Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Season 3 of Upload.Prime Video’sUploadfollowsNathan Brown (Robbie Amell)as he dies and is uploaded into the virtual afterlife of Lakeview, owned by Horizen. Upon beginning his new, virtual life, he meetsNora (Andy Allo), his “Angel” (a.k.a. Horizen customer service representative), and the two begin to fall in love. But, after it was revealed that Nathan was murdered in a conspiracy scheme masterminded by a select few billionaires to kill every poor person and flip future elections, the series took a dramatically different course than expected. So, asUploadSeason 3comes to an end (in which very little is accomplished to actually further the plot to take down said billionaires and plot a better future), we’re ready to say that the series needs to come to an end after one final season.
A man is able to choose his own afterlife after his untimely death by having his consciousness uploaded into a virtual world. As he gets used to his new life and befriends his angel (real world handler), questions about his death arise.
Much ofUploadSeason 2 felt a bit irrelevantto the overarching story, like Ingrid (Allegra Edwards) pursuing getting a digital baby with Nathan. Plus, we had more of theA.I. Guy (Owen Daniels), Aleesha (Zainab Johnson), and Luke (Kevin Bigley), each getting their own storylines (of sorts), unlike the first season. Nora’s time with the Ludds felt unnecessarily dragged out, as did the separation between Nora and Nathan (considering the season consisted of only seven episodes). Altogether, the story moved incredibly slowly until the Season 2 finale, where Nathan and Nora—the former now downloaded back into his body in the real world with a regrown head—sought to stop the Freeyond project before the billionaires managed to reduce the world’s population.
WhenUploadSeason 3 began, it felt like the pace was finally picking up and the characters were racing against the clock to stop Freeyond before Nathan’s head exploded (literally). However,the Freeyond plot was stopped in the premiere episode. They managed to stop most of the people planning to upload to Freeyond, though there were some lost before the event was shut down. Then, nothing happened to Nathan in the real world (as he survived without issue), and the rest of the season just killed time with the occasional bombshell thrown in.
We watched Nathan and Nora work on a farm, struggle to find housing and jobs, and return the drives of the Freeyond victims to their respective families. Little of which drove the big story forward, nor did it provide muchin terms of character growth for these two— by season’s end, they’re pretty much who we’ve always known them to be. The main event of the season, which ended up being the trial against the Upload companies for the twisted story the world believed about the Freeyond event, made little to no impact. The only substantial thing to come from the trial in theUploadSeason 3 finale, aside from a win for the Plaintiffs and a new name for Horizen, was Ingrid accidentally revealing to the world that there were two Nathans. Until then, they had managed to keep this a secret, especially as being a surviving download would put a target on Nathan’s back—a bigger target than his knowledge of the billionaires and Upload companies’ malfeasance already did. This ends with one of the Nathans seemingly being destroyed in the final moments of the season, though a question remains in the air about which one survived. However, at the end of the day, this does little to actually push the big story forward.
So much of Season 3 feels like a waste of time, and the important bits are so slow. Having two Nathans,while giving Ingrid an incredible opportunity for growth, didn’t do much else for the show. The entire Lakeview side of things is holding the story back, as it desperately tries to combine two major, competing TV shows (one is a comedy, while the other is a thriller about a dystopian society). Aleesha’s new job and being conflicted about how Horizen operates was compelling, while Luke’s entire story and the focus on humanizing the A.I. Guy was wholly unnecessary. Likewise,Real Nathan and Nora’s relationship wasn’t quite as enjoyable in the real worldas they spent nearly every episode disagreeing about something and being lost about what to do regarding the Upload companies. The comedy was also severely lacking in this recent season, seen especially with the much-repeated and lame attempts at jokes about Real Nathan’s “weight gain.”
It feels likeUploadis struggling tonotdig in deeper, as doing so would make the comedy even more difficult to achieve, but it’s time. At the current pace, the audience is growing bored. Not enough is happening, nor are the Lakeview antics funny enough to carry the show. We’ve seen enough of this futuristic society to understandhow bad things are, like Cyber Discount Day replacing Thanksgiving, and know plenty about the Upload companies to see why they need to be taken down.However, the series has yet to even address what the “ideal” future is.Is it really being uploaded to a virtual afterlife where everything is free? Is that the ideal solution, given how miserable it seems to be living in the digital world forever? Or is it being downloaded, escaping death, but causing who knows how many new problems in the real world in the process? Nonetheless, it’s getting a bit hard to care about this story with how slow things are moving.While the cast is fantastic, the story doesn’t justify going on this long. IfUploadwere airing regularly on a traditional network, the slow rollout of this gigantic story wouldn’t be a problem. There’s enough character work inUploadSeasons 2 and 3 to justify it. But,given the irregularity of streaming releases and the short lifespan these shows have before they are, inevitably, canceled, there’s no excuse for taking such a slow route to bring this story to an end.
