An unusual review of 'Upload' (TV Series)

Introduction:

Unlike my other blog posts, this isn't a technical blog but a review of a fictional series called 'Upload' that contains so many technicalities, so many good ones indeed. Hence, I couldn't resist myself from posting it here unusually. 

Summary:

The whole series is set in 2033 and is a fiction/prediction of how our world will evolve and how we’ll live and is based on one simple long-lived question:

What if we could get to live an afterlife and If so, what it’d look like?  

The whole series is based on answering this question with the digital world called ‘Upload’, where people after death have a chance to upload themselves aka their memories/brain/thoughts into a digital world from where they could have access with the people in the real world which literally means that there is no death to any conscious person unless their memories are deleted from the hardware.

There are just so many good ideas with many interesting & fun facts sprinkled all across the episodes throughout the series. 

The whole series so nicely jells with even the current world and we could easily interlink with the current tech world as there are just so many analogies that we could easily relate to as in the fictional concepts themselves are mostly developed/based upon the current technologies.

Who knows, this fiction could even come true with the advancements in machine learning & AI as a whole, let someone comment on this content in 2033 ;)

If you don’t expect spoilers, please go and watch the series and come back, I’m sure you’ll get some different perspectives.

If you’ve watched it already or don’t care about the spoiler, then proceed.

Here’s a breakdown of each episode:

[ Dates inside the braces are when I watched the episode and doesn't represent their release date, hey treat this as my diary ;) ]

S1E1: (23-May-2020)

A nice introduction of a different world(‘Upload’) where we’d live after death aka Afterlife forever. 

Our Hero, Nathan is seen having sex in his self-driving car with his GF, Ingrid. 

The protagonist dies due to the crash of a self-driving car and his memory gets uploaded to ‘Upload’, run by a company called ‘Horizon’ where he lives ever after and we’re also shown a glimpse of what afterlife aka Upload/Horizon world looks like and we’re also introduced to the female protagonist, Nora, who works as a helper/angel of that avatar/person who’s inside the Upload, as expected our heroine is the Angel(Customer representative) of our hero.

S1E2: (24-May-2020)

It starts with a sex scene where the female protagonist, Nora is having it with another person in the earth/real-world and we’re shown that the safety mechanism isn’t condom but a camera embedded in a small device that they attach to their chests’ and both accept the terms that they’re doing this with their permission, all we could guess is that people in 2033 has come up with this nice solution to avoid rape accusations and falsifications, I believe and we’re also shown that the nightly app, just similar to today’s Tinder or other dating apps, where people could rate against each other like we do for the products in the marketplace now. 

Then, we’re shown with the protagonist, Nathan, inside the upload meeting a dog whose voice is again given by a real person(customer representative from Horizon) from the earth/real-world, then he meets a politician/conglomerate who says that if he was murdered after having threatened the billion-dollar Upload industry by making an app which lets users create/upload their own Upload versions for free, but our hero blindly ignores it and then we’re shown with a person/lady investigating our hero’s car crash but finds no evidence. 

Then, our heroine/Nora is shown in scenes trying to earn as many stars to get more employee rating in the company so that she could get her senior person’s approval for an employee discount for her dad’s upload loan which happens only if the rating is above 4.5stars as per the norm, who wouldn’t sign otherwise, then she gets to have a bit of an emotional convo with the hero and then she somehow gets out hero’s mysterious copied data in her ring drive, this looks like a new pen drive like device with different shape and gets to recover the files from the memory doing this on her personal transparently displayed laptop in her home and that’s the wrap of the episode. 

S1E3: (26-May-2020)

Starts with the news of scientists trying to download the human consciousness(Inverse of Upload) into a body and everybody tunes into the news, but the person stays alive just for 4secs and dies, then we see the funeral party of our hero where we get to know that nobody really talks about him and our heroine also attends it and is seen watching it in a room seated beside our hero’s exes, talking with them and we also notice the stunts of relationship b/w our hero and his last ex GF who pays for all his upload expenses and we also see the investigator lady in the party who talks with both of them

S1E4: (26-May-2020)

Starts with our hero having a golf play with the richest man, then our heroine takes the hero to the 2Gigs which is the economy class of Upload where we’re shown with kinds of people with lower income group who’d freeze until someone from the real world pays for them, just like kindle subscription they’d only get to read the samples for free and to the extent that their avatars have to pay even to have a penis 🤪, our hero thinks that this is the one group that he ever wants to help aka serve these people in lower group aka 2Gigs, who gets only 2 Gigabits of data per month, just like our mobile recharges nowadays, the whole technology we see throughout is just so well jelled with the real world that it feels like we already know most of them which gets us so instantly connected and I kinda personally like the way this virtual world is created, but then our hero gets a call from his Ex/real-world girlfriend who has arranged for an interview with some news channel women where we’re again presented with the kinda relationship bonding they have and eventually in the consecutive scene we’re shown with our hero/heroine bond building up, then comes our hero’s ex into the upload with her sex suit on for the first time and she sees an issue with our hero’s dick not getting up which actually is an issue with our hero as he’s lost interest in her, so funnily for us, the ex calls for the tech support in the middle of the sex scene where our heroine comes in when our hero is standing in the room covering his lower half with the bedsheet and then our heroine says to check for the responsiveness of the avatar/body and touches our hero’s body for the first time with her fingers and they both are lit but the scene is not developing there yet as his ex’s avatar comes up after pausing for a while having gone to console her crazy cat, so then they make love or not is not shown but we’re shown with what our heroine feels while sharing it with her colleague who then reinstalls the nightly dating app by opening up the phone on their wrist, in fact embedded in it and she ends up meeting the same old guy and this time, it is her on top of him doing it by thinking about the hero’s body touch that she had sensed just a while back, then we’re shown with our investigating officer entering an automated shop/store where our hero bought something before he died in the car crash, then she gets to meet a human manager and sees up the CCTV footage where she sees our hero’s Ex doing something in his car behind his back just after he enters the store which later turns out unsuspicious/emotional and there it ends.

S1E5: (26-May-2020)

Starts with the small boy Dylan in the ‘Upload’ world talking to her mom and getting jealous by seeing his grown up younger brother as he’s bringing his gf to his home, then we’re shown with our hero talking to his ex having argument about their relationships with some 3rd persons in it as well, then we see our heroine doing some babysitting with Dylan, then she leaves after getting calls from her dad who’s sick and admitted to the hospital, so Dylan, our hero and his friend meet-up who then goes into an another new world within the upload which is named as grey market and they explain it so nicely to us by relating it to the dark web, where we’re seen our hero’s friend getting a pass to date a real world person and Dylan gets missed, searching for whom both the adults run after and find him tattooing which’ll make him as adult after a good sleep, then they get back out of the grey market running as we see a timer on their heads counting down from 1hour window and if they don’t get back, their avatar might be considered as dead in the Upload world and would endlessly roam around inside the grey market forever, so then Dylan goes to sleep and our hero’s friend goes to date a real world person who’s then interrupted with his angel and we’re also shown that the so-called real world person are in fact connected via VR as their avatar gets stuck and we only hear the audio of the girl vomiting in the background, then we see Dylan’s body changed into an adult, a female one with boobs who then roams freely and before this we’re also shown our heroine having a convo with a medical/upload personnel about the issues with the memory of the avatar trying to fix the memory issues of our hero and gets a recovery software called memboost-turbo which retrieves all the deleted memory files of our hero, then she asks her colleague sitting opposite to her who’s shown to us for the 1st time, i guess but later we’re seen her to be running the memory shop inside Upload, whether she touched her computer anytime because she sees some files missing just from a specific folder, for which the women says that its a serious accusation and she’s ready to go with the lie detector and nobody can fake skin data, then finally we’re shown with our investigating lady drown in a lake in her self driving car after blanking out the window glasses aka killed brutally by the car after she was going to meet the guy in the upload company, i guess, whom she was suspecting in our hero’s death. 

S1E6: (27-May-2020)

Our heroine goes on a real/talking date during/about which our hero is thrown away but then they end up being at her office and she sees our hero drawing then the dating guy leaves and our hero & heroine spends the whole night sleeping next to each other after she shows off her office space and tells him about her memories and she gets caught by her superior, then eventually we’re shown with the family relationship of our hero’s ex Ingrid taking our hero’s niece to a sleepover where they share some sweetness&bonding, then we’re also simultaneously shown with our hero’s friend Luke fighting with his angel. Overall, this was a not so much interesting but just looked like a passing/connecting episode. 

S1E7: (27-May-2020)

Our hero meets our heroine’s dad and takes onto the Upload’s tour where they share something to each other and their bonding is shown, eventually, our heroine goes away and someone tries to hack the upload systems where we see all the avatars turning into pac-man when our heroine tries to find the issues or the conspiracies behind our hero’s memories, we’re also shown with our hero’s ex Ingrid sharing about her newly found affair with our hero’s friend with whom she had slept although we’re not shown with those scenes yet and she also shares about how she’s been thinking about switching off our hero for 6 days a week meaning she had also lost interest in him now, finally it ends with our heroine having some life-full matters with her dad on the way to home in the bus as they’re shown as economically contrived. 

S1E8: (28-May-2020)

Starts with our hero going through the memories of our heroine in the store which is run by an employee sitting just opposite to her then in the next scene her senior pulls her up and suspends her instantly and she goes into upload in her avatar to our hero where he tries to propose her but her avatar aka the senior rejects it and our hero is upset thinking that he was rejected, then he calls his mom and asks to visit other digital heavens and her mom takes him in a hard drive and leaves Horizon/Upload and goes to some other small agency where we’re shown about how there are some very cheap AR+VR versions available in the marketplace and our hero is shown up in a bulb, meanwhile our hero jumps on an economy plane after hearing from her colleague friend that our hero is departing from horizon/lake-view/upload from New York to LA and goes to our hero’s ex’s home thinking that she’d be the one taking him but later they both know that it is her mom and then she also gets to zoom to the pic of our hero in all the photo frames in her home, where we’re shown that all glass displays have got the interactivity features and are partially operable w/o software in it and also gets to smell the sweat on his jerkin in the cardboard then they both gets to LA to the same digital agency in the Ingrid’s self driving car and our hero decides to give an another chance to stay with Horizon/Lakeview(Which is an another name of the digital place, heaven) after seeing Nora/our heroine, then when they get out of that agency, a guy runs away by taking the hard drive from his ex’s hand and throws it into the water but our heroine somehow got the real hdd which has our hero’s memories and then we’re shown with both of our protagonists inside the Upload hugging and playing and we see that our heroine has taken him not to Horizon but to her place and is seen talking to him by laying on the bed and there the episode ends.

S1E9: (28-May-2020)

Starts with Nora with her friend visiting a store where people are lined to get a hold onto a nearly free version of upload where they could create their own versions by themselves, a similar kinda tool which Nathan/our-hero was working on, then we’re seen Nathan having a convo with his friend, Luke by residing in the bar, then Horizon holds a meeting ordering all employees to switch off all the artificial brains in the upload tonight as they’re going to update their software aka the Upload world, in this Nora steals a pen like device from her colleague’s back pocket which is used to code and change the settings of the Upload world and also connect with the real world, which she later gifts to Nathan, then employees decorate the office for the update eve and has a convo with her senior as she got back in the office by getting approval from her boss’s boss and they also have a convo about Nathan but to cover that up Nora calls his hookup guy and he comes in to the eve and simply kisses him whenever her boss sees her during the party and she acts so nicely to keep that up, eventually people are given a task to find the egg that’s hidden in the Lakeview as part of the gameplay of the evening & eventually our hero breaks up with his ex, Ingrid and she also has a convo with her dad about Nathan in another scene at their home, I guess but that’s not very clear at all and there seems to be some conspiracy theory with his dad & Nathan’s link, then we’re also shown with our hero talking to his friend after a very long time who reveals him that he hooked up with his gf, Ingrid and that he’d been feeling guilty about it lately and that’s why he was avoiding him and our hero decides to switch to 2Gigs after getting some money from him as they both were partners in the company, then all the employees puts all the upload brains on sleep and then leaves while our heroine has a convo with the hookup guy trying to remove him from her life, then she goes by stairs and makes some hack in the door so she comes back by the back door after everyone leaves the office and we’re also shown about how she wears the sensing gloves and touches & feels the hero’s hand for the first time and they kiss too, then our hero uses his coding skills to make them transparent when the guards looks at them, then our hero is woken up just because Nora thinks that maybe if he’s awake during the update, he might remember or get back his old memories but later when she gets a notification saying that he needs to sleep to update him, she makes the choice hardly because after they wake up, he might/could forget everything including the kinda relationship that they’ve developed so far and it ends there. 

S1E10: (28-May-2020)

We’re shown with updated upload world, where everyone wakes up at 7 am, I believe that’s when the horizons employees come for work, when our hero is woken up, he remember’s some of the memories and the twist that he sold his code to his ex’s/Ingrid’s dad and was killed up to cover that up, this twist made it look like he was the one who cheated his partner & not the other way around and our heroine also got to know this after Nathan told her as not remembering her, falsely just to ignore her, then she cries like anything and her colleague friend tries to console her by avoiding other colleague funnily in that place, then our hero moves to 2Gigs and meets a person twice just for the sake of showing that someone does exist in that place, then both of our protagonists try to have a convo and a guy who tries to delete the hdd of Nathan’s memory sneaks in from the window of her house’s window while she into the upload wearing the VR headset and takes the knife, then she somehow manages to escape and run away from him running all over the city and this becomes the best chase/fight/save scene ever as our hero who with his hacking/coding device gets to save the heroine by locking up the bad guy in the elevator and kills him, this was just a freaking awesome scene, then she talks with Nathan over audio as his data ran out and only 0.1Gb was available during which she talks about how she feels, this was one of nicest/emotional/heart-touching dialogues ever in this whole series, but our hero is on hold/pause/blocked-out as he’s out of data now, then her dad comes over and ask to go and hide somewhere as her place is known to the people who wants to delete Nathan which is why they’re after her now as she helped him in LA, then she goes off in her hookups’ self driving car trying to escape and go off the grid, meanwhile we see Ingrid, Nathan’s Ex coming up to his room and watching him blocked out, recharges him with 1Gb and instantly we see our hero saying that he needs to call her/Nora immediately but is also shocked to see Ingrid here and when Ingrid says that she’d uploaded herself into this Upload world just for him, his whole of 1gb is consumed almost instantly, i was ROFL for sometime, then it ends after the lights are out with Ingrid shouting for tech support. This was one of the craziest episodes which make us want to watch the upcoming series. 

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