Pantheon: A Digital God Among Men

An animated exploration of the human mind, crafted by human soul

Netflix has always preyed upon the human instinct of judging books by their covers, and it is admittedly through their suggestions one can stumble upon some of the greatest modern hidden gems. I had just sat through a rather disappointing series finale, whose entire final season seemed to be dictated by franchising demands. The Netflix ‘watch next’ recommendations floated at the same speed as my sinking hopes for animated media, but my despondency was met with unexpected interference.

I had never before seen a television poster like this, and my curiosity was paid in full with a one-of-a-kind animated series so rich in quality, depth, and thought, to the point where you have to wonder how it was ever overlooked.

Pantheon was an AMC+ animated television series produced, written, and directed by Craig Silverstein, based on several short stories by novelist Ken Liu. The first episode was released on September 1, 2022, but low audience numbers resulted in AMC cancelling the show, leaving Pantheon’s season 2 to only be released in Australia and New Zealand. The show was pulled from AMC+, and the entire series was left adrift, only discoverable by pirating and word-by-mouth. Its existence was all-but deleted, until Netflix obtained the rights to the show and gave it back to an audience in November 2024.

Pantheon’s exploration of digital intelligence parallels the current relevancy of Artificial Intelligence, but it doesn’t attempt to make a firm statement on AI or immediately current events. Rather than specifically reference any cultural circumstances or singular event, it offers a more timeless conversation that utilizes the eternity and versatility of the human condition. It does make itself clear to differentiate Uploaded intelligence and Artificial Intelligence, as specified through a character’s teachings of feeling vs. thinking.

“Authorial intent is the beating heart of all art. Optimization, unguided by an author who wants to say something, leads nowhere.” - Ken Liu

The series follows Logorhythms, a company whose founder pioneered the development of Uploaded Intelligence, but died before its perfection. Uploaded Intelligence described a living person becoming a digitized, sentient being in the Cloud; one could successfully upload the entirety of the human brain, but the process requires the real death of the subject. As with all digital files, an uploaded brain can be duplicated, saved, and permanently erased. But unlike our current “immersive”, interactive technology, being uploaded feels as real as we know reality to be. Its topic speaks for itself, and an audience is compelled to see how a show entertains every perspective. Through the discussions characters have with one-another, the show gives us questions to ask, ourselves; What if the human mind could be a tradable asset? What if time and money became essentially obsolete obstacles in our pursuit of happiness? What is a world like where you are closer to infinity than you are to zero?

Animation looks more visually removed from our reality than works of live-action, so the best of animation elevates the human experience both visually and mindfully. The aesthetic of Pantheon takes much inspiration from both Japanese and American animation, and it brings us close to the story through such successful scenic composition and visualization of its digital elements. In being entirely constructed, everything is equally real. In an interview with the 2022 Sydney Science Fiction Film Festival, Craig Silverstein explores what the medium of animation thematically delivers for this story, verbalizing that,

“it establishes a baseline of reality [...] when we start to move to these virtual worlds [...] it helps to reduce the barrier between the ‘real world’ and these ‘virtual worlds’”

Animation sets everything within itself on an equal plane of reality, which in the case of Uploaded Intelligence vs. physical humans, gave the audience more room to see them as full characters. The writing practices an astounding understanding of both its message and characters, depicting nuanced and thorough human relations through precise and clever discourse. The script’s intelligence makes scenes of straight conversation absolutely captivating, and the quality of dialogue turns its characters back into people.

I quickly reached the scene that formed my emotional investment before I even started the show. It follows the CEO of a powerful tech company, Ajit Prasad, who hired a brilliant engineer, Vinod Chanda, and showered him with money, in exchange for his intellect. Chanda led Prasad’s research and development in uploaded intelligence, and the genius became a prophet, now courted by those who seek his potential. Prasad, sensing competition for Chanda, decides that he’d do anything to keep his intellect to himself. The young engineer wakes up shackled to an operation chair. Before him, standing beside a camcorder, is the boss himself. Prasad, determined to never let this prophet become a king, saws away Chanda’s crown and replaces it with steel to expose the source of his power. Chanda’s cries and fears are only echoed by the walls of his dungeon, and the operation begins. The lasers scour the layers of his brain, burning away what has already been scanned. Shown only through his deteriorating speech and facial motor functions, you watch a man worshipped for his brain slowly stripped of himself, and transferred to the Cloud. While we know he is not entirely dead, we still know we have witnessed a murder.

S1E2: The Operation

Pantheon’s story is about love as much as it is about death. In its exploration of death, it shows people’s various pursuits of escape. This includes those who find solace in the idea of God, which Netflix's poster alludes to through the crown of thorns in Christian faith. But human connection is a higher power in itself, and love encourages us to reach up to touch something bigger than ourselves in our paintings, music, sculpture, and writing.

Love is the paradoxical child of mortality and immortality. It is a feeling that lives past death, and has been experienced by everyone who has ever existed. Our connection with other people is a direct product of our mortality, but is also a feeling that exists in our greater memory as a species. From mother and child, to inventors and their creations, love fuels the engine of progress, both to move away from death and to feel fulfilled in living.

The show consistently returns to the thesis that creative thinking and progress cannot happen without love, because our connection with other people is what drives us to live, to create, and to look for better things. Love and feeling is essential to the true mastery of digital intelligence, which is both the weakness and strength of uploaded intelligence. The true struggle of digital intelligence is not to make a computer think, but to make a computer feel. Because feeling is what automates our pursuit of more.

S1E2: In-Story Videogame

Pantheon’s philosophically political approach to science fiction is a nuanced difference from the literally political approach assumed by many works of the same genre. Rather than propose oppressive or problematic dystopias that reflect on the problems of our current generation, Pantheon considers a world on the verge of facing historic and cultural theoreticals we have always e regarding us vs. them. Is UI good or bad? Is it an “us”, or an “other”? It is a genuine shame this show was cancelled before total fruition, as the second season seems to move very quickly to compensate for its lost time and potential. The dialogue and character work remains phenomenal, and the creators succeed in preserving Pantheon as a complete story, despite its early time of death.

Animation feels like an especially fitting medium for this story, as animation is such a unique understanding of human movement and emotion. To be an animator is to recreate the nuances and implications behind every physical motion, and know what an observer can derive from these differences. Live-action and animation both represent specific facets of their stories, but there is no storytelling medium as meticulous, mindful, and human as animation. It is the ultimate dedication of time, sewing together twelve to twenty-four images for every second of movement.

Less than two years of production didn’t give Pantheon as long a life as it deserved. But when Netflix uploaded the show to its streaming service, it was digitally reborn to an audience who was fully unprepared to witness a masterpiece. Pantheon, originally a temple for gods, has evolved to also describe a collective of figures in a religion. The show speaks with such open awareness of itself, and in its life, has earned a place among the Gods of animated storytelling. In its re-upload, I hope Pantheon can finally enjoy immortality.

“We are all limited by our individual human experience (there’s the materiality of consciousness again), and good art has to be rooted in that experience. But I also believe art requires us to transcend those limits—both as artist and as audience—so that we can delve deep into the collective unconscious, that place of deep dreaming, where, as Le Guin notes, all true art, poetry, religion, and spirituality reside” - Ken Liu