Diksha Sundriyal
The fourth season of Prime Video’s ‘Upload’ takes the audience back to the future, where the question of Nathan Brown’s fate still hangs in the balance. The previous season ended on a dark note with one of the Nathans presumably killed by Horizen. While Nora, Ingrid, and the surviving Nathan accept the new order of things, Aleesha dives deeper into the crimes of her employers. This season focuses on her taking charge of bringing down the company. Interestingly, this journey of hers started, or rather, gained momentum, after she got involved with Karina Silva, who turned out to be just as ruthless as the company she worked for. Considering the role that she played in Season 3, it is a surprise that she is nowhere to be seen in Season 4. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Karina’s Role in Horizen was Much More Complicated Than It Appeared
The third season of ‘Upload’ introduced Karina Silva as the Horizen executive brought in to take charge of the new product development responsibilities, focusing on cybersecurity, and she played her role impeccably. Under her leadership, the company developed key tech concerning Lakeview, especially its AI help, and slowly, it became clear that she had some wild ideas about what to do next. Parallel to this, she also forms a romantic relationship with Aleesha, who sees Karina as a driven, albeit intimidating, individual at first. Later, however, she is so exhausted by Karina’s lies and manipulation tactics that she starts to wonder if her girlfriend ever tells the truth. This distrust leads Aleesha to work against her and Horizen.
She gathers evidence that is helpful in the case against the company, though it doesn’t do as much good because those files are permanently sealed. The third season ends with Aleesha getting called to Karina’s office. Aleesha worries that she is going to get fired because most likely, Karina has figured out who the leak was. The season doesn’t give us a resolution of this mystery, and when the fourth season opens, things appear to be at a surprising point. At the beginning of the fourth season, Aleesha is found to be working at a top-tier executive position for Horizen, and Karina is nowhere to be seen. Soon enough, it is revealed that Aleesha is now secretly working for Oscar Mayer Intel, which is focused on bringing down Horizen and whatever new digital hellscape they have planned for the world. But this is not the most shocking part of it all.
It turns out that Karina was also a secret agent for OMI. In fact, as an executive, she was a top-tier informant. However, when Aleesha leaked the files from her laptop, it led to Karina getting fired, and OMI lost its most valuable agent, who had been placed in a position that had been benefiting them greatly. When Karina came back to her bosses with the news that she could no longer be of help to them, they brainstormed about cultivating a new asset. This is when Karina told them about Aleesha and her talents. By now, Aleesha had already proved herself incredibly capable of sneaking out info from places that otherwise seemed unreachable or highly protected. Karina’s firing opened the way for her promotion, and if she was brought into the fold, OMI would have another top executive as its secret agent inside Horizen.
Fortunately, OMI saw Aleesha as a valuable asset because the alternative was for them to have killed her. This way, Karina saved Aleesha’s life. Perhaps this is why she called Aleesha to her office in Season 3. She wanted to come clean about her true mission and had to fill Aleesha in on her taking over this role. While this turns out to be good news for Aleesha, Karina is not so fortunate. When Aleesha asks her OMI handler when she can see Karina, he lets it slip that Karina has been killed. When he sees the shock and horror on Aleesha’s face, he immediately corrects himself, claiming that they have sent Karina on a scuba diving trip. Of course, this is a lie and Karina is dead, but Aleesha chooses to believe this lie because it is better to imagine Karina somewhere on the beach, enjoying the sea rather than lying dead in a ditch, killed by her former employers.
Karina’s Fate in Upload Confirms Jeanine Mason’s Exit From the Show
Considering that the Oscar Mayer Intel guy basically confesses to killing Karina and threatens to kill Aleesha on several occasions, it is clear that Karina is no more, which means her appearance in the four-episode fourth season is a no-go. While no official statements were made by the show’s creator or Jeanine Mason, who plays Karina, it is clear that the decision of her departure from ‘Upload’ was made early on. While it is a shame not to be able to see Mason in action as the duplicitous and beguiling Karina, his absence does serve an important purpose in setting up a core plot point of the final season. It is her failure in Horizen that leads to Aleesha working as a spy for Oscar Mayer Intel.
Moreover, her absence also gives the show the space to explore the complicated dynamics between Aleesha and Luke properly. It would have been interesting to find out about Karina’s status as a spy and see her in a more positive light than the one projected in Season 1. However, the limitation put up by the number of episodes would have stretched the show thin. It needed to focus on the key characters, from the two Nathans, Nora, Ingrid, and Luke, to Aleesha herself, and give them a proper sendoff. Keeping Karina around would have hindered that path and, more importantly, it wouldn’t have served her character well either.
So, all things considered, it made sense for her to leave the show. Meanwhile, actress Jeanine Mason, known for ‘Roswell, New Mexico’ and ‘Grey’s Anatomy,’ has kept busy with other projects like the theatre play, ‘Tether,’ and the biographical drama, ‘The Man Who Changed the World.’ Having been a fan of ‘Upload,’ Mason deeply enjoyed working on the show, especially with Greg Daniels, and was glad to play a villain like Karina, who has more dimensions to her than what others see.
Read More: The Cow in Upload Season 3, Explained: Why is it So Big?
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