My Week In Pop Culture - Pantheon Season 2

I had a work trip this week (New York City treated me well! Check out Indian Accent if you have a chance, their tasting menu is out this world and worth the splurdge), and my evening unwind came courtesy of Pantheon. If you’re a sci-fi fan you might have already caught up with it - season 1 aired on AMC in 2022, and season 2 had a limited release in 2023, so it was floating around if you knew where to look for it.

I first heard about it when season 1 dropped on Netflix back in November, and I was hooked from episode 1. It’s beautifully rendered near-future sci-fi, where the next frontier is cracking UI - Uploaded Intelligence. A brain can be scanned and uploaded to the cloud, but in the process it is destroyed. Digital life, created from human life. What would that mean for society? How quickly might we advance, thinking human thoughts at the speed of a processor, and which directions would we go? What will be created, and what will be destroyed?

It asks those aching, philosophical questions (a way more entertaining brand of thriller than whatever Manchurian candidate bullshit is going on right now in the real world), but it grounds them in real emotions. Truly: love, connection, the desire to grow, the need to hold on and look back, all of these things lie at the core of Pantheon.

Our entrees into this world are two teenagers - Maddie, a moody, shy, smart 14 year old living with her mom in Sacramento, having recently lost her father; and Caspian, an even moodier but genuinely kind 17 year old hacker whiz kid type. When Maddie is contacted by a mysterious being who uses only emojis, she suspects it is her deceased father. In investigating the truth behind his death, she meets Caspian, and they realize that there is a massive conspiracy at hand involving both their families.

In a nutshell, Romeo+Juliet meets Altered Carbon! What’s not to love?

This is the kind of show that I’m always glad to see get a season 2, because there was a lot of juice left at the end of season 1. Thankfully, it was worth the squeeze - though mildly truncated, it wrapped up the current story line in a satisfactory way, then launched itself out into the stars in the back half of the season. While I can see the second half of season 2 being polarizing (it’s very exposition-heavy, with some accelerating time leaps that may be overwhelming), I adored this show from beginning to end.

Spoilers for Seasons 1 and 2 Below

Season 1 ends with the existance of UIs revealed to the world, the internet down, and Maddie and her mom believing all traces of David were gone. Caspian, however, has been successfully recruited by Logorythyms to continue to work on unlocking the secret of stable UI. His lab rat - a copy of Maddie’s dad, David Kim.

After a bit of setup, by episode 2 they’re reunited. Caspian is feeling the weight of expectation as the clone of the brilliant Steven Holstrom, but the copy has something the original has lost - the ability to love. The key to stable UI turns out to be integration of code from another UI, and identifying the code relating to one’s purpose.

I’ll be honest, I’m a bit fuzzy on the details about that, but it was really gripping as he came to the discovery.

Caspian has healed the flaw in David, and in that moment a new, fully digital being is created from sections of his code: Maddie’s sister, Mist. (Possibly MIST, but it’s a bit of a hassle to do all caps.)

Their triumph is extremely short-lived, however, and soon they’re back on the run from Logorythym’s, who use the cure that they have ripped away from David to cure none other than the uploaded-from-frozen Steven Holstrom, who looks like Steve Jobs with a pinch of Evil Spock. Holstrom, being the only UI who has been cured, is now a virtual (lol) god.

Meanwhile, the governments of the world are getting a bit nervous about all of these extremely powerful ghosts in the system, and they’ve developed their own countermeasure: Safe Surf, aka The Swarm. A computer virus designed to hunt down UIs, it keeps Holstrom in check while Caspian and Maddie race to find another UI to fight him. Turns out, Mist carries the cure.

The one sour note of the season for me was the “Maddie says something unbelievably cruel to Mist for not killing Holstrom when she has a chance drives Mist off, but then Mist comes to the rescue in the nick of time” bit, which is a trope that I despise. Reading up on some details of the show, I’m a bit more forgiving of it having been reminded that Maddie was only 14-15, but I still 1) don’t believe she would say that and 2) never bought for a second that Mist wouldn’t come to the rescue, so the stakes with that felt very artificial to me.

But where they went with it…

There’s this thing I call the Arthur C. Clarke ending, which is where you get this big build up of family drama and really interesting sci-fi, then there’s an abrupt tragedy and 20,000 years in the future aliens look up some recordings of it. (I will not be providing examples. Because I can’t remember the names.) It’s a technique that feels narratively jarring to me, because instead of giving things this new and alien frame of reference as intended, it just creates a sense of disconnection.

Pantheon engages in a smidge of that in the last few episodes, but in a way felt like zooming out, rapidly expanding my sense of scale and giving me, as I said before, a new and alien frame of reference, but one that remained grounded in love.

Holstrom appears undefeatable, and running out of UIs to cure and elevate to godhood, Caspian must upload. He’s the same being, or a least close enough to merge his code with Holstrom’s and foil his plans. Caspian sacrifices himself feeding Holstrom to The Swarm. Mist, however, arrives in time to capture the last snippet of his code.

Caspian awakens in the future, Mist having finally cleared his system of the toxic code from The Swarm. The digital world around them is vast, teeming with UIs and digital intelligences, like the now human looking (and very cute) Mist.

In the digital world, millennia have passed. Technology has accelerated tremendously, and digital life now vastly outnumbers embodied humans. They take up fewer resources, are functionally immortal, and can do anything they can imagine - what’s not to like?

In the real world, though, only 20 years have passed. Some embodied humans, including a now-grown Maddie, disagree that life is better without a body. Others, including a bitter ex-Logorhythms employee, simply hate digital life. Things are at a crisis point, and Caspian is judged the best advocate for digital society, not least because Maddie is the head negotiator, and (surprise!) the mother of his son.

The Swarm is freed from it’s digital shackles, but instead of attacking digital life, it goes after humans. Caspian, infected by it’s code as he is, is able to communicate with them. Digital society agrees to recognize them as life, but not life that can live on earth after killing so many humans. They journey out to the stars to see what they can build in the depths of space.

Unfortunately, Maddie and Caspian’s son is killed by The Swarm. However, in that moment Caspian, also on the verge of death, tells her that more than 100,000 years in the future, she will get a do-over.

Time begins to leap forward - Maddie uploads and leaves the planet, harnessing the power of a sun to build a vast simulation. Billions of universes, playing things out and waiting to find one like the one she remembered, where she can step in as a god and bring him back.

But how did Caspian know? Well, Safe Surf/The Swarm became gods in their own right, ones powerful enough to communicate back through Caspian. It’s just alien god and simulations all the way down, baby.

In their last act as gods, Maddie and Caspian slip into another of her universes, wiping their memories clean and starting the story once more.

Pantheon reminded me strongly of a Christopher Pike book, The Starlight Crystal, which I was more than a little obsessed with as a 12-14 year old. There’s something that I love about that concept - techno-mysticism, like reincarnation for the STEM generation.

Near future sci-fi is often some of the most powerful fiction out there, reflecting the future back at society. If you’re in the mood for more, Paolo Baccigalupi’s The Water Knife is beautiful and terrifying; the 2013 movie Her is also well worth a rewatch, or a first watch if you missed it the first time around.