Pantheon, Season 1 Review and 5 things I liked and disliked about it

Prologue:

A young woman begins receiving messages from an unknown number that claims to be her deceased father. Trying to uncover the truth, she stumbles upon a larger conspiracy involving the singularity.

IMDB: 8.1
Rotten Tomatoes: 100%

Review:

It is undoubtedly one of the best-animated shows I have ever watched. I would love to see a live-action adaptation of this show, but a few scenes would take a heavy toll on the budget for the VFX scenes.
There was a show on Amazon, “Upload” which had a concept of having loved ones of a person uploaded to a server so that their consciousness can always stay connected with them. Pantheon takes that concept up a notch, it discovers what could be the downsides of such a technology if it got into the hands of people for whom lives do not matter but their technological advancement and the company’s welfare are their first priority.
Pantheon starts off with a girl Maddison Kim (Katie Chang), who seems introverted and mostly keeps it to herself, starts getting emoji texts from someone, who later turns out to be her deceased father who was uploaded. The process of uploading her father, David Kim (David Dae Kim) is completed by a company named Logarthythms. Logarhytm’s founder was Stephen Holstrom (William Hurt) who is a lookalike of ‘Steve Jobs‘ and his company is a replica of ‘Apple‘. Ajit Prasad (Ajay Mehta) is a lookalike of ‘Mukesh Ambani‘ with his company Alliance similar to ‘Reliance‘.
Laurie Lowell, another uploaded person who broke out of the servers of Logarthythms and connected with her husband, Cody (Scoot McNairy) connects with her and they both build a fortune by investing in the stock market. Later we see Cody buy servers for her uploaded wife, where she could stay. Laurie later finds that there is David as well, another uploaded person who is trying to get out of Logarhythms server. Laurie helps Maddie to get her father out of Logarhythms control and servers. After Maddie gets her father on his laptop and independent servers, gradually David starts developing himself as he is a UI (Uploaded Intelligence) and as he starts learning about his capabilities and how much power he has to access the entire world’s data. Later David and Laurie find out that Chanda, who used to work for Alliance, another uploaded intelligence who worked for Alliance and kidnapped and uploaded by Ajit Prasad and trapped him in a loop to work for him and write codes and improve his uploaded intelligence.
The show is one of a kind. I never expected an animated show to explore such possibilities and get the viewers thinking about their distinct future with technology. Yes, technology eases our workload but what if companies offer us something like this for our dying loved ones and they start suffering from problems that David and Laurie suffer where the code malware leads up to them getting erased and malfunctioning.

5 things I liked about Pantheon:

Pantheon is certainly one of the best-animated shows I have watched till now. Yes, there was ‘Invincible’ by ‘Amazon Prime Videos’ which discovered and showed us the possibilities of superhumans among us but Pantheon took the real-life aspects, modified and realigned it for their stories, and presented us one of the dark realities that might be possible in our upcoming future.

1. Pantheon has one of the best stories in the animated TV series I have watched till now and it could even beat a few live-action series I have watched till now. They bravely picked up personalities like Steve Jobs, Anil Ambani, the Prime Minister of India, the President of Russia, and the Saudi Arab Defense Minister. They covered the aspects of geopolitics including global powers like United States of America and China, and a few rising global powers like India, Japan, and Saudi Arabia. They went to a great extent where we saw the possibilities of countries using Nuclear Power for their global dominance.
2. The show also covers the concept of digital privacy and how it is almost impossible for someone to erase a digital footprint once it is created. We see David Kim dying as an uploaded intelligence in the last episode but back at the server station of Logarthythms we see Mr. Waxman tell Caspian that they have another copy of David Kim and he just needs to be coded again to make him the saviour of the uploaded intelligence.
3. The story of Pantheon is really gripping as a viewer. It is a technological drama that does not hinder far away from reality and it has an emotional storyline as well. Though there are some aspects that might seem far-fetched like uploading human consciousness on a server, manipulating the stock market, buying servers and having them on ships and a few more like these.
4. The images and animation Pantheon brings to you are good enough even if the show is not from big production companies. The fight scenes and some landscape scenes look visually pleasing and matches the tone and intensity of the show.
5. The series have many characters and concepts to show their viewers. Except a few characters I hardly remember the names and roles of many other characters that are there in the show. But interestingly, each character that is presented to us having a good enough screen time leave a high impact on the viewer and tends to drive and manipulate plot of the story for their own benefit.

5 things I disliked about Pantheon:

Although it is one of the best animated shows I have watched, there are still a few things I did not like about the show.

1. It is one of the best shows and yet again a top-notch one from AMC yet the marketing of the show has been done well enough. Not many people know about Pantheon and yet whoever has watched the show has been absolutely stunned by such a storyline.
2. Although the storyline is really interesting, but the story of Maddison in high seems like what we have watched before in stories where the protagonist is being sided by the entire school, or the protagonist faces problems mixing up with the other classmates.
3. The topics and storyline is can be a bit challenging for people who prefer to watch shows and movies laying back and doing other things simultaneously as the story and plot of the show might change rapidly with introduction of a some major plot points every now and then.
4. AMC should have hired some well-known actors for voicing their characters. Yes there are some like Paul Dano, William Hurt, Scott McNairy, Aaron Ekchart, and Maude Apatow but currently, none of them are crowd puller. I hope in the next season AMC does cast one of such crowd-puller actors so more people get interested to see what this show is really about and what goes on in it.
5. Storytelling needs to be more chronological as AMC has had a habit with their every show to hide some stories from the viewers and present that stories later just before that lack of plot starts mattering the most.
   
   Also, AMC messed up with the release of episode 6 and episode 7 as episode 7 was released before 6 that got viewers wondering what was going on in the show.

Future for Pantheon:

Although there has not been any confirmation yet by AMC to renew the series and bring Season 2 for the viewers, yet we believe that with the limited success the show has had, there will be another season for Pantheon.