I'm not sure that "Pantheon" is ever legally going to make it to most of the world, since Amazon Prime acquired the show from AMC, it has only released the second season in the Australia/New Zealand region, and nowhere else. However, VPNs are a thing, and if you're a fan of the first season of "Pantheon," you're going to want to see the second.
This picks right up where the first season left off, following Caspian and Maddie in the wake of the global blackout as the world becomes aware of the U.Is. The story takes several twists and turns, which I won't spoil, but they involve the further attempts of Stephen Holstrom's team to find a cure for the existing flaws in the U.Is, and the attempts of the world powers to respond to the reality of U.Is. There are several time jumps, several wild leaps into more theoretical realms of science-fiction, and the love story you may have suspected was developing in season one resolves in a satisfying way. I was critical of the first season for being so careful not to step too far into abstraction and ambiguity, but that's not true of the second season. As the show explores more facets of U.I., the worldbuilding really steps up. The second season also explores artificial intelligences, introducing the character of MIST (Thomasin McKenzie), an A.I. who latches on to Maddie.
Fans who liked the paranoid thriller elements of "Pantheon" may be disappointed that the show focuses less and less on thrills as time goes on. There's plenty of geopolitical conflict and occasional action scenes - the U.I. fight each other and a new anti-U.I. program called Safe Surf - but most of the mystery and conspiracy elements are phased out. However, I like that "Pantheon" leans into extrapolating all the consequences of U.I. instead, from early fears about them taking over the world to the possibilities of integration into human society. I like the way that the characters grow and change, including Ellen (Rosemarie DeWitt) involving herself in politics and reconnecting to Peter Waxman (Ron Livingston), and Maddie eventually figuring out her own path toward enlightenment. The ending is one of the headiest, weirdest, and most fitting jaunts into the unknown that I've ever seen, even in science-fiction. Not everyone is going to appreciate this, but I'm thrilled that "Pantheon" exists for those who will.
And now, I feel I should say a little about "Pluto," which was an anime that I had been looking forward to since it was announced. Based on a manga by Naoki Urasawa, which was itself a modernized adaptation of one of Osamu Tezuka's "Astro Boy" stories, the show is a detective mystery about a future world where robots are common, and a mysterious force that is going around killing off the most powerful ones, along with their human creators and defenders. An android detective named Gesicht (Shinshu Fuji) determines that the perpetrator is a mysterious new robot named Pluto (Toshihiko Seki). In order to stop Pluto, Gesicht enlists the help of the robot boy hero Atom (Yoko Hisaka), his sister Uran (Minori Suzuki), and the other robots that Pluto is targeting.
I've seen most of the anime based off of earlier Urasawa manga, including "Monster" and "Master Keaton," and enjoyed them. Urasawa is great at tales of suspense and criminal masterminds. Unfortunately, he's not so good at action, and despite so much of "Pluto" being about these powerful robots who can cause great destruction, any real fights are brief or anticlimactic. Pluto himself is often treated like a sinister supernatural entity, capable of generating huge storms and tornadoes that obfuscate what's really going on with the early robot deaths. The mystery itself is also underwhelming - very talky with a lot of characters to keep track of. It was a bad idea to have forty-minute episodes, since the pacing frequently slows to a crawl. I'm not fond of what Urasawa did with Tezuka's premise either, which revolves around the major players all being involved with a Middle-Eastern war in the past, lots of convenient amnesia, and way too much ham-handed hand-wringing about robot and human relations. The Middle-Eastern characters in particular come across as very tropey and outdated.
The animation doesn't help. Urasawa's characters always look a certain way, and that's fine, but they don't offer much opportunity for interesting visuals. Tezuka's robots, on the other hand, are usually very dynamic and exciting. I was very disappointed to discover that the robots in "Pluto" are very much Urasawa characters, who mostly stand around talking in very ordinary environments. When they do fight, it tends to look less like "Ghost in the Shell" and more like a gritty, depressing, real-world war drama. Add some bad CGI and no humor whatsoever, and you wind up with a slog. "Pluto" might have come off better if there weren't half a dozen other, much more interesting animated shows for adults that came out in the same month, but that's how it is.
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