After Watching Both Seasons
I finished Pantheon a while back. The cyclical reincarnation choice in the finale absolutely blew me away.
Enlightenment is spending hundreds of thousands of years, through endless history, endless ages, before returning just as in the past, by vow, to feel pain and life.
Feeling a bit down inside, so I’ll grab some more books to fight poison with poison.
My Own Feelings
This show is, from a certain angle, also the medicine I’m using to try to heal my own soul.
S2E6 felt like it was sliding into cliché. Then E7 suddenly blew the scope wide open. By E8 the scope had reached Three-Body proportions.
The cyclical reincarnation choice in the finale was so stunning, it kind of matches my worldview. Enlightenment is spending hundreds of thousands of years, endless history, endless ages, before returning just as in the past, by vow.
From season 1 onward, this show kept bringing up recursion. Including that episode where Chanda escapes — you can clearly see it’s one level of the recursion escaping on its own, which means that apart from the level that succeeded, one or more levels of the self are forever trapped in that endless loneliness. By the same token, at least one level in the universe truly succeeded through its own pure will, and the storyline of the recursion layer we see in the show is no longer the outermost layer of the universe.
In this show, because the parallel spacetimes (possibilities) the universe runs on are infinite, Maddie becoming a god — or humanity becoming gods — is actually an inevitability of spacetime, just as a running UI will inevitably escape, because quantum computing power (possibility) is unlimited.
It’s like how my grandmother has already passed away. That’s very sad, but the hopeful part is this: in this universe of endless computing power, her information is being recorded all along, and from some spacetime a perfect observation point must still be findable, one where I can once again access the whole of her life. And in some spacetime, I too can manage to meet her again. Because the universe’s computing power is infinite, there’s always a possibility out there. It’s just that the me of this moment doesn’t choose to realize that possibility. I only need to cherish and live well in every present moment, to feel ignorance, feel pain, feel life — because “ignorance is bliss,” because I choose to believe I live in layer 0 of the recursion. People in layer 0 of course have it harder, just like flesh-and-blood humans, but this is a purer, simpler, more pastoral age.
The ending of season 2 made me ache for Maddie and the others, just as I ache for myself.
And in a new turn of the cycle, Maddie and the others have a chance to create something different. After all, every recursion, every iteration, has the potential to mutate.