TL;DR: Upload Season 4 closes out Prime Video’s sharp sci-fi comedy with a whimper instead of a bang. Great cast, weak writing, and a finale that undoes too much. Funny in moments, heartfelt in others, but ultimately disappointing.

There’s this peculiar ache that comes when a show you’ve spent years defending at parties—right after someone says “wait, that’s the one with Robbie Amell in a cloud computer thing, right?”—finally bows out, and you realize it’s not going to stick the landing. Upload, Prime Video’s scrappy little satirical rom-com about love, death, capitalism, and the cloud (no, not the one that loses your Google Docs, the other one that loses your soul), has always been a weird hybrid of razor-sharp parody and sincere romance.

And now, four seasons in, it’s done. Just four episodes make up this final season, which feels less like a full-bodied farewell and more like a brisk coffee date where the other person is already checking their phone to call an Uber. The series ends with a shrug—technically an ending, yes, but one that undermines both the satire that made it sparkle and the characters who made it worth logging into Prime in the first place.

I’m not going to lie: I loved Upload. I loved it in that guilty way where you know you’ve hitched your heart to a show that’s never going to dominate Emmy ballots, never going to flood TikTok with reaction edits, never going to dethrone Amazon’s fantasy billion-dollar darling (The Rings of Power). But for four years, Upload was mine. My own little Black Mirror-but-funnier refuge, a reminder that TV could be both goofy and profound. And Season 4… well, Season 4 made me feel like someone had copied and pasted the wrong file into the folder marked Finale.

Remember When Upload Was Actually About Something?

The first three seasons of Upload thrived on this balancing act: broad, charming romantic comedy on one side, biting satire about tech dystopia on the other. Horizen—the evil Google/Amazon/Meta mega-conglomerate—wasn’t just a backdrop; it was the very spine of the show. Every gag about microtransactions in the afterlife or artificially scarce memory packages carried a sting because, let’s be real, we could see Jeff Bezos announcing “Prime Eternal” any day now.

But in Season 4, that sharp commentary has mostly evaporated. There are flickers of it—gerbil-powered cars (yes, really) being safer than self-driving Teslas was exactly the sort of dumb-smart joke the show used to nail—but the larger satirical edge feels dulled. Instead of skewering the world outside, the final season collapses inward, doubling down on soapy love triangles, scattered side quests, and a suspiciously sitcom-y status quo reset.

The worst part? It feels like the show forgot what made it unique. Upload without its satire is just another rom-com, and as much as I adore Robbie Amell’s eyebrows and Andy Allo’s warmth, this story needed its teeth.

The Nora & Nathan Problem (And the Clone Nobody Asked For)

Let’s talk about Nathan. Or rather, the Nathans. Yes, plural, because Season 4 decided to double up on our digital himbo. And while I get that cloning, duplication, and “which version of me is the real me?” is fertile ground for sci-fi, it doesn’t do much here except dilute the emotional core of the show: Nathan and Nora.

These two were supposed to be our anchor, the “dead guy and his angel” pairing that somehow made all the corporate dystopia feel human. Their chemistry is undeniable—every scene where Amell and Allo get to just be together reminds you why you started caring about this story in the first place. But Season 4 barely gives them the space. One Nathan ends up tied up in a side plot with Ingrid (Allegra Edwards, who continues to be far more interesting than the show ever expected), while Nora feels increasingly sidelined in her own story.

And when the show tries to compensate by giving Aleesha (Zainab Johnson) more narrative weight, it fumbles that too, handing her an ending so bizarrely out of character it feels like the writers copy-pasted it from a rejected draft of The Good Place.

Performances That Deserved Better Writing

The thing about Upload is that the cast never phones it in. Even here, in a wobbly final season, they bring it. Robbie Amell doing double duty as two Nathans could have been a gimmick, but he leans into it with real charm. Andy Allo radiates charisma even when she’s given crumbs. Zainab Johnson, Josh Banday, Allegra Edwards—every single one of them sells material that often doesn’t deserve them.

In fact, Ingrid ends up stealing much of the spotlight, and her arc is the closest the show comes to true character growth this season. Watching her evolve from shallow socialite to someone who genuinely cares was one of the most surprising and satisfying parts of the series. But even that gets shortchanged by the finale’s desperate need to reset the board.

A Finale That Feels Like Ctrl+Z

Here’s the real kicker: Upload ends by hitting undo. The finale loops back to a near-status quo, leaving characters either stuck in the same lonely place they started or paired off in ways that feel perfunctory. No grand revelations about technology, no satirical mic drop, no big swings. Just a neat little bow that unravels the more you tug on it.

And maybe that’s the most frustrating thing. The show always had the potential to end with something bold—maybe a warning, maybe a rallying cry, maybe just a truly weird, gonzo statement about digital immortality. Instead, it chooses safety. For a show about the terrifying, absurd possibilities of the future, playing it safe feels like betrayal.

Upload’s Legacy: A Brilliant Premise That Glitched Out

Even now, I don’t regret the hours I spent in Lakeview. The show was never perfect, but when it worked, it captured something rare: the absurdity of trying to be human in a world already half-digital. The jokes about capitalism in the afterlife landed because they weren’t exaggerations—they were previews.

But Season 4? Season 4 feels like a ghost of itself. The satire is muted, the romance is undercut, the pacing is off, and the ending is unsatisfying. It’s not a disaster—there are still laughs, still moments of genuine sweetness—but it’s not the ending this little-engine-that-could deserved.

Final Verdict

Upload Season 4 doesn’t crash so much as it quietly fizzles, like a notification you keep meaning to check but swipe away instead. The performances are strong, the occasional gag still lands, and the bones of the show remain clever. But without the biting commentary and with a finale that hits reset instead of pay dirt, the series leaves us with an ending that feels less like closure and more like an error message. I’ll miss it, but I’ll miss what it could have been even more.