From Newsgroup: rec.arts.tv


I watched the first episode of Upload, a TV show about a young man who
dies prematurely and is talked into having his consciousness uploaded. I expected this to be superficial and novelty-driven, but I was wrong. I
found it utterly charming, and there are enough story hooks to keep
things interesting for quite a while. I think I can pitch it without
spoilers.

Our hero, Nathan, has a terrible accident and must choose between
surgery and digitization. He is digitized at his girlfriend's insistence
-- it's a permanent commitment to someone he wasn't sure he wanted to
marry, even longer than lifelong, and also he doesn't have a credit card attached to his account. A surprising amount of stuff turns out to be an in-app purchase. There are also ads, AI people walking around pitching products. His girlfriend won't give him a credit card number because she
likes all his requests going through her, and now that he can never
leave her, she no longer needs to keep her possessive and controlling
streak hidden.

There are some interesting logistical issues. For instance, there's a
dial where each resident can control which season is experienced. Nathan chooses fall, and he doesn't see many people in the lake. A more
experienced resident says that there are tons of people swimming in the
lake; we can tell by the low frame rate on the few we do see. Both the
dial and the frame rate issues puncture resident immersion, which IMO is
a big problem in an eternal afterlife.

There is a motif around, of all things, a cowlick: Nathan had one in
life, which he used gel to slick down. It popped out during his fatal accident. The "angel" who was uploading him erased it as she digitized
him, but it appeared in the afterlife anyway. It bothered him a lot;
since he always slicked it down, it felt wrong even though it was
natural. Eventually the angel edits it out a second time, after seeing
that it codes as wrong to him. It's possible that we're already done
with this, that it was intended simply to convey that a digital
afterlife can render us how we see ourselves, instead of how others see
us. It's also possible that the back-and-forth attention paid to this
means it's going to be a season-long motif. I'm kind of hoping for the
latter, just to see how they do it.

I also watched "Bean There, Done That," the second episode of Best
Medicine. It was good. Martin reencounters his childhood bully while
solving another medical puzzle. I thought the ending was a little OTT,
but then I've been working with a more delicate and balanced treatment
of similar material, so I may have been miscalibrated.

I'll probably continue to watch both shows.

What did everyone else watch?
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