What is the fate of the world?

Wow.

I finished the last episode in a daze, head reeling and completely satisfied with the ending of this series. It feels complete with a conclusion that sits in your soul demanding to be chewed over.

In this episode we reach the rhyme and reason for the show’s title – not just a meditation on what it means to be human, to embody our hopes and loves and pain, but also what it might mean to be divine.

In this case it’s worth defining what we mean by divine – essentially a case of unlimited agency. That doesn’t translate to infinite power or omniscience (not quite) but it does mean, as Laurie rightly points out, that in a digitally connected world, anything humanity needs, relies on and uses is open to control by the UIs.

It’s not humanity plus – which the series has been so careful to emphasise – the UIs are something different, not by choice but by constitution. It’s the smartest piece of thinking about intelligence to hit mainstream SFF in a while. Why? Because it envisages intelligence as something that is far from universal. By which I mean that many creatures and entities have intelligence but rarely is it similar to what we see when we look in the mirror and imagine what intelligence is supposed to be.

Octopodes, corvids, whales and many other creatures have higher level intelligence but too often we cannot see it because when we look we don’t see it mirroring what we conceive of as smarts. Which is that we don’t see human thinking staring back at us.

Despite all the variation across human cognition we delude ourselves into drawing hard borders around intelligence so that it has to look and feel like us. It is, in part, forgivable – for how do we imagine that of which we cannot conceive?

Consider the slime mould – which clearly exhibits some kind of agency but operates in a way which we cannot begin to truly comprehend, like seeing someone act through a shuttered window; we can tell they’re acting but we cannot say why or what they’re doing.

The writing in Pantheon runs the UI as parallel to humanity but fundamentally inhuman. Chandra is a fascinating example as the prime antagonist. He isn’t evil but his concerns are very much within a remit that doesn’t include humanity, not just in the sense of his emotional detachment from flesh and blood people but in terms of how he is processing the problems with which he’s faced.

Chandra is alienated. All the UI are alienated. Except for David, Maddie’s father. This alienation plays twofold – the inhumanity of the UI but also their inability to regain that from which they’ve been separated; their bodies.

And while the UI fight among themselves for the kind of world they think will serve them best, Caspian is following the arguments through to their end. Another smart decision because the outcome for this change in the world is one which will touch on everything, everywhere all at once. So, we follow Caspian as he tries to wish the genie back into the bottle, tries to turn the clock back. He’s doing so not only to stop the UIs from ending the world but also because he’s not ready to be the person he was literally made to be – a reborn Stephen Halstrom (our Steve Jobs cipher).

Caspian discovers that his progenitor has trod the ground before him, has faced the challenges he’s only now working through and reached the same conclusions years before. In fact that’s why Caspian exists – because someone else did the math and realised he needed to exist.

After the horror of discovering who he was, we get the justification for the things that were done to him. It doesn’t feel like Caspian deserves any of this but at the same time, as he wrestles with who he is and why he is, we get an insight into the feeling that all this was inevitable.

And with Caspian’s realisation that he has to exist because the problem Stephen Halstrom made can only be ameliorated by Caspian the show comes full circle to the divine.

The reason? If you have a world in which UIs are real and in which their powers over humanity are effectively godlike, how do you manage the damage they can do? Should you even attempt to?

The show puts its answer before us and stops there. It doesn’t say it’s the right answer which I really like (not least because the underlying morality is a western one and why should that be privileged?). For the characters in the show it’s the only answer they believe will help but we don’t see it at work because the story does precisely what I was hoping for – it ends with ideas floating on the horizon waiting for us, the audience, to think them through and decide for ourselves what’s right.

Verdict: What kind of god would you choose?

Rating? 10 gods of the right sort out of 10.

Stewart Hotston