Note: Major spoilers ahead for the final season finale of “Upload” on Prime Video
“Upload” is now complete on Prime Video — the final four episodes of the series debuted on Monday. Ironically though, despite the finale being a series finale, it does leave a potential door open.
As hinted at in the season 4 trailer, Real Nathan (Robbie Amell) did indeed survive the end of season 3, Instead of destroying him like Back-Up Nathan said, Horizen actually used Real Nathan as a test subject for the next evolution of uploading. This version would allow subjects to upload while still alive, without burning their heads off.
The thing is, the process is draining, and it destroys the brain little by little. So, after being uploaded a few hundred times, Real Nathan simply couldn’t keep his body going once he escaped. He was able to make it back to Nora (Andy Allo) though, and the two had a VR wedding in lieu of actually being able to make it to Montreal, like Nathan dreamed.
In their final moments together, Nathan wished Nora a happy birthday, happy new year, and any other message he could think of that he wouldn’t be around to actually deliver to her, before gently passing away. And so ended Nathan Brown, for real this time.
“Sometimes you’re shooting something, and you’re trying to cry, and then sometimes you’re shooting something and you’re trying not to cry,” Amell told TheWrap. “And that was one of those ones where it was like, you’re just trying not to be so outwardly devastated.”
But is it really the end? Because, while Nathan was being tortured, he managed to convince a Horizen employee to specifically preserve his memories with Nora, storing them on a ring drive. Nathan eventually gave it to Nora as her wedding ring.
In the last minutes of the episode, we see Nora at a cafe, working on her tablet, when a notification surprises her saying that the drive is trying to pair with the device.
On its face, the ring is just a scrapbook of sorts. But, as a former angel, Nora is certainly smart enough to potentially use that ring to restore another version of Nathan, and series creator Greg Daniels conceded to TheWrap that the ending is him “trying to maybe eat my cake and have it too.”
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with allowing the audience to wonder, and to make their own endings in their minds after the thing’s over,” he said. “There’s enough information there, you could argue with your friends.”
For her part, Andy Allo agrees that “it’s not a stretch” to think that Nora could bring a version of her Nathan back to her, but she hopes the character wouldn’t.
“Man, I feel like, how wonderful to relive certain memories with someone without having them there,” she told TheWrap. “And so my hope is that, I don’t know, he always has a special place in her heart, and she can kind of go back and relive those memories, but then she moves on, and is able to have a family or whatever.”
Amell agreed, noting that, when he read the script, having Nathan re-download “didn’t feel right this time,” so he didn’t see the ring as a cliffhanger.
“I saw it as a sweet little scrapbook,” he said. “I think even if she were to put it together and try and create another version of him, I think that it wouldn’t work. I think that it would be one of those things that felt bad after doing it. I think it kind of lends itself more toward memory parlor, to me. Just something special between the two of them. They had their goodbye.”
It was an intense goodbye and, though Daniels noted that Nathan dying wasn’t always in the specifics of his master plan for the series, “it was on theme.”
“Because the theme is all about love transcending death, and the meaningfulness of it,” he explained. “And I feel like the most intense romantic stories are like ‘Titanic’ or ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ they don’t always work out for the lovers. And I think that the love itself is an important thing in life; better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. And I think that for those two characters, they came to peace with it at the end.”
Daniels added that it’s easy to set up an emotional ending if everything works out for the characters, but in reality, people don’t always win. So, for him, “the more valuable thing” is finding an emotional win even in hardship (a tactic he also used on “King of the Hill”).
“I think that there’s going to be people who probably wanted a more unreservedly happy ending,” he admitted. “But I really feel like the best romances are complicated like that, and I do think that they both got a wonderful experience out of their romance.”
Allo was perhaps one of those people, as she admitted to TheWrap that she was “not happy at all” to see Real Nathan meet his real demise when she first read the script.
“Just because I wanted Nora to have her own happy ending, you know? There’s been so much build-up, and she’s fought so hard for this man, and this relationship, and found herself along the way,” Allo explained. “So I just was like, ‘Ah, I want her to have it all.’ But then the more I read it, and sat with it, I was like, ‘You know, that’s actually kind of beautiful.’”
“And the message I got from it is like, loving someone so much, and that sometimes the most loving thing you can do is letting them go,” she continued. “For my Nathan to say, ‘Look, go and live. Don’t sit around waiting for me,’ I think was just so beautiful for her to have that permission to kind of [go] ‘OK, my life isn’t over. I can still take the love I have for you and what we’ve had. It doesn’t all just go away.’”
Allegra Edwards, who played Ingrid for the series run agreed “it’s debatable if [Nora] actually got quite a happy ending as well.”
Edwards’ character arguably did get a happy ending, as her Nathan survived and their marriage worked. But really, Edwards was just pleased to see the growth.
“She’s gone through a lot, and she’s she’s worked pretty hard to grow, and it’s not been 100% successful 100% of the time, but boy, the effort’s there,” she said. “And I do think that she has improved as a person, so even if she didn’t get her happy ending, per se, I think the fact that she’s actually grown the most, I would argue, is a victory in and of itself. The rest is kind of icing.”
“Upload” is now streaming in its entirety on Prime Video.
Everything New on Prime Video in August