The second season of Upload is shorter at only seven episodes long. Despite the previous season ending on a somewhat big cliffhanger that tried to deliver a lot of shock, and this season opening right after, it feels muted and underwhelming. The twist is nearly immediately undone. From the first season, Nathan had died, and his memories uploaded into a digital afterlife, where he ends up falling in love with his “angel”, a staff named Nora. Unfortunately, Nathan was already with Ingrid, who, despite her narcissism, does genuinely loves Nathan, which makes the love triangle all the harder to watch.
Nathan had slowly fallen for Nora over the course of a season, and the feeling is mutual, yet despite this, both end up moving on from each other somewhat easily. Nora, having left her job and gone off grid, quickly develops feelings for another guy. While Nathan, having resisted Ingrid’s advances at first, does look to have started slowly giving in to it. This makes the relationships feel fickle and shallow, undoing what came before.
This season is slow, and for most of it, it meanders around the more interesting subplot of Nathan’s death, in favor of just… other less pressing side plots. It reveals a bit more of the AI world and how it functions. The worldbuilding is appreciated since there are still a lot of unanswered questions. It continues to play into the nickel and diming of the uploads in this digital afterlife, since they are still paying consumers after all. It shows the result of excessive greed from capitalism, such as updates and patches to the digital afterlife. However, some parallels still don’t quite work when it feels too much like the real world in some things (like the physics), but not in others (like… certain physics).
The focus is on the love triangle between Nathan, Nora and Ingrid. Ingrid is struggling to keep Nathan’s attention onto her, which can be kind of sad. While Nathan is only staying with Ingrid through immense guilt. On the other hand, Nora has misunderstood Nathan’s actions and ends up changing her allegiance to work against the system. These are all typical plot points where each decision is not black and white. The “good guys” are doing bad things, and the “bad guys” may not be so bad. However, this means that after the glamor of the unique concept (being able to upload your consciousness and live a digital life) wears off, this is a somewhat generic show.
Some of the side characters get their fair share of limelight, and you might say that it may be too much in certain episodes. These can be funny but a lot of times, these scenes are distractions that are too unrelated to what’s currently going on and are too far removed. It feels like these side characters might have had too much attention placed on them as they do not feel central or necessary to the plot.
After meandering for most of the season, the last two episodes carries some heavier stuff. There is big progress made in the subplot of Nathan’s death. In the earlier episodes, he had been slowly getting his memories back and piecing together what happened. Towards the end of the season, we finally touch on the reasons why. Equally important, we get a resolution with Nathan and Ingrid’s relationship, and of course, the season ends with a cliffhanger, but one that’s expected, and given how last season’s cliffhanger was resolved, we can guess what is probably going to happen.
Overall, the second season of Upload is okay. The initial interest of the unique premise starts to lose its attractiveness, so the gap in the storytelling is more obvious. At its core, this is like a relationship drama, but even then, there are so many distractions that you feel that most of the season was wasted and nothing much of note happened.
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