minor spoilers

The UIs have a problem. They think it was put there by their creators but no one knows for sure. Whatever the origin, they have to fix it or they’ll die.

This episode follows our UI and their physical friends as they engage in a hack of Logarythms, the big Apple-inspired tech company whose nefarious dealings have harmed so many.

This set up drives a thrillingly executed hack and heist adventure which sees both sides playing the other in a way that I could both marvel at and cross examine without coming away feeling like someone somewhere had given the characters plot armour or allowed bad choices to come good.

Having just read a series of books on infosec for a project I’m working on elsewhere, the writing here feels authentic as well as exciting. Basically, there wasn’t a part of it where I was shifting in my seat and pointing at the screen shouting that no one would make that mistake.

Caspian’s story also comes full circle in that we finally discover everything that’s been going on for him, almost around the same time he does. It’s a doozy.

I won’t spoil it here but the arc for Caspian is the sharpest satire about the arrogance of techbros (and titans of industry everywhere). It skewers the arrogance of thinking the world can be controlled not by showing it go awry but by baking into the story the fact that no matter how tightly someone tries to control the world it is, in its very nature, beyond grasping. It also spends time reminding us that people exist who actually believe they have the money and the brains to accomplish the impossible while the impossible slips around them to deliver a solid kick up the backside.

What I particularly like is how the story seamlessly shows us how success in what can be done, in achieving the difficult, quickly deludes those who accomplished something hard into believing nothing is beyond them.

It’s a lovely study in how people come to believe their own hype and the damage they cause when they succumb to such delusions.

A couple of episodes ago I talked about how being a person on a computer would take a lot of processing power – that comes to the fore this week in a couple of ways and it’s dealt with both as plot but as a quite sensible reflection upon how difficult it is to be a person, about how complex we are and how fragile consciousness is.

We get to explore how consciousness could be seen as a collection of strange systems interacting to create something emergent and unexpected – intelligence. We also get to see how, if you remove just one of those planks, it can all come tumbling down.

Pantheon is solidly into its second act – we have our players. We have them exercising their freedom and shucking off their old assumptions and, in the shadows, we can see the bigger conflict to come. When these UIs finally find a way to overcome their legacy creators they’re going to have just one set of opposition to doing whatever they want – each other.

If the execution of the later part of the season matches this first part then I’m looking forward to seeing that conflict play out.

Rating? 9 buzzing motors out of 10.

Stewart Hotston