Pantheon

Our Review

The most ambitious animated sci-fi of the decade, and almost nobody saw it. Based on Ken Liu’s short stories: Maddie, a bullied teen, is contacted by her dead father — a tech-company engineer uploaded before his death — and the show expands into a full singularity epic: uploaded intelligences (UIs) as refugees, weapons, gods; a geopolitical AI race; and a generational story about what consciousness becomes when it’s not bound to meat.

Season 1 is a perfect thriller (the escape, the corporate conspiracy); season 2 goes centuries forward — the post-human future — and delivers a finale of genuinely cosmic scope: the show’s answer to “what do people become?” is staged with more imagination than live-action could afford in ten movies. The ideas — grief uploaded, love persisting past bodies, the ethics of digital immortality — are handled with adult seriousness. Scavengers Reign and this are the twin peaks of modern adult animation.

Verdict: Watch it. Humanity’s next chapter, animated with total conviction.