It’s an excellent episode for Allegra Edwards. She gets to play out of character—in the real world, Edwards’s talking toilet has been chastising her for too much time in VR, so she’s going to take a break. To ensure Robbie Amell doesn’t ask any questions, Edwards hires a “job gerbil”—for an Amazon show, “Upload”’s real comfortable showing what a Bezos-led dystopia would look like. The job gerbil, a phenomenal Paloma Nuñez, has to pretend to be Edwards in the virtual afterlife.
Except Nuñez isn’t terrible, so Amell and buddy Kevin Bigley will think Edwards is just being awesome all of a sudden. The episode opens with them discovering they can siphon data off the rich guys and give it to the poor people on limited data plans. You pause until next month when you run out of data in the virtual afterlife. Amell’s got a code editor device (from last season) to do the hacking.
He and Bigley take it upon themselves to play, you guessed it, Robin Hood.
They have a great suspense comedy plot with Edwards. It’s casino night (or afternoon) in the afterlife, and they’re going to win big against the richies, thanks to a complicated cheating system. Suspense factors in once real-world boss Andrea Rosen catches the code hacker in use, so she and debugger Ryan Beil try to find the culprit.
Their investigation coincides with Andy Allo’s job interview with Beil; while she’s usually in customer service, the Luds want her to drop some physical items around the programming floor, so she’s got to do a job interview. She’s ostensibly unqualified, but the show established from the start she’s really good at the programming side when she gets to do it.
Since she can’t go back to her apartment, she’s rooming with fellow Lud and fellow virtual afterlife customer service rep Josh Banday. It ends up being an excuse to show off Banday’s profoundly gross and funny lifestyle and get some laughs.
Allo also reunites with Zainab Johnson and meets her not-exactly-replacement Mackenzie Cardwell. No reuniting for Allo and Amell just yet, though she does check in on him once she’s back.
Rosen gets a lot this episode; cop Hiro Kanagawa is investigating—which freaks out Rosen because she spies on Bigley in the shower and then Beil for an indeterminate reason—so Rosen enlists Johnson’s help hiding evidence. It all will tie together with Allo’s arc by the end.
It’s a good episode for Allo too. It’s a decent character development arc amid her saboteur stuff and then the silliness in the virtual world.
But Edwards gets the best material by far; just a splendid showcase.
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