S03.E08: Flesh and Blood

[AnimeMania]

(Season Finale)

Nora takes the powerful Upload companies to court, but she may have bitten off more than she can chew.

Premiere Date: Friday, November 10, 2023     Prime Video    

[Jediknight]

Okay, first off fantastic job with Ingrid this season.  They humanized her by showing why she would be so attached to Nathan.  Her friends were terrible, and her dad wished she died, but there was Nathan.  Nathan was the one that actually cared about her.  Nathan didn't see her as a status symbol, or money, or didn't run her down with stuff like her friend did.  And her friendship with AI guy starting last season was excellent, he even got invited to the wedding.

But holy shit, next season is gonna be a civil war.  It's gonna be Horizen/Betta vs uploads, AI guy, the Ludds, 2 Gigs (you know Yang's gonna back Luke and Nathan), and angels (Tinsley did not look happy getting pushed aside).  And that whole sequence showed the evolution of AI guy, he didn't hesitate to protect Nathan.  He overrode his programming to do that.

We better get a season 4.

[bettername2come]

AI guy has had a great character arc. It was nice to see Nora and Ingrid bonding. I hope "copy" Nathan is the dead one, or that he's misunderstanding and he got something like a "merge changes" procedure with both sets of memories. I think that would give Ingrid some good motivation to work against Horizen more actively if they destroyed the version of Nathan that actually loved her back. 

The commercial for Horizen was very well done. 

[Paloma]

On 11/10/2023 at 4:05 AM, Jediknight said:

Okay, first off fantastic job with Ingrid this season.  They humanized her by showing why she would be so attached to Nathan.  Her friends were terrible, and her dad wished she died, but there was Nathan.  Nathan was the one that actually cared about her.  Nathan didn't see her as a status symbol, or money, or didn't run her down with stuff like her friend did. 

 

9 hours ago, bettername2come said:

It was nice to see Nora and Ingrid bonding.

I also liked Ingrid better this season, but I don't understand what Nora said to her to make her willing to testify. And I'm still unclear on why her testimony was so crucial. Actually, I'm unclear on what the overall trial was intended to accomplish. I know that the lawyer (Nathan's ex) said they won because they got a lot of money for the families, but was the main issue in question at the trial?

10 hours ago, bettername2come said:

The commercial for Horizen was very well done. 

The commercial was great--cleverly written and slickly produced, just like what a real mega-company would produce to salvage a PR disaster. 

It's annoying that this season was only 8 episodes and ends on a cliffhanger, especially since it will probably be more than a year until the next season (assuming it is renewed). Overall I did not enjoy this season as much as the first two, though the last 2 episodes of this season seemed better than the rest of of this season. 

[Affogato]

the commercial for Horizon was so good that I had to rewind and watch it the second time. My mind, being old, automatically went into 'ignore the Monsanto commercial' mode. Also, they are keeping the name 'Horizon' as a 'container for liability'. Yes, Betta is not responsible for what Horizon has done.

Ingrid got an automatic notification, which suggests to me that the digital copy of Nathan was killed. I don't think that the flesh version would trigger the notification. However, look at all of the Angels who made multiple copies and the company had no idea. We know Aleesha created a second Nathan one time that we saw and the pixels dispersed, but it is possible that a zipped file remains? ? Perhaps Nathan or Nora made a backup, too. I don't think it means he will be gone, maybe just lose some memories. In any case, I am guessing that everyone is hurrying to make backups of different things, for their own reasons.

I did observe that the surviving Nathan was not dressed in the light beige shirt of the digital Nathan and the background looked more like concrete (a cell, perhaps) and less like the fog digital Nathan would be hiding in, if he had escaped. None of that is definitive, though.

 

[shrewd.buddha]

10 hours ago, Paloma said:

Overall I did not enjoy this season as much as the first two, though the last 2 episodes of this season seemed better than the rest of of this season. 

I feels, to me, that the premise of the show has been played out and now we are stuck in some sort of rom-com loop.
Ingrid and Nathan#2 have absolutely nothing in their "lives" to do except hang out with one another. They have no family, friends, careers, ambitions or goals.  More seriously, they have no money -- there's no way Ingrid's job at a VR-suit store can pay for the Lakeview lifestyle. 
Nora and flesh-Nathan have a similar problem:  now that the upload scandal has been exposed, they don't have much going on except romantic misunderstanding shenanigans. 

The trial was like whiplash -- it came out of nowhere and was resolved in about ten minutes. It looked as if Nora was on her way to a career as a lawyer, but that also turned on a dime and now she is back to ... what, exactly? 

It seemed strange that David Choak's character was MIA during the trial. 

I don't know if I can handle another season of Ingrid's unhinged obsession to have total control of Nathan's life/death/afterlife/love/existence. 
It's not even funny anymore. 
And if the sexes were reversed, I think there would be online petitions and riots in the streets... 

Edited November 11, 2023 by shrewd.buddha
Grammar

[Affogato]

3 hours ago, Paloma said:

 

I also liked Ingrid better this season, but I don't understand what Nora said to her to make her willing to testify. And I'm still unclear on why her testimony was so crucial. Actually, I'm unclear on what the overall trial was intended to accomplish. I know that the lawyer (Nathan's ex) said they won because they got a lot of money for the families, but was the main issue in question at the trial?

The commercial was great--cleverly written and slickly produced, just like what a real mega-company would produce to salvage a PR disaster. 

It's annoying that this season was only 8 episodes and ends on a cliffhanger, especially since it will probably be more than a year until the next season (assuming it is renewed). Overall I did not enjoy this season as much as the first two, though the last 2 episodes of this season seemed better than the rest of of this season. 

I'm not a lawyer, but I've tried to figure out what was happening, after I read your message and realized I wasn't completely sure what was going on. So, here goes:

Horizon wanted to win the election to allow digital people to work, but the digital people would still not actually be legally human. Horizon was enslaving them.  I'm sure that they would work in the digital afterlife and barely make survival rations, so there might theoretically be a way to get out from under the company, but it would be impossible. Meanwhile in the real world jobs are scarce and a lot of people are living on the razor edge of survival. I think the trial was a suit against the company for tricking people into uploading/suicide under false pretenses (no server big enough for them to digitally live.) It wasn't clear to me at the time, but this must have been what Nora and Nathan were doing touring the rural areas with a bag of discs, talking families into participating in the lawsuit. Which would be why they played nice and did work on the farm. The restitution was to their families, since the uploaded aren't people, and frankly I didn't think it was a lot of restitution. 

Our lot, Nora/Nathan, hoped to expose the companies practices and intent, but the material (Choak's testimony, for example) was inadmissable because it was stolen intellectual property.

Going forward, with the new name and corporate entity, if anyone tries another lawsuit it will be directed against Horizon, not 'Betta', and have limited scope.

Nathan has Choak, he hasn't been uploaded or downloaded. He is in the harddrive. I suppose he could have been called for testemony, but it would have been in one of the bell jar things.

Anyway, that is my guess.

I'm guessing the downloading scam is another issue and the next trial is whether the downloaded have rights, which is a trickier issue, but the world seems poor and desperate, so it will be hard to hang on to the concepts of freedom and rights.

[Affogato]

54 minutes ago, shrewd.buddha said:

I feels, to me, that the premise of the show has been played out and now we are stuck in some sort of rom-com loop.
Ingrid and Nathan#2 have absolutely nothing in their "lives" to do except hang out with one another. They have no family, friends, careers, ambitions or goals.  More seriously, they have no money -- there's no way Ingrid's job at a VR-suit store can pay for the Lakeview lifestyle. 
Nora and flesh-Nathan have a similar problem:  now that the upload scandal has been exposed, they don't have much going on except romantic misunderstanding shenanigans. 

The trial was like whiplash -- it came out of nowhere and was resolved in about ten minutes. It looked as if Nora was on her way to a career as a lawyer, but that also turned on a dime and now she is back to ... what, exactly? 

It seemed strange that David Choak's character was MIA during the trial. 

I don't know if I can handle another season of Ingrid's unhinged obsession to have total control of Nathan's life/death/afterlife/love/existence. 
It's not even funny anymore. 
And if the sexes were reversed, I think there were be online petitions and riots in the streets... 

Earlier in the show, didn't people at Lakeview who ran out of money slow down and end up in the basement, living on crumbs of electricity? That puzzled me. Unless Ingrid had paid in advance for Nathan's room, so there is no money for 'food' but there is still the bedroom? The money thing would seem to be a problem for most people, since who has the money to keep the lifestyle going? Very very few rich people, and it goes down the toilet if your family  suffers a revesal of fortune. Why would your great great great grandaughter care if you are eating sushi off a fat man's feet? Also, ew.

Nathan apparently was a programmer and is now unable to legally work. Norah, I think also has education and access to computer/coding type work and has some savings (if Nathan had money he lost it when he died). I think they are living off Nora's money right now. She may still become a lawyer, but she has a lot on her plate currently.

Ingrid apparently never had a job and her main profession was trying to overcome her insecurities?

[iMonrey]

So that's it huh? Only eight episodes when the previous two were ten each? Ripoff. 

I still enjoyed the season but yeah, it's got some problems. I don't know how Ingrid can afford Nathan's upkeep at Lakeview on what is probably a minimum wage job. Nora and Nathan think Nathan will be OK because the scientist  deliberately sabotaged the first download, but more recently we've been told they've been experimenting on pigeons and about 40% of them ended up exploding. One right on Aleesha, and we saw it. So why are they so confident Nathan is OK?

What happened to Luke? At the end of the previous episode it was like his room was shut down, or he was downgraded or something. Not sure what Karina did to him, and there was no follow-up.

There are a lot of things that don't make a lot of sense, I just try not to think about them too much.

[PurpleTentacle]

So upload testimonies are not admissable, because they are property of this corporation, but stolen e-mails, that are also property of this corporation, are totally admissable?

Also lawyer ex-girlfriend saying that there is nothing they can do for Nathan until they get the law changed is bullshit. You can fight this in the courts, ultimately going to the surpreme court. It's one thing upholding laws saying some 1s and 0s on a computer screen aren't humans, it's another when you have a pretty, white (I wish those weren't factors, but they are) guy standing right in front of your bench.

I think the writers should have gotten a law-consult.

And to Nora and Nathan: I mean guys, if you have the documents, you can just leak them to the press. The lawyers might not be able to, but nothing is stopping you. These documents show homicides in hundreds of cases (since Freeon never intended to follow through on their part of the contract, the contract is void, which means lasering somebodies head off is murder) and attempted homicide in thousands of cases.

Edited November 13, 2023 by PurpleTentacle

[EyewatchTV211]

On 11/13/2023 at 3:38 PM, PurpleTentacle said:

So upload testimonies are not admissable, because they are property of this corporation, but stolen e-mails, that are also property of this corporation, are totally admissable?

Lawyer ex-girlfriend said the e-mails were provided by a current company whistleblower. So she didn't know they were stolen, and I guess as of now, Karina doesn't know her e-mails were stolen and hasn't come out to make that complaint. As far as everyone at the trial knows, they were provided legally.

[blackwing]

Ugh, I didn't realise that this episode was the season finale.  Annoying that it ended on a cliffhanger and that there are so many unresolved/open issues.  Now we have to wait for over a year to determine which Nathan survived.

On 11/11/2023 at 11:17 AM, Affogato said:

Earlier in the show, didn't people at Lakeview who ran out of money slow down and end up in the basement, living on crumbs of electricity? That puzzled me. Unless Ingrid had paid in advance for Nathan's room, so there is no money for 'food' but there is still the bedroom? The money thing would seem to be a problem for most people, since who has the money to keep the lifestyle going? Very very few rich people, and it goes down the toilet if your family  suffers a revesal of fortune. Why would your great great great grandaughter care if you are eating sushi off a fat man's feet? Also, ew.

Yes, Season 1 ended on a cliffhanger with Nathan running out of money or data, and then he was frozen in black and white.

Wasn't there an Asian woman who was living in the basement on the slow data plan?  I thought we saw her in some kind of window/hatch on this episode or one of the recent ones.  Luke was talking with her?  I can't remember what the storyline with her was.

[DrSpaceman73]

I can't take another season of cutesy Nora Nathan banter. It's beyond nauseating. 

The show can't figure out what it is bit seems to favor rom com this season. Which is disappointing. 

This whole season felt Like time wasting lost potential. 

Edited November 17, 2023 by DrSpaceman73

[iMonrey]

On 11/16/2023 at 3:01 PM, blackwing said:

Wasn't there an Asian woman who was living in the basement on the slow data plan?  I thought we saw her in some kind of window/hatch on this episode or one of the recent ones.  Luke was talking with her?  I can't remember what the storyline with her was.

Those are the 2 gigs. It's an interesting idea the show never really fleshed out or explained very well. 

Initially I got the impression there were different upload communities, and Lakeview was just the fanciest, most expensive one the rich people got into. But eventually with the introduction of Freeyond (or whatever it was called) it seemed more like Lakeview was the only upload facility. 

So it doesn't really make a lot of sense, from a business standpoint, that you could be rich enough to get into Lakeview but then run out of money and be downgraded to a 2 gig. Seems more likely they would just pull the plug on you, or that the upload fee is paid up front without ongoing charges.

[Affogato]

2 hours ago, iMonrey said:

Those are the 2 gigs. It's an interesting idea the show never really fleshed out or explained very well. 

Initially I got the impression there were different upload communities, and Lakeview was just the fanciest, most expensive one the rich people got into. But eventually with the introduction of Freeyond (or whatever it was called) it seemed more like Lakeview was the only upload facility. 

So it doesn't really make a lot of sense, from a business standpoint, that you could be rich enough to get into Lakeview but then run out of money and be downgraded to a 2 gig. Seems more likely they would just pull the plug on you, or that the upload fee is paid up front without ongoing charges.

Everything costs, though. Nickels and dimes. 95 cents for minty fresh breath. The 2 gigs are likely just a low level source of income. So someone starts living the luxury life and on a few years they blow it all on massages and scented food. 2 gigs lets them beg relatives for more. Meanwhile always new rich folk upstairs. 

[Dobian]

This whole season was very uneven for me.  The pacing felt off.  They would surge forward with the main plot, then meander around.  With Nathan and Norma in the real world, they were spending more time there than in Lakeview.  It gave me Westworld flashbacks.  The whole theme of a corporation having ownership of a human being like they were a piece of intellectual property is Orwellian and a great topic that has been explored in different ways with the advent of AI.  But it's a topic that might be a little too heavy for this show, and better served in a serious science fiction drama.  This season had its moments, and some very funny ones, but wasn't quite up to the first two for me.  I hope they get picked up again, though, as this would be a terrible cliffhanger for the show to end on.

[Chicago Redshirt]

On 11/11/2023 at 7:06 AM, Paloma said:

 

I also liked Ingrid better this season, but I don't understand what Nora said to her to make her willing to testify. And I'm still unclear on why her testimony was so crucial. Actually, I'm unclear on what the overall trial was intended to accomplish. I know that the lawyer (Nathan's ex) said they won because they got a lot of money for the families, but was the main issue in question at the trial?

So here's my attempt to explain what was at stake in the trial. Apologies if I get anything wrong:

Holden and her firm filed a class-action suit against Horizen for the disaster in which people coming for free uploads at Freeyond were lost in a supposed Luddite attack. Freeyond was set up as a more democratic and economically affordable alternative to Big Upload, and was setting up stores in major cities across the country. In reality, Big Upload (Horizen and a couple other competing yet collaborating firms in the same space) organized Freeyond, and deliberately sabotaged the uploads of people to shift voting patterns in the hopes that a bill allowing Uploads to work would pass, which would make them all mega-super-rich instead of just merely rich, because when you have basically an army of VR slaves who owe their continued existence to you, what can't you get them to do? And how much could you sell their labor for?

So Holden was attempting to show that Horizen/Big Upload was truly behind the disastrous Freeyond that led to what were presumably hundreds if not thousands of deaths.

Anyway, though our heroes know this conspiracy to be true, they can't use any of the direct proof they have toward it. Both Nathan 1.0  and Backup Nathan are the intellectual property of Horizen and apparently can't be used against it. (Which is some hand-wavy BS IMO because the discovery process would allow to seek records from the company, even those that are covered by intellectual property protection. They could just ask for access to Nathan 1.0's file and get him to testify that way.). But the same thing goes for David Choak, 

I can't think of a very good reason why a competent investigative team knowing what Our Heroes know and with access to scan the entirety of David Choak's memory could not determine many, many legit ways to show the conspiracy that existed. Yes, the one doctor that they found as a witness got blown up real good, for instance. But there is presumably a whole chain of evidence that having talked to him would have opened up. 

But for show purposes, the only connection that they can make is having Ingrid testify that she knows that her father was in cahoots with Smoak, thus linking the software that Nathan developed to Big Upload.

Ingrid is of course a very shaky foundation on which to build a case. As much as we have seen the show humanize her, she is a) not the smartest person in the room b) a chronic liar, including having been pretending she was dead for a substantial period of time to fool her boyfriend c) at odds with her family after having been cut off financially, giving her a potential motive to strike back at them by lying d) a VR addict.

What Nora tells Ingrid is basically: this case could lead to the Uploads getting recognized as having rights. Right now your boyfriend is a bunch of code that Horizen can do what it wants with, and he won't be free, and you won't really be free to be with him until we stick it to Horizen.

Instead of cross-examining Ingrid on any of the above weaknesses, the Big Upload lawyer seizes on Ingrid inadvertently letting it slip that there are two Nathans. I'm not really sure why this would be an effective trial technique but whatever.

So it comes down to Al, who hacks her girlfriend Katrina and is able to come up with a terabyte of sketchiness that they are able to send to the plaintiffs' lawyers under the theory that Karina sent it as a whistleblower. Obviously she did not, and presumably if this were a real trial, Holden would have to explain where she got these records from, Karina would be able to say that these records were stolen, fake or whatever. But the Horizen decides to settle for what, it seems to me, is pretty much chump change. A class action lawsuit in which (I think) 140ish families clear $1 million each is pretty small ball. 

The thing I don't like in addition to Holden acting like this is a great settlement for her clients when (presumably) they have some level of evidence of Horizen deliberately killing people to sway the results of an election is that Our Heroes are like "Man, sorry this lawsuit didn't expose what corruption there is with Horizen." They still have the terabyte of sketchiness that Horizen was up to. And even if Holden agreed to a confidentiality order, it couldn't possibly stop Al or others from not shipping that terrabyte of information to journalists, the Internet, government regulators, etc. 

Edited November 24, 2023 by Chicago Redshirt

[Chicago Redshirt]

On 11/19/2023 at 11:46 AM, iMonrey said:

Those are the 2 gigs. It's an interesting idea the show never really fleshed out or explained very well. 

Initially I got the impression there were different upload communities, and Lakeview was just the fanciest, most expensive one the rich people got into. But eventually with the introduction of Freeyond (or whatever it was called) it seemed more like Lakeview was the only upload facility. 

So it doesn't really make a lot of sense, from a business standpoint, that you could be rich enough to get into Lakeview but then run out of money and be downgraded to a 2 gig. Seems more likely they would just pull the plug on you, or that the upload fee is paid up front without ongoing charges.

My understanding:

There are various companies in the business of uploading people, of which Horizen is the biggest. As Verizon is for cell phones, Horizen is for uploading people and creating virtual spaces for people to visit simulations of their loved ones. Freeyond was set up as an alleged rivals to all the fancy and expensive upload companies even though it was in reality a sham that was being used by the expensive upload companies. 

Lakeview has been presented as Horizen's own upload community. By implication, the other upload companies have set up their own servers and their own upload communities. It may be that Horizen has other communities beyond Lakeview, but we haven't been shown any separate ones.

The 2 Gigs are on a plan where you only have limited access to the uploads and the uploads only have limited ability to do things. They are in the virtual basement of Lakeview. Presumably, Horizen sells different parts of Lakeview and different packages based on what they can afford. Got $1000 a month you're willing to pay (say)? You can go for the Horizen 2G platform and visit virtual nana in black and white one time a month, and know that she has the chance to do basic things that don't take up that much bandwidth, like read books or hang out with other 2Gs. Or if you want to pay a million a year, you get the full country club experience where your simulated loved one will have an attentive staff at your beck and participate in all sorts of experiences not allowed in the real world. 

As for going from one plan to the other, it seems likely that for some people, they may start off only able o afford 2G and then get enough money or drive to afford a better package, or vice-versa.

Edited November 24, 2023 by Chicago Redshirt

[Chicago Redshirt]

On 11/12/2023 at 12:04 PM, iMonrey said:

So that's it huh? Only eight episodes when the previous two were ten each? Ripoff. 

I still enjoyed the season but yeah, it's got some problems. I don't know how Ingrid can afford Nathan's upkeep at Lakeview on what is probably a minimum wage job. Nora and Nathan think Nathan will be OK because the scientist  deliberately sabotaged the first download, but more recently we've been told they've been experimenting on pigeons and about 40% of them ended up exploding. One right on Aleesha, and we saw it. So why are they so confident Nathan is OK?

What happened to Luke? At the end of the previous episode it was like his room was shut down, or he was downgraded or something. Not sure what Karina did to him, and there was no follow-up.

There are a lot of things that don't make a lot of sense, I just try not to think about them too much.

Ingrid is presumably able to maintain some level of the upkeep on keeping Nathan going through one of several ways: a) having prepaid for a bunch of it when she had access to family money b) blackmailing the one angel to sneak her stuff and c) her job. I'm willing to consider that being a VR Suit rental clerk pays better than minimum wage, as VR Suits are more of a luxury good. 

Presumably the doctor's admission that he had sabotaged the first  human download means that as a corollary he and others were setting up pigeons to die after being download recipients.

Luke was telling Karina about all the hacks that he was doing to scam Horizen, one of which was accessing a premium version of Lakeview for free. Karina was basically passing along every one of his hacks to the consulting team that Ingrid-as-Nora was on and shutting them down. So that's why the next morning Luke realized his free premium Lakeview had been shut down and came to the conclusion that Karina was truly evil for having closed up the loopholes he told her about.

Edited November 24, 2023 by Chicago Redshirt

[Chicago Redshirt]

On 11/13/2023 at 2:38 PM, PurpleTentacle said:

So upload testimonies are not admissable, because they are property of this corporation, but stolen e-mails, that are also property of this corporation, are totally admissable?

Also lawyer ex-girlfriend saying that there is nothing they can do for Nathan until they get the law changed is bullshit. You can fight this in the courts, ultimately going to the surpreme court. It's one thing upholding laws saying some 1s and 0s on a computer screen aren't humans, it's another when you have a pretty, white (I wish those weren't factors, but they are) guy standing right in front of your bench.

I think the writers should have gotten a law-consult.

And to Nora and Nathan: I mean guys, if you have the documents, you can just leak them to the press. The lawyers might not be able to, but nothing is stopping you. These documents show homicides in hundreds of cases (since Freeon never intended to follow through on their part of the contract, the contract is void, which means lasering somebodies head off is murder) and attempted homicide in thousands of cases.

As with anything having to do with the legal system in a TV show or movie, there has to be a fair amount of handwaving.

But in a normal lawsuit, there is a process called discovery where each side gets to ask questions of witnesses for the other side and to demand that they produce documents, subpoena documents from third parties, etc. Against this background, Holden's firm should have certainly asked for some of the documents that Al managed to steal and obviously did not get them.

Failing to turn over documents can be punished in a lot of ways, and at least hypothetically could lead a judge to allow otherwise admissible documents to be considered. The impropriety of stealing the documents could hypothetically be considered lower than withholding them.

Putting that aside, as others have said, Holden's hands were supposedly clean as to the documents and it was not established in what we saw in court that they were not legitimately obtained from a whistleblower. The show glossed over exactly what the documents were and what they said, just basically that they are a terabyte of sketchiness that purportedly came from Karina. So they may show that Freeyond didn't ever plan on uploading anyone, they may not. (Again, Our Heroes should have been able to point out that Freeyond did not have the infrastructure to do any uploading because they knew that before Al's document dump, and Holden should have been able to follow up on that to make at least some connection as to why Freeyond was operating as such a scam).

We don't get to see Horizen checking with Karina to see if she went whistleblower or if she was the victim of a hack or what. But they presumably could confirm that the documents are genuine. Even if they brought  a motion to suppress the evidence at trial and succeeded, they may have reasoned it was a better bargain to settle with the plaintiffs in the class action and lock them under a confidentiality clause in the settlement.

As you pointed out, this in no way should make the problem of these documents go away. Al and co still have access to the terabyte of sketchiness and can duplicate it as many times as they want and send it to whoever they want. 

Fighting for the rights of uploads in the court would be an attempt to change the law, in addition to having Congress pass new laws. It would seemingly be an uphill one. The uploads and/or their families signed contracts that they were entirely the property of Big Upload. There presumably has been precedent allowing Big Load to operate the way it has for a while. To the extent the Upload universe is basically supposed to be our universe with higher tech in the not-so-distant future, the U.S. Supreme Court is not particularly likely to side against Big Upload, even if the pro-upload rights side march out Nathan as an appealing white male poster child.

But even assuming for argument's sake that there would be a shot to win a such a court victory, it's clear Holden and co. aren't particularly interested in being the ones to do it. They go where the money is. And it would cost a lot of money to fight this hypothetical court challenge, and it would take a long time. Even if you were guaranteed a victory, which you obviously wouldn't be, getting uploads declared as sentient beings doesn't easily translate into money for them or for the firm. Which is why Holden's firm has zero interest in trying to pursue such a route. 

[Paloma]

@Chicago Redshirt Thanks so much for all of your explanatory posts. If there is another season, I will reread them before watching. 

One thing I am still confused about--or maybe just don't remember what we learned in the previous seasons--is how did Freeyond start and what was it supposed to be originally. Wasn't this originally Nathan's software project that he was working on with his partner/friend? I have a vague memory that the partner/friend betrayed Nathan by selling Freeyond to Horizen--is that right? If it was originally Nathan's project, I think he intended it to be used for good--to offer a real alternative to those who couldn't afford a Horizen upload. But I don't remember what that alternative was--obviously it could not be as nice as Lakeview. 

[Affogato]

1 hour ago, Paloma said:

@Chicago Redshirt Thanks so much for all of your explanatory posts. If there is another season, I will reread them before watching. 

One thing I am still confused about--or maybe just don't remember what we learned in the previous seasons--is how did Freeyond start and what was it supposed to be originally. Wasn't this originally Nathan's software project that he was working on with his partner/friend? I have a vague memory that the partner/friend betrayed Nathan by selling Freeyond to Horizen--is that right? If it was originally Nathan's project, I think he intended it to be used for good--to offer a real alternative to those who couldn't afford a Horizen upload. But I don't remember what that alternative was--obviously it could not be as nice as Lakeview. 

I think at the end of season one Nathan and his partner are arguing. Nathan's partner wants to partner with another company. Nathan wants to sell to Horizon. When his partner categorically refuses to sell to Horizon, Nathan goes behind his partner's back and sells a copy of the code they have written to, I believe, Ingrid's Dad/Horizon, because Nathan's family needs money. Nathan is killed to cover it up. Those are the memories that they are worried about Nathan recovering. Nora helps him recover them. 

I think they originally meant it to be used for good. Whether it is as nice as Lakeview is probably a matter of opinion, Lakeview is (as recently pointed out) somewhat stodgy and one note.  Also, there aren't any opportunities for work or study or real advancement, it is like having a vacation in your Grandpa's country club.

Edited November 24, 2023 by Affogato

[Paloma]

2 hours ago, Affogato said:

I think at the end of season one Nathan and his partner are arguing. Nathan's partner wants to partner with another company. Nathan wants to sell to Horizon. When his partner categorically refuses to sell to Horizon, Nathan goes behind his partner's back and sells a copy of the code they have written to, I believe, Ingrid's Dad/Horizon, because Nathan's family needs money. Nathan is killed to cover it up. Those are the memories that they are worried about Nathan recovering. Nora helps him recover them. 

I think they originally meant it to be used for good.

Thank you! Part of why I was confused about this is that when Nathan's memories were incomplete and/or confused, we (along with Nathan) were getting different interpretations of what really happened.

 

[redpencil]

On 11/12/2023 at 11:04 AM, iMonrey said:

So that's it huh? Only eight episodes when the previous two were ten each? Ripoff. 

Season 2 was actually only 7 episodes, and definitely felt cut short to me.

[Affogato]

1 hour ago, redpencil said:

Season 2 was actually only 7 episodes, and definitely felt cut short to me.

Yeah I'm tired of this arrangement. I want more. 

[Affogato]

On 11/24/2023 at 3:55 PM, Paloma said:

Thank you! Part of why I was confused about this is that when Nathan's memories were incomplete and/or confused, we (along with Nathan) were getting different interpretations of what really happened.

 

Yes, I really have had to go back and try to figure out what happened in order to watch this current season. I think, if we get a fourth season, the same thing will happen.

[Quark]

I thought this season was a hoot and a half.

Ingrid was hysterical.

Robbie Amell is adorable.