Season 2 of the best show on TV about people who pay to upload their consciousnesses to the internet after they die in order to carry on in some sort of digital afterlife! Second to none!

The Premise

See Upload Season 1 write-up for the basic premise. Season 2 focuses on Nathan (Robbie Amell) and Nora (Andy Allo) drifting apart following the relationship uncertainty at the end of the last season. Nora ends up disappearing off the grid to join a clan of Luddites in the woods while Ingrid (Allegra Edwards) strengthens her bond with Nathan… by pretending to be dead and uploaded.

More pieces of Nathan’s murder mystery fall into place, but that stuff isn’t terribly interesting to me!

The pornography on this thing is simply captivating!

My Half-Baked Thoughts

This season started out very slowly. The end of Season 1 had Nora tell Nathan that she loved him, with Nathan unable to respond after all 2gb of his data was used up during his stay at a, ahem, less lavish afterlife locale. In the month that he spent frozen, Nora moved on. Eventually, being a target, she and her dad decided to play it safe and hide out in the woods with a group of technology-hating Luddite semi-terrorists, where she meets some douchebag named Matteo. They eventually have her act as a plant within Horizen in order to carry out some of the Luddites’ plans to take down the Lakeview afterlife facility (where all the shitty rich people are). Once Nora gets back into Horizen — and gets a promotion and a legitimate reason to stay there beyond sabotage reasons — her side of the story gets back to being interesting again, but never to the heights of Season 1.

I hope these baby blankets we stole from the maternity ward will be perfect disguises during our getaway.

Nathan’s side of the story contains a lot of needless dicking around, with most of the focus on Ingrid deciding to fake it as an Upload. I found her arc unbelievable which, in a show about dead people’s consciousnesses transferred to hard drives so they can eat maple bacon donuts, is saying quite a bit. It just goes to show how rock-bottom Ingrid’s self-esteem really is to spend most of her waking hours squirming around a tub with a VR suit just for a dead guy. I wouldn’t do it for any dead guy in the world!

The season, while enjoyable enough, was unfocused. Like my blog posts! I’ve made that joke millions of times! I don’t think the murder intrigue is all that compelling, and every time they decided to circle back to fitting more pieces of the puzzle together I couldn’t help but think of shitty police procedurals. I don’t care who killed Nathan or why. I don’t care why David Choak continues to invest himself in the goings-on of the living world and why he might want to kill Nathan’s app business. Who cares, who cares. What this season did right was focus more attention on Luke, the army veteran who got his legs blown off in (I think) the Gulf War. He has legs now, of course! He dances and jitterbugs all over Lakeview!

The food is so bad all the color has drained out of my cheeks!

Here’s what I especially think sucks. The whole temporary Nathan/Nora emotional break-up is fine and understandable, but I don’t think they needed to throw other monkey wrenches into the mix. I liked it better when Ingrid was controlling Nathan’s “life” from her position as a definitely-not-faking-dead alive woman. Now that she’s literally there in the afterlife for most of her day, it sets up an unneeded extra barrier between Nathan and Nora. They already have a barrier! A literal barrier! They don’t need another barrier! And what’s the deal with that woman, Tinsley, who seems to be falling for Nathan as well! We don’t need another barrier on top of the other barrier that’s already superfluous to the original barrier! That’s what made Nathan and Nora’s relationship is Season 1 so much more compelling, that a person was falling in love with an Upload and that had a lot of logistical and ethical ramifications. Now it’s like “everyone is in love with an Upload”. Diminishing returns! Watering down! Help! Help!

Future technology will allow you to carry the shrieking remains of your loved ones around your neck.

Tinsley is going to be key in Season 3 for a couple of reasons. 1) Tinsley is falling in love with Nathan, and there’s going to be a big love pentagon between her, Nathan, Nora, Ingrid, and Matteo. And let me tell you: Matteo and Nathan are gonna start fuckin’. 2) Tinsley felt bad for the poor treatment of the AI, so she gave it a hug to make it feel better. At the end of the season, the AI decided to give Ingrid a hug to make her feel better. Tinsley is going to be the catalyst that creates sentience within the AI system, allowing it to take over Lakeview and the Uploads and conquer the living world! Wouldn’t that be something?

I don’t have much more to say about Season 2, so we can wrap it up quickly.

Worth the Watch?

Season 2 is only 7 episodes, you can finish it in an evening. Just watch the damn thing.

Watch it on the toilet. I don’t care.