“How much of your life would you have to change if you could live forever? What is the value of your human life?” All of these are questions that the latest teaser for the upcoming AMC+ animated series Pantheon raises. The two-episode premiere will air on AMC+ and HIDIVE, AMC’s recently acquired anime streaming service, on Thursday, September 1. The show is based on a collection of short stories by award-winning author Ken Liu and will examine the speculative capabilities of technology and digitised human consciousness.
Maddie (played by Katie Chang), who believes her recently departed father David (Daniel Dae Kim), was murdered by the microchip business Logorhythms, is introduced in the trailer. However, the reality goes far further than that, since the corporation has been doing research on a project to upload and digitise human brains. David was one of these test subjects; his damaging brain scan resulted in his consciousness being transferred to the cloud. In his new life as an “Uploaded Intelligence,” or UI, David reaches out to his daughter for assistance in defeating a worldwide plot. In the preview, David is shown conversing with Maddie while wearing a virtual reality headset.
Besides ourselves, we encounter more Uploads or persons who have been digitised and uploaded to the cloud. Extraordinary talents such as shapeshifting, supersonic speed running, and flight are at the disposal of these beings. In the last moments of the teaser, we see the tension between the actual and virtual worlds reaching a breaking point, with the potential for a nuclear war to break out at any moment. Some of these folks’ reactions to their new digital lives are summed up in the trailer’s final line: “We used to be human. Now we’re gods.”
Pantheon features an A-list voice cast, including not only Chang and Kim as Maddie and David, but also Paul Dano as Caspian, Rosemarie DeWitt as Ellen, Aaron Eckhart as Cary, Taylor Schilling as Renee, Ron Livingston as Waxman, Chris Diamantopoulos as Pope, Raza Jaffrey as Chanda, and William Hurt as Stephen Holstrom. Scoot McNairy, Anika Noni Rose, Maude Apatow, Corey Stoll, Michael Kelly, Grey Griffin, SungWon Cho, Kevin Durand, Samuel Roukin, Krystina Alabado, Lara Pulver, Madhur Jeffrey, Heather Lind, Nyima Funk, Tunde Adebimpe, Quinn Hawking, Clyde Kusatsu, Ken Leung, Jacob Sartorius, Vincent Ventresca, Julian Lerner, Magn Writer, creator, showrunner, and executive producer Craig Silverstein (TURN: Washington’s Spies, Nikita) is on board. Titmouse, who animated Big Mouth and Star Trek: Lower Decks, will be in charge of animating the series. Christopher Prynoski, Shannon Prynoski, Antonio Canobbio, Ben Kalina, and Juno Lee are executive producers for Titmouse alongside Silverstein on this project.
As a director, Lee’s responsibilities are multifaceted. AMC Studios is responsible for creating Pantheon. The first two episodes of Pantheon will launch on AMC+ and HIDIVE on September 1, with further episodes running weekly on Thursdays.
Synopsis
The exciting science fiction drama follows Maddie, a harassed youngster, as she receives unusual support online from a man named David, who turns out to be her recently deceased father thanks to an experimental damaging brain scan that transferred his mind to the Cloud. While David may be the first of his type, the unfolding worldwide conspiracy that threatens to spark a new sort of world war ensures that he will not be the last “Uploaded Intelligence” (UI).