I'd like to know how much this was impacted by covid problems, since the final product is really scattershot. C plots are introduced (the cyber investigator, black gal's management arc) with zero payoff, weird bits are brought up from the prior season to negative impact (the dead kid is brought back for one scene to handwave away why he's older to never be seen again (why include that scene at all!), the elevator death is brought back just to reiterate the Cigarette Smoking Man is a bad guy), and as mentioned, the season finale both doesn't wrap up anything AND creates any number of future plotlines (is there going to be a Nora Nathan, a backup digital Nathan, and an Ingrid Nathan?).
But my biggest issue is that this season, with the numerous ways the dead and the living visit each other's domains, is that they are entirely changing the nature of society. It's not just a weird VR chatroom dead people hang out in, it's essentially immortality and a remote work location. How does society change when everything is owned by Choaks, who never die, where no one ever inherits anything, can never be promoted beyond the dead, and can never top the accumulated wealth of people with hundreds of years of interest/investment? When people _know_ they have an infinite amount of afterlife in the future compared to mere decades on Earth, why would anyone do anything in the meatworld to risk that afterlife? When the dead are really AIs, some with massive influence on Earth, what sort of rights can they bargain for? If Choak rents out a robot and murders someone on Earth, how is he prosecuted?
Frankly, a lot of this is better covered in Stephenson's
Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Wikipedia, which aside from being a complete political 180 from his views in Cryptonomicon (future Democrats drink in coffee shops all day, while future Republicans have devolved into the Taliban), has a lot of interesting things to say about what happens when the afterlife is definitively real. Though Banks'
Surface Detail - Wikipedia points out that governments could use that tech to make their own Hells for citizens not following their society's dogma.
