It was written by series creator and showrunner Charlie Brooker, directed by Owen Harris, and first aired on Channel 4 on 11 February 2013.

The episode tells the story of Martha (Hayley Atwell), a young woman whose boyfriend Ash Starmer (Domhnall Gleeson) is killed in a car accident.

"Be Right Back" explores the theme of grief and tells a melancholy story similar to the previous episode, "The Entire History of You".

[1] On 22 January 2013, a trailer for the second series was released, featuring "a dream sequence", a "repetitive factory setting" and a "huge dust cloud".

A few months after the death of a person he knew, Brooker was removing unneeded contacts from his phone, and considered it to be "weirdly disrespectful" to delete their name.

Then last year after we had a baby I spent a lot of time up late and on Twitter, thinking: what if these people were dead and it was software emulating their thoughts?

[8] In a British Film Institute panel, Brooker notes that the episode mirrors stages of internet dating, progressing from text conversations to phone calls to real-life interactions, and believes the "biggest leap" to be the synthetic flesh version of Ash, while the rest is "not that far-fetched".

[8] Harris wished to make the episode appear as if it could be possible in the near future, as if one could "walk into the Mac store tomorrow and it wouldn't be out of place to see people trialling software like this".

[15] Brooker wished to avoid a trope of "histrionic" technology interfaces in television, using more subtle cues such as Martha deleting an email on her touch-free laptop with a simple hand movement.

Club described it as a "spare, haunting piece",[22] though Megan Logan of Inverse said that whilst episode is tragic it does contain a "deep-seated optimism".

[23] Focusing on the interconnection of content and tone, Charles Bramesco of Vulture wrote that the episode amalgamates a "cerebral sci-fi thought [experiment]" and a "sentimental core", making it a "high-concept tearjerker".

[24] Tom Sutcliffe of The Independent connected the episode's tone to a development in Brooker's writing since his marriage and first child, calling it "tender" and "wistful".

[27] Roxanne Sancto of Paste said the episode "examines our own mortality and our desire to play God", and demonstrates how humans have a "desperate need to reverse a natural and necessary part of life without considering the consequences".

[20] Bojalad wrote that they are "one of the most realistically comfortable and happy couples" in the series,[29] and Owen agreed, writing that though the relationship has little screentime, the audience feel "an instant connection with them".

[19] These scenes are later mirrored: examples include the android Ash disliking the Bee Gees and engaging in sex that feels "robotic".

[22][28] Yoshida said that the presence of the android Ash is "menacing" though he has a "docile" demeanour, further commenting that Martha is unable to resist him, despite her repulsion at the situation.

[25] In contrast to the previous series opener, "The National Anthem", Brooker described "Be Right Back" as "more earnest than people might expect" as well as "melancholy" and "very intimate and personal".

Yoshida compared his inability to drop the matter with Martha's choice to "forever nurse herself on a slow drip of delayed acceptance" by replacing Ash with an android.

[32] Yoshida compared the artificial Ash to Frankenstein's monster,[17] with Hand making the same comparison, writing that both are "resurrected figure[s]" that "can never be human".

[32] While Frankenstein demonstrates that the "vital essence of humanity" is more than a collection of body parts, "Be Right Back" shows it is not the "digital presence" of a person.

[34] In 2015, Luka co-founder Eugenia Kuyda built an online chatbot using chat logs from her late friend Roman Mazurenko.

The chatbot was launched in May 2016 and met with mostly positive response, though four of Kuyda's friends were disturbed by the project and one believed she "failed to learn the lesson of the Black Mirror episode".

[39][40][41] Comparisons were drawn from a planned feature for Amazon's voice assistant Alexa to "Be Right Back" in June 2022, after a demonstration at their Re:MARS conference.

The executive introducing the plans, Rohit Prasad, recommended that it be used to mimic dead loved ones; an example was shown of Alexa imitating a grandmother's voice to read a story to a grandchild.

[45] One professor of internet studies, Tama Leaver, compared the planned Alexa concept to the episode and said he understood how the feature would be tempting.

[44] The computer science professor Subbarao Kambhampati said that the potential to help people grieve—as with replaying videos of dead loved ones—needed to be assessed against moral questions raised by the technology.

This was 14% higher than the time slot's average for the channel, but a lower figure than the 1.9 million viewers who watched "The National Anthem", the previous series' first episode.

The website's critics consensus reads: "'Be Right Back' tones down Black Mirror's typically dark humour, but its examination of grief in the age of social media makes it an exceptionally powerful episode.

"[30] Owen found that the ending "doesn't really conclude any of Martha's character progression",[19] while Higgins wrote that "Ash has become just another sci-fi stock robot".

"[19] Bojalad wrote that the scene in which the police arrive to inform Martha of Ash's death is "among the most artful and devastating moments Black Mirror has ever presented".