Upload (2020) s01e04 – The Sex Suit

Watching “Upload” do sexy is… uncomfortable. And not just because Allegra Edwards is loathsome and the episode frequently promises she’ll not be around then keeps bringing her back around. She and lead Robbie Amell are in therapy now. They still haven’t had sex because Edwards thinks the suit is gross.

So at some point between last episode and this episode, they had that talk. Maybe it was cut for time. I doubt it but maybe.

Anyway, the big sexy moment in the episode is when Andy Allo has to assist Edwards and Amell when they’re getting jiggy. Turns out part of customer service means giving the Upload digital people… digital arousal assistance.

Do Allo and Amell really have a moment or is she just playing him or is it just part of her job… Eh. Allo and Amell are so obviously destined for romantic collision, even if the show just denies that development it’s still just playing a trope so it’s hard to get particularly invested in any of the episodic roadblocks.

So even though the episode’s often better than usual—script by Aasia LaShay Bullock—there’s no way to get really invested in Amell and Edwards’s therapy exercises or Amell telling Allo he doesn’t really love Edwards anymore and he wishes she wouldn’t have sex with him and on and on. It’s just runtime fodder. “Upload” is full of it.

There are some decent jokes and less Kevin Bigley, which is good, and more Josh Banday (as the night shift assistant), which is also good. Though Banday’s just there. He’s got nothing to do. Banday meanwhile gets material and is mediocre at it. I liked Bigley in the pilot episode too… he’s just pointless. “Upload” can’t even pretend its supporting cast and subplots are actually important, not even when they figure into murder plots.

The show’s a great example of streaming’s very low bar to clear acceptable.

Upload (2020) s01e03 – The Funeral

This episode opens with a Rupert “Tilford” (cough, cough, Murdoch)—played by Creed from “The Office”—paying to get his Upload mind put into a clone body. And he dies. More than any episode so far, this episode of “Upload” felt a little like they were trying for Robocop humor.

It’s better than Robocop 3 at least.

But we also find out Robbie Amell and Allegra Edwards were counting on that process—called, obviously, Download—to get Amell resurrected.

Someone should really work out how “Upload,” “Westworld,” and “Devs” exist in the same universe.

So the Rupert stuff comes up again later on in the episode, which is set at Amell’s funeral, where we find out he doesn’t have the friends he thought he had but his college girlfriends all come out to see him because he was the only MIT bro with any play.

The girlfriends aren’t there for Amell, rather his virtual assistant, Andy Allo. Well, wait, she’s his actual assistant, just for his virtual life. She goes to his funeral because she’s started to crush on him. And gets to see fiancée Edwards threaten to delete Amell from existence because she owns his account after all.

We get to check in with some of Amell’s family, but not really. The funeral scene is about Edwards being terrible and being terrible to Amell and Allo seeing it all. “Upload” has some pretty basic plotting.

Though, given that basic plotting, it’s surprising when the episode forgets to resolve the subplot about Edwards getting a sex suit so she and Amell can have some private time after his funeral. It’s not ghoulish, it’s hip.

But she thinks the suits are gross and didn’t get one but never tells Amell. Or never tells him in front of the cameras so it just seems like a plot hole.

The best thing in the episode is probably Elizabeth Bowen, as Amell’s cousin who’s investigating his death. She’s weird and funny about it, whereas the other weirdness goes without much comment.

I mean, the episode is all Edwards shrieking. There’s only so much it could ever do.