Digital Afterlife And Class Divide

Amazon Studio’s Season 2 of the sci-fi comedy series Upload has been the number one show watched all week since its release on Prime Video on March 11. According to Whip Media, Upload, created by Emmy-winning writer Greg Daniels (The Office, Parks and Recreation) and starring Robbie Amell, Andy Allo and Allegra Edwards, was the most viewed show in both the U.S. and the U.K. in the first week of its release, surpassing Netflix’s The Last Kingdom, with its final season released on the same day. Upload remains in Prime Video’s own Top 10 chart this weekend.

Upload Season 2 concentrates more on class divide than the love story that had made Season 1 so captivating. Season 1 saw young app developer Nathan (Robbie Amell) uploading into a virtual afterlife after a self-driving car crash. Spurred on by his doting girlfriend Ingrid (Allegra Edwards), Nathan ended up in Horizen’s Lakeview, a digital grand hotel, where he grew closer to his customer service “angel,” Nora (Andy Allo), as they investigated his murder together. Season 2 begins with Nathan stuck in 2-Gig, a data-limited lower floor in Lakeview. Even in the digital afterlife, one needs money to have the illusion of being alive. Nora is running away with her father to take themselves off the grid, and join an anti-tech rebel group named “The Ludds.” Tucked away in a forest, the commune, complete with its own anti-tech pastor, grow their own vegetables, the uncoded, real kind.

This 7-episode-long second season differs in many ways from the first ten episodes, which established this near-future where it is possible to upload into a virtual afterlife. Much of the first season focused on the love triangle between Nathan, his rich girlfriend Ingrid and Nora. The evident chemistry between Amell and Allo made the series an engrossing one, gripping the viewers with the question of how Nathan will break up with Ingrid, the person who paid to have him uploaded, and thus keeping him virtually alive.

With Nathan and Nora apart throughout much of Season 2, the series concentrates more on the politics of having such a place as Horizen’s Lakeview, the introduction of new in-apps programs, such as the ridiculous baby app, and the development of other characters, such as Aleesha’s character who comes into her own in this season, as she ceases to be just Nora’s sidekick friend.

The class divide in the virtual afterlife takes center stage in this season. Ingrid pulls Nathan out of 2 Gig, after she tells him that she uploaded too for him. Having experienced 2 Gig and made an acquaintance there, Yang (Phoebe Miu), Nathan becomes aware of the discrepancies between those in the luxurious Lakeview apartments and those stuck in 2 Gig. Nathan becomes a sort of Robin Hood this season, while Nora starts to work as an undercover agent for The Ludds, who want to fight the inequality that a place such as Lakeview sets up for the afterlife, mirroring the very same inequalities already existent in real society. It is not too clear why The Ludds target Horizen and the other afterlife programs, instead of attacking the financial inequalities already at play in society.

The politics surrounding class divide in the virtual afterlife is interesting enough to sustain one’s attention, but it distracts from what truly made season 1 so absorbing: the impossible love story between Nathan and Nora. Although Upload has often been compared to The Good Place (mainly because of its creator Michael Schur), Greg Daniels’ series had the potential to resemble more a series such as Pushing Daisies, with its star-crossed lovers storyline. The tension created with Ned not being able to touch his childhood crush Chuck, which would kill her, is what made Pushing Daisies such a great series. There are already many other movies that explore this kind of impossible relationship, such The Ghost and Mrs Muir (1947), Heaven Can Wait (1978), or Just Like Heaven (2005), of ghosts falling in love with a living person. The build-up tension between Nathan and Nora in Upload, however, fizzles out in this new season.

Season 2 appears less interested in exploring what it truly means to be living in this digital world, and thus the consequences entailed in a relationship between a living person and one who is a virtual “consciousness” without a sensing body. The most important question, which this series raises, remains unexplored in this second season: what does it mean to not have a body anymore? Instead, the episodes keep showing the inhabitants of Lakeview eating—with a running gag of the billionaire eating endangered species—when there is no need for them to eat at all anymore. Even Yang takes some of the food served at the dinner Nathan invites her to with her back to 2 Gig (why?). Ingrid’s character this season lightly explores the inconveniences of using the body suit to be in Lakeview, but it does not go much further than that.

Overall, Upload continues to be an entertaining series, and I look forward to seeing where the series will go in the next season.