Pantheon tells of a potential future where humanity learns to become digital gods through downloading their minds to cyberspace. What could go wrong with that? As it turns out, many, many, many Things.
- Chanda's uploading in Episode 2. He's strapped down fully conscious, while his scalp is opened up by surgeons, before lasers cut into his exposed brain, and he can do nothing but beg for his life while his boss Prasad just stares with cold satisfaction. Then his words begin to slur into nonsense as he feels his mind going. And what does Prasad say after this horrible operation is complete?
- Beautiful.
- Chanda wasn't even the first victim. Prasad had earlier tested the same procedure on several poor people from Mumbai, but these failed to upload properly, leaving them as mute, amorphous beings who still remember their human lives.
- For how deplorable Prasad's aforementioned deeds were, Chanda's revenge in episode 4 is equally horrifying. First he takes over Prasad's apartment complex and gives the servants false messages to send them away. Then he sets off a gas explosion on the bottom level, before uploading the recording of his gruesome operation to show Prasad's terrified wife and daughter. Then the sliding door over Prasad's swimming pool closes while his son is still inside, trapping the boy as the apartment burns and every escape route is destroyed. Chanda is so blinded by rage he doesn't care if an innocent family is collateral damage.
- Caspian's life is a worst-case scenario for anyone with paranoia. His "parents" are raising him not only for the sake of a job, but to try and ensure he turns out like someone else they had personally known rather than encouraging him to actually be his own person. Every time he's had to witness to or been the target of his verbally abusive home life for the past decade it's been orchestrated because he's there to experience it. He's a loner at his high school, which is hopefully by pure chance and not because Logorhythm's been throwing more money around to ensure his isolation, and the one person who reaches out to him and he accepts is an actress who was hired to play the part for three years, only doing it for the paychecks to help her mom. His online presence on both his personal computer and phone have always been monitored by Logorhythms, watching everything he does digitally. Actually getting his hands on the project files only makes it worse when he can see for himself interviews with the man he was created to be, seeing his own "birth" from what he generously describes as a robot womb, or hearing how his "girlfriend" wasn't allowed to refuse to perform "intimate acts" in her contract despite her initial objections. Even something that should have been purely his own decision, his username "Gage" being in reference to "Phineas P. Gage", is tainted by learning his original's birth name was also Phineas.
- To make things worse, it's implied that, had the ruse not been spotted, Rachel would have been killed in a car accident just like the real Hannah to make sure Caspian turned out exactly like Holstrom. And neither Rachel nor her family knew about any of this. That poor girl dodged a major bullet thanks to Caspian.
- Also worth noting that is what would eventually turn Holstrom into a dangerous Narcissist obsessed with "perfection" and "utopia". Given that Caspian is not incapable of violence and other questionable actions, who knows what that reenacted event would have done to him.
- To make things worse, it's implied that, had the ruse not been spotted, Rachel would have been killed in a car accident just like the real Hannah to make sure Caspian turned out exactly like Holstrom. And neither Rachel nor her family knew about any of this. That poor girl dodged a major bullet thanks to Caspian.
