Diksha Sundriyal
The third season of Prime Video’s ‘Upload’ upturns everything for Nathan, as he finds himself in quite a tough spot. The season started with him getting a new lease on life after he downloaded, while his copy in Lakeview continued to live as if he’d never disappeared. After many ups and downs, it finally looks like he can have a quiet life with Nora, but the worst is yet to come. Turns out, no matter what they do, Horizen always has a way of getting out of the trickiest of situations. The final two episodes prove that it will take much more for people like Nathan and Nora to bring down the giant that is Horizen. One lawsuit won’t cut it. Meanwhile, Horizen becomes even bigger, adding to the problem. SPOILERS AHEAD
Upload Season 3 Episode 7 and 8 Recap
Nathan and Nora prepare to re-upload him, worrying that his head might explode any day now. They decide to celebrate his last day together but have to change their plans when Nora is called in to help with the case Holden’s law firm has been building against Horizen. They discover that Dr. Kapoor was being kept in a safe house because he agreed to be a star witness against Horizen. He lied about Downloads having their heads explode, revealing that there never was any problem with downloading someone. This means that Nathan’s nosebleeds are nothing more than nosebleeds. He will not meet a dreadful end and doesn’t have to re-upload.
With Dr. Kapoor’s testimony, things would get really bad for Horizen, but then he is killed, and the case is back to square one. Nora and Nathan convince Ingrid to testify against her father. Despite her initial hesitation, Ingrid is convinced by Nora when the latter mentions that both of their Nathan aren’t treated like people by Horizen, and they don’t have any rights. Meanwhile, Download Nathan plans to propose to Nora once the case is done, but Fake Nathan takes the cake by proposing to Ingrid first.
Upload Season 3 Ending: Which Nathan did Horizen Kill?
In the final few minutes of ‘Upload’ Season 3, things take a tumble for Nathan and everyone around him. Aleesha’s timely spying on Karina and leaking her emails give the people a chance to win the case and force Horizen to pay millions of dollars. However, this doesn’t mean that the company has been held accountable for everything else. In fact, Holden reveals that they will not get farther than the millions of dollars in reparations. The emails, per protocol, will be sealed and never become public knowledge, and it will do nothing to grant Uploads their rights, which means that both Download Nathan and Fake Nathan remain Horizen property.
It puts a dent in Download Nathan’s plan to marry Nora, but it would have been alright had his identity as a download not been exposed. Previously, when Ingrid testified against her father and Choak Industries, she unintentionally let it slip that her ex and her current boyfriend are Nathan. By far, Download Nathan’s identity was kept a secret, but now Horizen knows that their property is out and about in the world, and, unsurprisingly, they want to get their hands on it.
Once the case is wrapped, Horizen takes quick action. It arrests Download Nathan and later storms Lakeview to sweep out all the copies, which it turns out are much more than expected. Nathan’s copy also meets this dark fate, where he is taken away from Lakeview because his existence is an illegal act and could get Horizen in a lot of trouble. In the past, despite knowing that this practice was illegal, Horizen employees resorted to creating fake residents out of backups, and no one paid attention to it because Horizen never thought they’d have to be answerable in a court of law. But now that they have been held accountable, they fear that more of their secrets could be unraveled, and they are trying to clean things up as much as possible.
In the final scene, Nathan calls Nora, Ingrid, and his mother, revealing that the other Nathan has been removed from existence. It’s a shock for them all, but Nora asks the most important question: which Nathan is he? We don’t get an answer, but considering everything, we believe that Download Nathan is the one who was kept alive by Horizen. By far, he is a rarity, and Horizen would want to keep him around. As for the Fake Nathan, he was already a copy and shouldn’t have existed in the first place. His existence would point the law to the existence of other copies, which would open a whole new Pandora’s box, which Horizen wouldn’t want anyone to touch.
It makes sense then that they would choose to keep the Download Nathan and erase the copy. However, Download Nathan isn’t exactly legal, either. He has no papers, and he doesn’t technically exist. Moreover, it’s clear that Horizen has already mastered the science of Download. They forced Dr. Kapoor to blow up a man’s head to raise their download prices. They want people to think that this is a dangerous endeavor, and if it becomes public knowledge that a download has been walking amongst them all this while, it will ruin Horizen’s plans to extort the situation and make copious amounts of money out of it.
If Horizen were to choose between money and legal things, we know that they wouldn’t bat an eye before choosing money. This casts some doubt on whether this Nathan is the copy. It would certainly complicate things on a personal level because this Nathan loves Ingrid, not Nora, and that whole dynamic has been very delicate the whole time. It would be interesting to watch Nathan be with Ingrid, not Nora, for once.
With all this in mind, the most plausible explanation is this. Both Nathans are alive at the end of ‘Upload.’ Horizen has taken away Download Nathan to some secret facility and made it look like they have killed him. They’ve sent Fake Nathan to be the real Nathan now so that there is only one Nathan for the world, and none’s the wiser about what they are secretly doing with the Downloads.
Is Aleesha Fired? What Happens to Her?
Apart from Nathan, Aleesha is another person who is at risk of being eliminated or attacked by Horizen because she poses a danger to them. Despite liking Karina a lot, Aleesha spies on her and leaks her email to help the prosecution win the case against Horizen. She makes sure that Karina’s name is revealed as the whistleblower and hopes that things will fall apart for Horizen so much that they’ll never get around to catching her. But things are more complicated than that. When it is revealed that the records will be sealed and things will proceed business as usual at Horizen, Aleesha finds herself in a very dangerous situation.
Once the case is done, Aleesha is told to meet Karina in her office urgently. Aleesha worries that she will be fired or, worse, killed. But it remains to be seen what’ll happen with her. At this point, it’s most likely none of those things. Because Karina was named the whistleblower, Horizen will blame her for this debacle. Even if she didn’t leak the emails, someone got into her system because of her carelessness, which wouldn’t be tolerated by her superiors. Karina calling for Aleesha is most likely just her wanting to see her girlfriend in a tough time, hoping to find some support.
Karina has several reasons not to immediately distrust Aleesha. For one, they are dating each other, and Karina seems genuinely interested in Aleesha. She knows that Aleesha was sick the day her emails were leaked. Moreover, she doesn’t see Aleesha as a threat. She wouldn’t imagine her girlfriend sneaking into her laptop and then destroying her life and career. Karina doesn’t see Aleesha like that. At least, not yet.
Despite her love for Aleesha, Karina has proved to be very strict about things when it comes to her work. She takes it more seriously than Aleesha, and she’s smart enough to figure out how she might have been duped. Moreover, getting into her emails could only be done by someone very close to her, and Aleesha is certainly in that circle. On top of this, Karina could have CCTV inside her office, which could have recorded Aleesha stealing the emails. So, yes, Karina might know what her girlfriend did. But will she fire Aleesha? Not yet. For someone as cunning and ruthless as Karina, we expect her to chalk out a plan and use Aleesha to get to the things that mean more to Horizen.
Why Does Horizen Rename Itself Betta? What is Workload?
For companies like Horizen, branding is everything. As Horizen, they were selling a perfect afterlife to its residents. However, when their name is embroiled in a lawsuit that they lose, it becomes important for them to separate themselves from this negative press. They don’t want people to think about the lawsuit when someone mentions Horizen. To distance themselves from this, they rebrand themselves as Betta. Their PR presents it as a complex makeover where Betta aims to be better than Horizen, when, in reality, they don’t plan to change anything. They want to use Betta as a re-brand to keep themselves in the business without people subconsciously connecting them to the company that killed millions of people for their benefit. Their new program, Workload, proves that their priorities haven’t changed.
In a previous episode, Nathans, Nora, and Ingrid found out about the law HR 32255, which would allow Uploads to work. Horizen wasn’t doing that for the benefit of the Uploads but to cut their costs and save billions of dollars. Their plan is to get Uploads to work for them, removing humans from the equations. Because Uploads are not legally people and don’t have any rights, they can be treated like products. They can be exploited and overworked, and because there is no union to safeguard their interests, they would be forced to do whatever companies like Choak Industries want them to.
One would think that losing the lawsuit would halt Horizen’s plans in its tracks, but it looks like they are completely unbothered by this. It’s nary a chink in their armor, and paying a few million dollars to people is nothing the billionaire owners of Horizen and Choak Industries can’t afford. Their eye is on the prize, which can be achieved with a simple rebrand, relying on their audience’s short attention span, and continuously working behind the scenes to make sure that things like HR 32255 and Workload are cleared by the law so that they can continue to make unimaginable amounts of money.
Read More: What is HR 32255 Law in Upload, Explained
