Failure to ‘Upload’

Today marks the end of the third season and possibly full series of Upload, Amazon Prime’s comedy-drama sci-fi sitcom where the main flaw is that it’s never as clever as it thinks. Just take the title, for starters. This isn’t the kind of show you can easily run searches for, which is a shame since Upload’s dystopian not-so-distant-future is oddly relevant, both for the right reasons and the wrong reasons.

The premise is that Nathan Brown, played by Robert Amell, a wizard computer programmer and so physically attractive the script constantly makes excuses to call attention to it, dies in a suspicious accident probably because his concept of an open-source, build-it-yourself digital afterlife threatened a billion dollar industry. Except he probably wasn’t actually dying, the hospital might have railroaded him into blowing his head off to upload his consciousness into a computer because the concept of a digital afterlife makes it really to justify not giving someone health care.

This is all fantastic stuff. Topical, funny, and grotesque in the same sci-fi sitcom vein as Rick and Morty except with more relatable characters. Well, in theory anyway. But despite Upload’s marketing as a comedy-drama sci-fi sitcom, in practice it’s mostly romantic comedy.

But how can this be a romantic comedy when the main character’s dead? The short version of that story is that in Nathan’s corporate-branded digital mountain retreat owned by the shady company Horizen, he and every other dead person has to deal with customer service agents, or angels, to resolve their issues. In Nathan’s case, that’s Nora Antony, played by Andy Allo. Their romance rapidly begins to take control of the entire narrative, such that by the second season, despite Nora having run off to join the Ludds, an anti-technology sect that blames technology for the dystopian state of the world maybe ten whole years in the future.

In what I can only describe as a perfect failure to understand what about the premise of Upload is interesting, the show completely forgets the Ludds as characters in the third season. They’re such a non-presence that a person skipping ahead from the first to the third season might be inclined to wonder whether the Ludds were ever real at all or that Upload only created them to promote false flag narratives. The few named Ludd characters are unattractive misogynist incels who don’t seem to have an actual ideology.

It turns out the whole reason the corporation killed Nathan was to try and rig an election by tricking poor people in swing states into uploading into a free digital afterlife instead of voting, and then just killing them all with an easily solvable hardware error that you could they could easily blame on Ludd sabotage. Most of this is stupid and doesn’t really make much sense, so I can’t exactly fault Upload for not dwelling on it.

I will just briefly note that a person needs an extremely mindless interpretation of human behavior to think that people basically willing to commit physical suicide to enter a digital afterlife would have voted in the first place. Or that an accident of this magnitude, whether by sabotage or not, wouldn’t exactly encourage people to use the technology. Given that the hook for the third season finale is about Horizen’s evil plan to change the law so people in the digital afterlife can hold down jobs…well, let’s just say that the if you put any thought into the show, it fills its whole plot with similar logical errors.

Some highly confused politics result. To give a sense of just how weirdly Upload has aged in a fairly short span of time, a key point of the premise is that it’s nearly impossible to die in a self-driving car. Tech geniuses like Nathan are very real, and the hyperloop exists. Poverty has somehow worsened terribly despite of all of these advancements, with even angels having to work multiple jobs. This is all standard mainstream anti-capitalist messaging. Although it’s actually even more self-undermining than usual in Upload, since the show paints the Ludds so negatively even though they’re the only characters who recognize that the problem is systemic.

Upload and its writers clearly think technology is good, despite the fact that nearly every solid joke in the show involves lampooning goofy glitches or similarly horrific real-world technology. A trip to a farm provides some of the most striking visuals of this season, making a note about how nobody eats pigs anymore, just pig cancer, because pig cancer grows better than the actual pigs do. The farmers themselves, confusingly as usual, have every reason to despise technology, since their son literally killed himself as a part of the aforementioned false flag swing state election rigging mass murder scheme. Yet apparently they just accept at face value the fact that the Ludds committed the sabotage.

The common people in the show are both so stupid they’ll believe basically anything, yet also so important to democracy that Horizen is willing to murder them to keep them from voting. Nathan and Nora eventually stumble upon the idea of making Horizen accountable for murder, yet choose to go to a lawyer rather than the media for help. They’re also surprised when the weirdly short trial that ensues just results in the court sealing all the evidence. The resulting cliffhanger that doesn’t really serve the show but more screams that the showrunners are desperate for renewal.

What’s especially odd about this is that this was one of the show’s better ideas this season, creating a second Nathan from an illegal backup copy which appeared shortly after a relationship high point with Ingrid, Nathan’s girlfriend in life and Nora’s rival in death. The show doesn’t intend for Ingrid to be a likable character, most of the time anyway, although Allegra Edwards can be surprisingly compelling in regard to her denial about their failed relationship. But other times she just acts real bitchy, which only reflects badly on her when she behaves this way in regard to the characters we’re supposed to like. It’s fine when Ingrid’s chewing out one of the show’s many misogynist men.

But aside from Nathan himself just about every male character in Upload runs a gamut from gross to pathetic, which isn’t to say the female characters are much better, they’re just on a spectrum of emotionally callous to inspiring girlboss. A lot of the problems in Upload arise from a conscious effort to avoid falling into a swamp of moral ambiguity by constantly making it explicitly clear which characters are good and which ones are bad. It’s a lousy approach in general to storytelling, and it’s really wrecked the show. Neither the world-building nor the jokes can land properly when the show gives us explicit instructions for how to interpret them. And the romance is just incredibly boring, the main problem in a show loaded (or uploaded) full of problems.