Entertainment
Prime Video’s 4-Season Sci-Fi Series Is ‘Black Mirror’ With a Colossal Twist
Season 7 of the Netflix phenomenon Black Mirror arrived in 2025 with another batch of episodes to fill its audiences’ brains with existential dread, and creator Charlie Brooker has since confirmed that the series will return again. The series was made famous for using technology as a vessel to showcase the lowest points of humanity. While some of the technology is far beyond what is possible for the masses in our reality, the writing of Black Mirror delivers a grounded approach that is relatable to audiences because the actions of its characters feel possible. It’s what makes the series so devastating and what keeps the audience coming back for more every time a new season drops. Black Mirror fans who have already devoured Season 7 should check out Prime Video’s sci-fi series, Upload.
What Is ‘Upload’ About?
Upload takes place in 2033 and presents a world where death is not the end, and your consciousness can be uploaded to digital heaven, where loved ones can still communicate with you and even visit you through a virtual reality setup, transferring you seamlessly from the real world to the digital world. The “dead” can also still view the goings-on of the outside world through giant screens in this digital utopia. The series follows programmer Nathan Brown (Robbie Amell), who dies at the young age of twenty-seven from a self-driving car accident and is then uploaded to the luxurious Lakeview, where he is at the whim of his obsessive and materialistic, still-alive girlfriend, Ingrid Kannerman (Allegra Edwards), who is personally funding Nathan’s new digital home. As Nathan navigates his new existence, he grows close with his living customer service representative, a.k.a. his “angel,” Nora Antony (Andy Allo).
Nora works for the company to secure a spot in Lakeview for her ailing father. He is reluctant to join this digital purgatory and would rather take his chances in the unknown reality of death, in hopes he will be able to rejoin his late wife on another plane. What Nora didn’t expect to come with the job was a budding romance between her and Nathan, which is the beating heart of the series. Before Nathan died, he was looking to end it with Ingrid, but the financial stranglehold Ingrid had on Nathan put him in a very precarious position. He is almost forced to try to make this relationship work while simultaneously falling for Nora. Nora brings out a new side of Nathan, one that is the polar opposite of the superficial life he became accustomed to with Ingrid. There’s also another wrinkle in both of these relationships — both Ingrid and Nora are alive while Nathan is very much dead. The technology presented is far more advanced than what the audience sees in everyday life, but there is still no method to transfer a dead person’s consciousness back into another body to bring them back to life in the real world.
There’s also an issue with Nathan’s memories, as some major gaps in his life are missing. Before the accident that took his life, Nathan and his business partner were working on a free version of the digital afterlife program to give everyone a fair shot at continued existence, if that’s what they wanted. This mystery lends to the overarching fact that Nathan’s car accident might not exactly have been an accident. Not only does Nora become the primary love interest of Upload, but she also becomes determined to find out what actually happened to Nathan to grant him a trip to Lakeview. The way Ingrid seemingly forces Nathan to be uploaded is a clear dead ringer for what might be going on in this supposed conspiracy against Nathan and his intentions to help others.
This afterlife is available for everyone, but the wealthier you are, the better afterlife you are afforded. The wealthy get to enjoy a luxurious paradise, while everyone else is subjected to “2 Gigs,” where they have limited bandwidth and freeze when they run out of data, similar to the subscription tiers in Black Mirror‘s “Common People” episode from Season 7. The benefits of these technological advances seem too good to be true, and that’s by design. It’s a mirror to the real-life fact of megacorporations looking to monetize every aspect of human life. The real kicker is that both shows seem to be intentionally mocking both of the streaming services that float the bill for them to get made, sticking it to the man while still folding into the throes of capitalistic society.
‘Upload’ Is if ‘Black Mirror’ Ditched the Anthology Format and Followed One Storyline
Both Upload and Black Mirror are metaphors for real-life class disparity, with Upload delivering a more humorous approach. Even though it is more of a comedy, Upload delivers thought-provoking concepts about the morality of continuing your consciousness after death, almost predicting what the future could hold with inventions like Meta and the future advancement of virtual reality. The real setback to Upload is that it accomplishes a great deal with a very short runtime. It incorporates sci-fi elements, is a comedy, features a romantic throughline, and maintains a satirical outlook on modern-day society through a futuristic lens. Juggling all these plates at once can cause one, or a few of them, to fall at points in the series, but the Greg Daniels creation is still well worth the watch.
If fans of Black Mirror ever wondered what would happen if they ditched the anthology format and went with one storyline, Upload would be a great guess about how it would come out. So many amazing Black Mirror episodes start with so much hope and happiness, only to rip the carpet from beneath the viewer and give them a heaping dose of depressing reality. Upload does have more comedic elements, as stated before, but its pure concept is inherently bleak, and there are moments within the series that exemplify that feeling substantially. All four parts of Upload have now aired, with the fourth and final part bringing the series to a conclusion in 2025. That means the entire story is now available to watch from beginning to end, making it an ideal time to dive into this digital world.
Upload is available to stream on Prime Video.
- Release Date
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2020 – 2025-00-00
- Network
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Prime Video
- Directors
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Jeffrey Blitz, Athina Rachel Tsangari, Daina Reid, David Rogers, Sarah Boyd, Jonathan van Tulleken, Tom Marshall
- Writers
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Megan Neuringer, Maxwell Theodore Vivian, Farhan Arshad, Alison Brown, Shepard Boucher, Yael Green, mike lawrence, Lauren Houseman, Aasia LaShay Bullock, Alex J. Sherman, Alyssa Lane
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