AMC+’s Pantheon challenges animated sci-fi for adults

“Pantheon” starts with the introduction of Maddie (Katie Chang), a teenager struggling with both school bullies and the grief of her father’s recent death when she discovers the impossible. Her father, David (Daniel Dae Kim) contacts her from the great beyond. Well, sort of. It turns out that his consciousness was uploaded to the cloud by a nefarious company, who told his widow Ellen (Rosemarie DeWitt) that the experiment to do exactly that had failed. Why is David still a ghost in the machine? Who controls him? How did he get free enough to contact Maddie? And while Maddie embraces having him back, her mother struggles to believe that this disembodied version of her husband is the same as the man she lost.

Meanwhile, a young man named Caspian (Paul Dano) helps Maddie, but he also struggles with a very different parenting dynamic as his struggles all the time. At least he thinks they are. For some reason, parents Cary (Aaron Eckhart) and Renee (Taylor Schilling) play the roles of a dysfunctional home, complete with an abusive father, but they follow orders from somewhere else to push Caspian toward what feels like a predestined fate. What do they know about Caspian’s future? Why are they trying to manipulate it? And what are the authors saying here about the way real people can be ‘programmed’ as much as electronic ones?

The voice work throughout “Pantheon” — which also includes Maude Apatow, Scoot McNairy, Chris Diamantopoulos, Corey Stoll, Ron Livingston and the final work of William Hurt — is excellent, playing off the drama of the show as they would if it were a live-action show . Some of them struggle a bit with the occasionally overwritten piece of dialogue about what it means to be human. The show is stronger when it allows its themes to emerge organically from the dense plot rather than literally placing them in the spotlight. For example, in a flashback, David and Maddie conspire to put a cheat code in a game that makes it so you can’t die, prompting Mom to literally ask, “What’s the point of the game if you can’t die?” Ditto life, right?