Crime
Adolescence
In Netflix’s Adolescence, 13-year-old Jamie Miller is accused of a violent murder. And the motive behind this alleged crime haunts the people around him.
The Bible teaches that death is not the end. For the people at Logorhythms, that just means something a little different than what Scripture intended.
Twenty years ago, a brilliant scientist named Stephen Holstrom founded Logorhythms in pursuit of “digital immortality.” He discovered a way to scan a person’s brain and upload it to a virtual network, storing their consciousness as an “Uploaded Intelligence,” or “UI.” If you’re scanned as a UI, your physical body dies, but you can live forever in the digital world.
Holstrom died before his vision could be fully realized, but Logarhythms persisted, using somewhat shady methods to further their research.
Of course, none of this matters to 14-year-old Maddie Kim – until she starts receiving text messages from her father, who’s been dead—physically, at least—for two years.
Now a UI, he’s escaped from Logorhythms’ control.
Maddie’s not the only one making life-altering discoveries. Brilliant, troubled teenager Caspian Keyes has started to realize that nothing about his life is what it seems. His “parents” are undercover spies, his girlfriend is a hired actress, and he himself was created by Logorhythms to crack the secret of autonomous UIs. This revelation rocks his world – and it leads him right into Maddie’s path.
Together, Maddie and Caspian start unraveling the conspiracy surrounding Logorhythms’ work, and it becomes increasingly clear that these UIs could change—or destroy–the entire world as they know it.
Of the many controversial topics circling today’s culture, few are more hotly debated than artificial intelligence. Is it pushing us into a new era of technology? Is it leading to the ascension of robot overlords? The issue of AI goes hand-in-hand with discussions of creativity, individuality, and what it means to be human in the first place.
Pantheon touches on all these subjects and more. Don’t be fooled by the animation; there are plenty of mature ethical conundrums raised here. Is technology subject to us, or are we subject to it? At what point does it become unethical to cheat death? And what, exactly, makes a person a person?
Of course, you won’t find explicit biblical truth at the center of these questions, but that doesn’t mean Pantheon doesn’t occasionally hit the mark. When Caspian tries to convince Maddie that making a fully sentient UI would create “virtual gods,” she protests: “You can’t just keep making copies of people. That’s not what a person is.” It’s not exactly “made in the image of God,” but it’s at least on the right track.
Don’t let the animation fool you into thinking Pantheon is kid-friendly, either. It’s certainly not as explicit as other adult animation offerings, but language is still fairly frequent, as well as violence and some upsetting content. For instance: Maddie is bullied at school and told to end her own life. Caspian’s “father” is emotionally and physically abusive to his “wife,” though we find out it’s an act to force Caspian into maturity. Teenagers constantly find themselves in danger, sometimes at the hands of adults. Between all of that and the brain surgery required to turn people into UIs, a generally ominous aura persists throughout the series.
Pantheon asks some compelling questions about the nature of humanity and our relationship with technology, though not always with biblical truth as the goal. Still, it’s encouraging that even when Scripture is all but ignored, we still circle back to one of its most central messages: Human life is unique and valuable, and nothing, not even the most powerful of technology, can ever replace it.
(Editor’s Note: Plugged In is rarely able to watch every episode of a given series for review. As such, there’s always a chance that you might see a problem that we didn’t. If you notice content that you feel should be included in our review, send us an email at [email protected], or contact us via Facebook or Instagram, and be sure to let us know the episode number, title and season so that we can check it out.)
Season Two picks up right where Season One left off: the UIs revealed themselves to the world, and the government shut down the internet to keep them offline. While Maddie tries to get her neighborhood back online, Caspian works to solve the issue of “UI integrity” and make a pure, autonomous Uploaded Intelligence. That requires him to make a copy of Maddie’s father—and Maddie will do everything in her power to keep that from happening.
The UIs take the form of naked humans, though without any details that would constitute nudity (think Barbie dolls). Renee, Caspian’s fake mother, gives the middle finger to a security camera. Patrons drink beer at a bar. A stranger chases Maddie down and breaks into her house; she gets a kitchen knife to defend herself, but Renee takes him down with a taser first.
Caspian tells Maddie that “whoever cracks integrity creates the first virtual god.”
The s-word, “a–“ and “d–n” are each used twice. God’s name is taken in vain five times. “Pr-ck,” “h-ll” and “b–ch” are each used once.
Lauren Cook is serving as a 2021 summer intern for the Parenting and Youth department at Focus on the Family. She is studying film and screenwriting at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. You can get her talking for hours about anything from Star Wars to her family to how Inception was the best movie of the 2010s. But more than anything, she’s passionate about showing how every form of art in some way reflects the Gospel. Coffee is a close second.
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