When the first season of Upload premiered on Amazon Prime in 2020, creator Greg Daniels and some of his cast members told Mashable he had an uncanny gift for accidental prediction. Elements of the show, set in a 2033 where humans' digital selves can be uploaded to a virtual reality afterlife, kept popping up in real life during filming — like a joke about hospitals having "vape lung" units that was written before the phenomenon made real-life headlines.
The idea of being able to whisk ourselves into a digital world where our every whim can be coded or gestured into being, and our vulnerable human bodies left behind in meatspace, has existed since at least the 1930s. Nearly a century later, we're still years off the staggering computing power that would allow fully immersive VR, let alone transferring fully functioning human consciousness into a server. But between the release of the first season of Upload and the second, which arrives on Amazon Prime today, the world's most powerful tech company announced — to much derision — a pivot to focus on the future of just such a product.
Because let's face it: the Metaverse is a product. For all Mark Zuckerberg's dead-eyed utopian promises, accessing whatever the Metaverse ends up becoming will require expensive equipment, connections, data plans — and that's all before you get in there and need to spend real-world money on digital sneakers or rack up a very macro number of microtransactions to make your experience worthwhile.
The future of our virtual worlds will be shaped not by what's possible, but what's profitable, and Upload gets that.
The series has been compared relentlessly to The Good Place, that other sprightly and sweet afterlife comedy by Daniels' Parks and Recreation co-creator Mike Schur (the two projects were conceived independently, but Schur's happened to get made first). But it's also regularly likened to the notoriously bleak British sci-fi series Black Mirror, and that's because both shows extrapolate the ethical and social dilemmas of technology in a way that feels plausible because their creators understand how we use technology now. We store parts of ourselves in the cloud, we trade crumb after crumb of control over our days for a little convenience, and life also continues to exist outside of tech in much the same way it always does.
The world of Upload doesn't have one giant company that controls everything, because neither do we. Horizen — the show's fictional tech company offering digital afterlives at a range of price points, not to be confused with Meta-formerly-Facebook's actual VR project Horizon Worlds — is the dominant player in the digital afterlife space. Protagonist Nathan Brown (Robbie Amell), a benignly self-absorbed startup bro, was uploaded to Horizen's deluxe Lake View facility by his intense, wealthy girlfriend Ingrid (Allegra Edwards) after being severely injured in a self-driving car crash. Season 1 followed Nathan and his living Horizen customer service rep Nora (Andy Allo) as they investigated his death — in this 2033, self-driving cars are infallible (ha!), so they deduce that he was murdered because of his work on a free alternative that threatens the digital afterlife industry's billion-dollar bottom line.
As Season 2 begins, Nathan is trapped in "2 Gig" — the grey-sweatsuited, data-limited steerage deck of Lake View's luxury afterlife cruise liner — having just been surprised by Ingrid's arrival and gleeful announcement that she has uploaded herself to join him and whisk him back to first class. Given that, for some reason, uploading involves having your head literally blown up, he now feels he owes an incalculable debt to Ingrid on top of the fact that she's paying his bills, and so can't explore his blossoming romance with Nora. But once he gets back to his all-expenses-paid version of heaven, his brief experience in 2 Gig makes Nathan even more determined to break down the financial barriers to afterlife access.
In the world of the living, as Nora tries to untangle the conspiracy against Nathan and discovers a one-percenter scheme that looks beyond mere profit, she gets caught up with a group of anti-technology activists who oppose digital afterlives accessible only to the wealthy. Their catchphrase? "Delete the rich."
It's about as subtle as an auto-playing ad popup, but then again, this season was put together during a period where the gulf between the privileged and the less-so was starker than ever. While those of us with office jobs complained (validly!) about our Zoom fatigue and our shitty sourdough and loneliness, millions of others were forced to keep the world running at enormous personal risk, or left without income or support at all. Sci-fi stories don't tend to be extraordinarily subtle when it comes to inserting real-life resonance — it's almost entirely the point.
Sci-fi stories don't tend to be extraordinarily subtle when it comes to inserting real-life resonance — it's almost entirely the point.
Amell's Nathan is about as generic a protagonist as you could ask for, but he and the luminous Allo have a sweet, easy rapport that sells Nathan and Nora's connection and the season's poignant love triangle. Storylines where different characters are called to inhabit others' digital avatars draw some wonderfully funny and affecting performances out of the cast — Edwards, especially, is given a chance to flex her comedy muscles and flesh out Ingrid's controlling-girlfriend archetype with some real pathos. (Her arc here bears a fair bit of resemblance to that of Jane The Virgin's Petra Solano, another cartoonish rich-bitch whose scheming conceals an emotionally stunted inner child.)
And as Nora's pragmatic, permanently exasperated work BFF Aleesha, Zainab Johnson emerges as the season's MVP; whether she's dismissing an annoying intern or developing convincing, charming chemistry with a dead man on an iPad, the show is all the better for having expanded her role. Most crucially, it's at its best when it lets itself get properly weird in the back half of this season.
There are sometimes nods to outdated Back To The Future-style predictions — like an absurd office coffee machine that 3D-prints hot mugs of the brown bean juice, including the mug, all at once — and a lazy running joke about fast food chains buying up IRL social media platforms. (PaneraTok? OK, fine. KFCTwitter? C'mon.) But where Upload's cheerful techno-cynicism shines most is in the smaller moments. When Nora arrives at a tech-free "Ludd" commune in the forest to hide from the corporate conspirators who had Nathan killed, she marvels at their "unprinted" vegetables: "I had a window box [at home]," she says ruefully, "but my Monsanto seeds wouldn't grow without a code."
Upload still doesn't feel as urgent or as existential as some of the other shows that explore similar questions: What's on the other side of death? Who owns your self, when you outsource or loan it to technology and corporations in small but irreversible ways? Is technology a net good if its benefits will only be available to those privileged enough to afford them? But ultimately, Upload doesn't need to be focused on solving those dilemmas. It's similar to The Good Place, but not only because it's a high-concept comedy about the afterlife — it has that show's same faith that given the opportunity, people will want to take care of each other, no matter how many new ways we invent to to make life hell.
Upload is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
