What lies beyond the veil of death? Pearly gates? Lakes of fire? Could we come back as a butterfly or is there just an end to consciousness? Various faiths and philosophies have struggled to answer the question as has the genre of science fiction. Greg Daniels’ (The Office) new Amazon series, Upload, offers up its own answer by exploring the transfer of consciousness to a digital reality, which isn’t exactly an entirely new concept (The Matrix brought this to the forefront a generation ago). It’s use of that backdrop as satire isn’t entirely new either, as it takes cues from both Idiocracy and the original Robocop. What it does near perfectly, however, is blend the insightful, the absurd, the sweet, and the shocking into one oddly plausible look at a digital heaven.
In the first few episodes, we meet Nathan Brown (Robbie Amell, The Flash), a guy who seems to have it all. He’s young and attractive. He has started a promising business with his best friend. He has a gorgeous girlfriend from a wealthy family and a loving and caring relationship with his mother (Jessica Tuck, True Blood) and his precocious niece. This contrasts with spirited but secretly romantic Nora (Andy Allo, Pitch Perfect 3). She’s in a cramped Brooklyn apartment and even more cramped public transportation. She’s dissatisfied with 3D printed food and her casual dating app. Her father (Chris Williams, Silicon Valley) is terminally ill and, despite her employee discount, refuses to consider being uploaded into the internet-based afterlife she helps maintain.
Nathan’s self-driving car that he frequently used as an office/motel room crashes into a garbage truck and he’s given a choice: take his chances in the operating room or have his mind uploaded into his girlfriend’s family’s account at the upscale Lakeview. He’s unsure right up until the final (and suddenly terrifying) second of his terrestrial life before waking up in a virtual hereafter. Lakeview is a beautiful resort patterned after an early 1900s Victorian hotel, and it is full of activities, breakfast buffets, great water pressure, and Nora as his personal tech support “angel.” There’s no meet cute between them really as she reviews his profile prior to wakening him to his new plane of existence, but her attraction is hampered by the vanity she observes in his memories. When the trauma of his surreal surroundings starts to get to Nathan, it’s Nora who has to talk him back from a second death … and deal with the matter of some missing memories regarding Nathan’s last project.
As the series continues, we find that there are extra fees, in-game ads (a pretty novel method of product placement for the show itself,) and the occasional frame rate issue. Nathan’s neighbors include Luke (Kevin Bigley, Sirens), a former soldier looking for a wingman and any way he can to hack Lakeview for more perks, a perpetually 11-year-old boy (Rhys Slack, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow), and the cagey billionaire across the hall whose apartment is much much bigger on the inside. Centenarian women walk around as black-and-white younger versions of themselves as people regularly post reviews of their afterlife to social media.
Nathan’s funeral, something his girlfriend, Ingrid (Allegra Edwards, Briarpatch), has turned into a lavish affair after spending money on flowers, a venue, and Nathan’s virtual wardrobe, comes with a few surprises and even more questions. These include a very tense argument with Ingrid and Nathan’s best friend (Jordan Johnson-Hinds, Blindspot) and what exactly was going on with his car on the night he crashed.
Upload flirts with having too many elements in one narrative but, as a result, is never beholden to downbeats. In the corporeal world, Ingrid is interviewed by Vogue about dating dynamics between planes of existence as Nathan’s cousin and Nora investigate the crash that killed him. Lakeview has a wing for uploads with basic two gigabyte data plans whose families and future neighbors protest in the streets for a free service (or at least one with fewer ads or in-app purchases).
The more graphic and outrageous moments can be funny in the vein of Bruce Almighty or as shocking as Samuel L. Jackson’s departure from Deep Blue Sea. I was entertained throughout because of the satire of our app-driven culture and the scifi/spirituality-based high concept. Meanwhile, it took a few episodes for the underlying mystery to grab my wife’s attention. Ultimately, your enjoyment depends on what you like to focus on: deep hypotheticals regarding the nature of consciousness, the ethics of business and technology, or just the familiar trope of wacky neighbors. Whatever you like, chances are that there’s some of it here, and, depending on your tastes, Upload could end up becoming a simple, fun binge watch or your new quarantine obsession.
Just watched the whole thing this week. I got into it. Shouldn’t be surprised it was good given the creator I guess.