[This story contains major spoilers from the final season and series finale of Upload.]
“I remember texting Greg that I thought the scene between Nathan and Nora on the bench was one of the most beautiful things I had ever read,” Upload star Robbie Amell recalls of his initial reaction to discovering half of his character’s fate. “I thought it was so beautiful and real. I just loved those words, and that ended up being one of the final scenes that Andy [Allo] and I shot together.”
The scene Amell is describing is one of the final moments in the series shared by Nathan — a murdered coder who is digitally uploaded into a virtual beyond known as Lakeview — and Nora, the very alive customer service technician, otherwise known as an “angel,” who is paid to support him in his subscription-based afterlife.
In a shocking twist, the fourth and final season of Greg Daniels’ Prime Video sci-fi comedy kills one of those two Nathans permanently. “
The reality is that [Nathan and Nora] were fighting against the clock,” says Andy Allo while discussing the couple’s endgame. “That realization, though, was devastating.”
The decision to kill original upload Nathan following the events of the season three finale (where he and his reboot were captured by the corrupt digital afterlife company Horizon) was always in the narrative cards, says Daniels. “The specifics of it developed, but there was the question of whether [Nathan and Nora] would have a plain happy ending, or whether it would be more intense and appropriate,” the show’s creator tells The Hollywood Reporter now that the finale has released.
How Upload Determined the Fate of Original Digital Nathan
The four-episode finale event kicked off with a revelation that only reboot Nathan survived the encounter with Horizon. The remembered details of that event initially led everyone to think Nathan sacrificed himself to save his digital copy, throwing Nora into a downward spiral in which she confines herself to her bedroom, living out a series of VR goggle scenarios (including a wedding) with her remembered version of Nathan.
Attempts to pull her back to the real world by friends, including Zainab Johnson’s Aleesha (now a well-trained spy infiltrating Horizon) and Allegra Edwards’ Ingrid (preparing to marry reboot Nathan), are unsuccessful. That is, until a surprising encounter with what appears to be a digital ghost of the original Nathan. The experience revives Nora, who, believing Nathan is still alive, sets out to find and save him.
“We had this cliffhanger, and when we discussed it in the writers room, we were like, ‘Nobody expects the real Nathan to be the one, so we have to do that because that’s the biggest surprise,’” Daniels says of the choice about which Nathan to disappear.
From there, Nora and Nathan fight against the clock to save him and his deteriorating mind and body, a byproduct of Horizin repeatedly scanning his consciousness from his cloned body while he was captured. Their effort ultimately returns no solutions to keeping him alive, leading Nathan to make a heartwrenching choice that ends his third chance at life.
“What I was going for with them is something that would be the most intensely romantic version of the story,” says Daniels. “When you think about which stories are more romantic, Titanic is the big romantic story. It doesn’t necessarily end happily, but it ends with a lot of meaning and a lot of tears and an exchange of emotions. Giving that to Nathan and Nora was the prize in terms of letting them have the big, most emotional thing.”
The choice to have original upload Nathan move on while encouraging Nora to live calls back to some of the earliest conversations between the duo as he struggles to settle into his “digital afterlife” in Lakeview. “Life isn’t perfect,” Nora tells Nathan towards the end of the pilot. “But life is the most magical gift there is.”
“There’s the theme of how love transcends death. The show is very technological. We’ve got a tech company that has the answer. You’re going to get uploaded. But at the end of the day, is there something more meaningful than a kind of digital zombification thing?” Daniels says. “I always wanted to have an emotional story that was satisfying for people, but people don’t always win in real life. It’s phony to always have the characters win. But I think they can still win emotionally by taking away something important that they needed to learn.”
How Upload’s Finale Brings Nathan and Nora Full Circle
On-screen, Nathan’s death answers one of the series’ recurring questions of whether you’d upload if you had the chance, says Amell. “When original Nathan dies, it’s almost a relief for some of the people around him because of what he’s been through,” Amell says. “I would [upload] until I didn’t want to do it anymore, and I think that by the end of season four, Nathan doesn’t want to be uploaded anymore. He’s ready for what’s next.”
The choice also illustrates the ways Nathan has grown as a character. “The beginning of the show with Nathan was: Are we the decisions we’ve made in the past or can people change?” explains Amell. “This is a guy who starts selfish and would probably do anything he can to put himself first, to be the survivor and win. By the end, he just wants something better for Nora; for her to be happy and be able to move on and have her own life. I think part of that is a thank you to her for everything she did for him.”
“The most loving thing someone can do is let them go, rather than being like, ‘I have to have you, even if it’s unrealistic or detrimental to you.’ It’s such a selfless act,” Allo adds.
When it comes to Nora, she similarly gets a full-circle moment that calls back to her grief over her mother’s death, fear of losing her father and her habit of hiding away in VR goggles instead of living life. “She was fighting it so hard in season one that her dad wanted to go in real life, and then she ends up going through this whole journey with an uploaded guy and having to let him go in real life,” says Allo.
As Daniels sees it, “the relationship they had was so meaningful to the two of them. Certainly, for Nathan, who was a very shallow person, he got into a car accident and had this second chance to actually be a more meaningful person. For Nora, she was yearning for something of romantic substance. The whole thing with Nathan, you could look at it as the ultimate romance novel.”
“When [Nathan and Nora] started their romance, there were a lot of good friends and voices saying to her, ‘What are you doing? This guy’s dead. You should find somebody that’s more appropriate,’” he adds. “I wanted to see Nora go on this journey. She’s so hurt by her mother’s death and the experience of grieving, and she’s so romantic and yearning in the beginning for something profound and not casual. Nora wanted a big romantic thing to happen to her, and she kind of got what she wanted.”
Behind the Fate of Upload’s Surviving Couple and Second Character Death
While the original upload dies, reboot Nathan ultimately gets a new body and, as viewers see, builds a life, including having a real baby with Ingrid. “The thing that is very sweet — sweet being a word that I associate with Ingrid being new for me — is the relationship that we see Ingrid and reboot Nathan craft together. It’s almost like they got a reset button on their relationship. We see the makings of an actual relationship built on friendship,” explains Edwards.
“There is a world in which you can just color it with the batshit crazy decisio- making — faking your own scanning, living in your tub and not telling anybody, growing somebody’s body, having a fake baby. Whatever it is, she’s way at an 11. But [Nathan] was able at some point — and I think it was during the Princess Diana haircut scene — to see that it must be hard to be in that bathtub. That she’s given up a lot for him, and she does always try to protect him.”
While Edwards shares she can imagine a world in which the series gets a few more seasons and Ingrid gets “some time to just be with herself and makes some friends, and gets outside of that tube,” she says “the man that’s going to acknowledge her sacrifice is one step closer to the man that I think she should be with and then ends up with.”
“There is such a thing as, who else is she going to talk to that has any idea the breadth and depth and scope of what she’s been through other than this man?” Edwards adds. “Nathan is the only one. They’ve been trauma-bonded.”
Reboot Nathan is also the same Nathan who delivers closure with Luke (Kevin Bigley), who sacrifices himself to stop the evil AI Guy (Owen Daniels) from escaping Lakeview and entering the real world. “When you first meet Nathan in season one, he’s pretty egotistical and a bit of a dick, but you start to see that there’s a nice guy behind it. As those layers are peeled off by Nora, by Luke, you get to see there’s a guy with a good heart, but he’s also a guy who doesn’t quite wear his heart on his sleeve like Luke does. Seeing him come together with Luke for that moment is really important for both of them,” Amell says.
“It was important to see that bond wasn’t a one-way thing. It was very much a true friendship between two people,” he continues. “The Luke death will hit hard because he’s such a great character, he’s such a fan favorite, but it’s so perfect for his character. This is a guy who sui-scanned originally. He’s an Army veteran. Him sacrificing himself for his friends is so Luke, and I thought it was beautiful, sad and devastating. People will hate it, but people will also be like, ‘That’s my guy.’”
What That Upload Cliffhanger Means
While Nora’s Nathan dies, in what could be seen as an almost post-credits sequence, Nora then appears at a coffee shop in Montreal. While sitting at a table, she takes off the ring she and Nathan exchanged as part of their virtual wedding. Soon after, a man approaches her table, asking if she would be interested in a date. Nora declines, but in nearly the same breath, she receives a pop-up notification on her pad that a file — the copy of Nathan that was salvaged from his time in captivity with Horizon — is still there.
If Nora did choose to bring that Nathan back, it would be a version of Nathan that only has memories of Nora, and “she could just really create her own 50 First Dates,” Allo jokes, referencing the film her character nods to in the finale, and that she is seen watching on the subway in the Upload pilot.
While Daniels says they intentionally left that moment open-ended, he’s not sure bringing Nathan back would be the right choice. “She took her ring off, put it on the other hand. So maybe she’s moving on. It’s really open to interpretation,” he says. “I do think there’s a feeling of maybe she’ll still get what she wants, but I don’t even know if that’s the right thing for her to want. [Nora’s relationship with Nathan] had a lot of depth to it, so I’m a little torn as to whether she should go after that guy who came up to her in the cafe at the end. But I think that might be a better choice. He’s alive.”
Allo adds, “The ending moment of the ring drive pop-up, we shot a number of different reactions. I think they were still trying to figure out which way they wanted things to go and what felt final in a satisfying way. My ideal is that she goes on to live her life and have such fun, crazy adventures, and then when she’s done a bunch of stuff, or she’s had a family and all these things, the tech will be even more advanced, and she’ll be able to recreate him and fill in the blanks, download him and then they get to live out the rest of their lives.”
For Amell, whether or not he’ll see Nora again, is “for people to make their own decision about,” but “if Greg Daniels phoned me and he’s like, here’s my idea for the spinoff, I would say, ‘You don’t have to tell me, I’m in.’”
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The final season of Upload is currently streaming on Prime Video.