Pantheon - Underated Show of the Year?

Season 1 tweet review:

#Pantheon S1 on #Netflix - anachronistic near futurism based on Ken Liu stories. Ignores AI (v hard to do now IRL!) so human uploads can prat about in fantasy VR battles representing hacking. Meh. Social upheaval gets marginally interesting; will watch S2.

 

S1 trailer: https://youtu.be/wTgYeETwgKQ?si=o8UvyuGmKSQUaoYE

Watched on Netflix, but previously released elsewhere a couple years ago. Maybe a part of why it feels so dated (by the generative AI boom). Opening exposition on "The Singularity" is almost 2 decades into being cringe (for me). But maybe it brings along some general audience, from under rocks.



For demographic pleasing: high-schooler protagonist opening. Very blatant GITS references and Motoko Kusanagi character. Young parents split by death/upload (for middle-aging anime fans?)...

The whole refusal to accept husband is not dead gets tiresome. Maybe realistic. But doesn't depict him as being partly lobotomised, per plot. Or any of the uploads as being meaningfully transhuman...

Beyond time dilation, which makes no sense, because it would require exponentially more processing hardware. But instead they have arbitrary mind degradation limitation ('the flaw'). Bleh.

I was surprised that the human cloning aspect was historically plausible. But Steve Jobs dude wouldn't have had computer hardware to grapple with uploads 20 years earlier. 🤷

Season 2 tweet review:

#Pantheon S2 on #Netflix ramped up exponentially into space opera, last 2 ep's largely remix of @cstross's Accelerando!😍

Carefully constructed conclusion revised S1 mediocrity..: https://x.com/Z3R0Gravitas/status/1884676773008306303

... To fav show of year I keep talking about: [search link to my comments in the show's subreddit].

  

S2 trailer video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cj4zqd3k3yg

[Extended review/summary with large SPOILERS!]

 
S2 picks up 6 months on, in a global internet shutdown that's half way between Covid lockdowns and a Cory Doctorow novel, with plucky young hacktivists. It's initially frustrating, rehashing themes of S1 with Maddie and Mum Ellen's views somewhat reversed.

 

But the the plot ramps, with Caspian and Maddie getting together, plus a mysterious then chirpy digital sister. Who plays the role of a mini (rice cooked sized) 'think-tank' (per Ghost in the Shell SAC). Going on a quest to meet up with the (oddly limited) number of other UI (uploaded humans), one from each of a handful of nations.

The action peeks in S6, with a virtual world battle that's somewhat creative. But the animation style still lacking production values. (Although not bad for a show that was cancelled then homeless.) The alien swarm intelligence of the "Safe-surf" anti-UI countermeasure breaking into a clash between protagonist UIs (and CIs) vs Holstrom (evil Steve Jobs, renamed like Stephen Wolfram) bent on unleashing a viral pandemic to force more humans to upload.

 

 

An Akira (1987) like explosion/encasement by MIST then jumps us 20 years into a greatly changed future. Many did eventually upload, but restricted to Borg cube like autonomous data centres, scattered around the world.

Running at hundreds of times human pace, they can run mechanist automation in the real world using only a fraction of their conscious time. But are somehow unable to spot terrorists loading up one of their explosives...

There's an inexplicable lack of backups, too; the show arbitrarily avoids raising the interesting issues that might arise with digital people duplicating, recombine or irreconcilably diverging. Concepts best explored by Hannu Rajaniemi's (cutting edge sci-fi) "Quantum Thief" trilogy.

But the bewildering, over-saturated virtual space, filled with a riotous assortment of avatars/personas, like "Ready Player One" meets Rajaniemi's Zoku in a Supergiant Games (eg Bastion, Transistor). With a sense of complex internal politics/bureaucracy and culture spilt centuries from the outside world. Although the characters we know seem remarkably unchanged and the CIs (created intelligences) play no noticeable role. MIST excepted.

The echos of Stross's "Accelerando": we take a ride on a drone with a virtual observation deck implausible big and decked out, like the 'Cartesian Theatre' running inside a 1Kg deep space probe. We visit the robot-body building oasis domain of Bitcoin-Queen Maddie, quite like Manny's daughter who (in Charlie's novel) gets first mover advantage in claiming a small Jovian moon. The probe is also paralleled by the tiny solar sail vessel Safe-surf departs on (after persuasion from Caspian), propelled by a powerful laser beam in both cases.

Finally, for the last 20 minutes or so, an odd mystery: in amongst a partially averted AI apocalypse, and (more importantly!) personal tragedies 4 and 5 for Maddie, segues us out into deep time. Where I was very impressed they used the full and correct term "Matroska Brain", against a montage of self replicating Von Neumann probe like cubes dismantling a planetary system.

We culminate with an oddly romantic spin on nested simulations. (Hinting at quantum identical emulation meets many worlds in a past light cone, or something.) Odd, because S1 frames as detestable Logorhythm's conspiracy to recreate Holstrom as a real world clone, complete with parental trauma. Then solar god Maddie casually ups that game by 18+ orders of magnitude, with her billions of alternate ancestor simulations, in her melancholic mono-maniacal mission to recreate a perfect Caspian. (And figure out how he knew to say, with his dying robot body breaths, when and where this would happen.

 

So, Pantheon (and presumably the Ken Liu short stories its based on) are not the most thematically progressive. In fact, it's beauty comes from simplifying down and prioritising its time to potentially engage a wider audience. By spending most of its time close to the present day, focused on relatable character arcs. Maddie ultimately fully clear as the central protagonist. She's well portrayed (no sexualised characters, etc) and I found her romance believable and endearing (despite the awkward age gap).

Her motivations do veer about a little too fast, mid-S2. Similarly, we didn't get *quite* enough character development on Chanda, who was a very interesting reformed villain character. Holstrom's power (over him) in the digital world didn't feel earned, given he was on ice for 2 decades (of tech development) directly before hand. His dastardly plot felt a bit of a stretch. (In part, given how much of the real world is in denial about the huge ongoing harm of Covid infections.) Caspian's sacrificial victory was a poignant apotheosis, at least.

The most badly squandered character arcs was when two male UIs, Iranian Dr Farhad, and Israeli military Yair, set aside their international hatred and personal hang ups to merge with each other in an ultimate desperate sacrifice (that kind of jumped the shark a little, for me, lol). Their CI mind-child get one word "better" and a few pew-pews during the big brawl. I didn't even realise that wasn't just MIST, on first watch. We hear nothing of Joey after that, either, despite her flaw fixed, etc. (Nor certain other minor characters, but hey.)

Overall, the second season won me over, upgrading my opinion of the show from mediocre mainstream to something special. Favourite show of the year. That I've been compelled to chat about on Reddit. Trading opinions with old sci-fi fans and throwing computation cosmology ethics at some minds for whom these concepts are still novel and inspiring/unsettling.