The tragic and transcendent possibilities afforded by technology are the province of Pantheon, which intriguingly suggests—as did Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 animé classic Ghost in the Shell—that there are both benefits and dangers to having specters in the machine.
AMC Networks’ first traditionally animated TV series (debuting on AMC+), showrunner Craig Silverstein’s eight-episode tale is science-fiction drama on an intimate scale, plumbing big questions about the nature of reality and humanity through a narrative of familial turmoil, shadowy machinations, and paradigm-altering innovation. Buoyed by an excellent voice cast as well as Titmouse Animation visuals that are sharp, emotive, and imaginative, it’s a bold attempt at creating a unique streaming sensation, all of it revolving around a captivating conceit: uploaded intelligence.
Based on the short stories of celebrated author Ken Liu, Pantheon’s first season, which premieres Sept. 1, opens on three characters whose lives—and experiences—will soon crazily intertwine.
Maddie Kim (Katie Chang) is a high-school freshman who’s just relocated to a new town, and both she and her mom Ellen (Rosemarie DeWitt) are mourning the death of their genius dad/husband David (Daniel Dae Kim). Maddie doesn’t fit in at school, and is bullied by a clique of popular girls.
Although she doesn’t know it, this makes her a kindred spirit to Caspian (Paul Dano), a teen in a different state who’s considerably smarter than his peers but detached from everyone around him, including his constantly combative parents Cary (Aaron Eckhart) and Renee (Taylor Schilling). When not showing off his intellect to his jerky dad at the dinner table, Caspian spends most of his time in his room in front of a computer screen, where he trolls the dark web and researches conspiracy theories like a loner in search of answers to life’s big mysteries.
It's not long before Pantheon reveals that Caspian is onto something; rather than a dysfunctional couple, Cary and Renee are in fact agents working for Julius Pope (Chris Diamantopoulos), the current CEO of Logorhythms, an Apple-style conglomerate that was founded by deceased Jobsian visionary Stephen Holstrom (the late William Hurt). Apparently, Caspian’s entire life has been a The Truman Show-by-way-of-The Matrix simulation overseen by Pope and his minions.
The purpose of this elaborate scheme appears to have something to do with controlling the super-smart Caspian, yet in the four preview episodes provided to press, Logorhythms’ operation remains shrouded in secrecy. That, in turn, makes it the most enticing thread in this intricate tale, which also concerns Chanda (Raza Jaffrey), an engineer who, behind the back of his mogul boss Prasad (Ajay Mehta), tries to sell his firm’s breakthrough development to rivals, and for this transgression winds up the latest Guinea pig in Prasad’s covert—and highly illegal—experiments.
The biggest hook of Pantheon, however, has to do with Maddie, who one afternoon begins receiving messages from an unknown individual who communicates only by emoji. When her mom, Ellen, sees this conversation—and in particular a line of poetry written out in graphic faces and punctuation marks—her heart stops because she immediately recognizes it and, thus, the identity of the sender: David.
While this seems impossible to Maddie, it’s less earth-shattering for Ellen, who divulges to her daughter the fate of her father: In order to cheat death, David’s entire mind was digitally mapped and uploaded to a Logorhythms server. Ellen was informed by close friend Peter Waxman (Ron Livingston) that the process was a failure, but Maddie’s father-daughter chat proves otherwise, as do the later missives David relays to his wife and kid.
How David survived this operation is as convoluted as much of the technobabble strewn throughout Pantheon. What’s in less doubt is the core question—what makes us human?—that this conceit raises for David, Maddie, Ellen and also Cody (Scoot McNairy) and his wife Laurie (Heather Lind), the latter of whom is a Wall Street systems genius who suffered a similar uploaded-intelligence fate following a car crash that left her in a coma.
Silverstein’s series hinges on the idea that uploaded intelligence is superior to artificial intelligence, since it boasts the unparalleled processing power of an actual, fully reproduced human brain. And it concentrates as much on the emotional fallout of David’s predicament—with regards to his sense of self and his loving bonds with Maddie and Ellen—as it does on his efforts to free himself from Logorhythms’ grasp so he might once again live, not to mention fight back against the nefarious forces who sought to imprison him in a digital prison for their own ends.
Maddie’s decision to seek online help for her situation eventually puts her in touch with Caspian, whose day-to-day becomes more complicated courtesy of a budding romance with new girl Hannah (Krystina Alabado). Between their ordeals and the far more monstrous one endured by Chanda, Pantheon weaves a tangled electronic web of deception, exploitation, and existential terror—all of it conceived with an aesthetic flair that brings its conceptual notions about cyber spaces and consciousnesses to trippy life.
Titmouse’s animation is polished, angular, and marked by occasional nightmarish visions (such as the haunted ghouls who plague Chandra), contributing to the proceedings' portentous atmosphere. Silverstein’s series is an engrossing saga about intertwined worlds and shifting identities, and its resourceful animation is in tune with the material’s fixation on the malleability of reality.
With its second season already greenlit, Pantheon apparently has a long-term plan for its narrative, which, in its early stages, establishes a variety of promising threads about our VR-enhanced future and the practical and ethical dilemmas it will inevitably beget. Moreover, it does so with a measure of heart and humor, which often arises when David and his uploaded-intelligence brethren make their presences known by hacking every device in a person’s vicinity. A thriller that doubles as an inquiry into the fundamental (and perhaps evolving) relationship between body and soul, it’s a sci-fi story whose fantasy is at once rivetingly out-there and hooked into our present efforts to navigate an ever-changing techno-landscape.
