al.; Papacharissi). This area of scholarship has been ever more pertinent as we increasingly intertwine our lives with online media (Sparrow and Zhang). The regular uploading of digital matter when we are alive not only raises questions around what happens to our data after we die, but also how these data might be commodified and sold to those in mourning. Numerous companies have experimented with accessing material from social media profiles and personal archival material into Large Language Models and using them to emulate people alive or dead. These services provide an opportunity for people mourning over a loved one and potentially help them to feel connected to the deceased via an avatar (Sparrow); also, people can engage in services to access their profiles and act on their behalf on select platforms after they have passed to maintain a social public presence (Marwick and Ellison; Karppi). The Last Day of Molly resonates with current cultural relationships with technology and experiments such as those mentioned above, where some seek its assistance to access and connect with those who have passed, while also highlighting that doing so comes with ethical questions. Particularly for scholar of Internet law Mark Batholomew, online material is increasingly becoming a valuable commodity in exchange for privacy, to the point that we now must argue “for the right to remain dead”. Batholomew reminds us that privacy is a right that we are born with rather than something that should be gained or lost. These episodes also chime with current vulnerabilities we might have with our digital property potentially being accessed and commodified after we have died. This latter issue, we argue, is a problem of governance: the ownership of our digital archives is not simply a personal or familial matter but is structured by the systems that organise access to digital archives. Platforms, technologies, and institutional frameworks shape who can retrieve, interpret, and circulate the memories of the deceased. In this context, digital archives are not a stable record of the past, but a governed archive whose meaning is continuously negotiated. The ethics of mourning, therefore, become inseparable from the politics of data, raising urgent questions about control, responsibility, and the governance of digital remains in the contemporary media environment. Conclusion The Last Day of Molly invites us to rethink what it means to remember, grieve, and let go in a digital age. As memories become data, the dead remain present, yet no longer in control of how they are known. Mourning, in turn, shifts from a process of closure to an ongoing engagement with fragments—replayed, reinterpreted, and never fully resolved. In this sense, digital memory does not simply preserve the past; it reshapes the past. 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Digital Archives · Dystopia · Immortality · Lived experience · Temporality · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Themes in Literature Analysis · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction