In this YouTube review, the host provides an overview and critique of the first episode of the sci‑fi series Incorporated, titled "Vertical Mobility." The series is set in 2074, split between a pristine, corporate‑run Green Zone and a resource‑starved Red Zone. The protagonist, Ben Larson, a Red‑Zone native, infiltrates the Green Zone to rescue a lost love who has become a high‑end escort for elite executives. The reviewer outlines the world’s political structure (corporations controlling government), key locations (walls separating zones, synthetic food, population‑control permits), and major characters—including Ben’s corporate‑married wife, her powerful mother‑in‑law CEO, a formidable corporate security chief, a Red‑Zone fighter friend, and a mysterious mentor figure. Plot highlights include a scene where Ben uses a wave‑emitting device to incapacitate his boss and frame him, and the brutal cage‑match entertainment for Green‑Zone elites. The host draws parallels to classic sci‑fi works such as Gattaca, Elysium, Blade Runner, and The Hunger Games, praising the visual aesthetic and genre‑fan appeal. However, the reviewer criticizes the series for lacking originality, being predictable, and likely remaining an average sci‑fi TV offering rather than a standout. The conclusion recommends the show as a decent addition to a sci‑fi watchlist, especially for fans awaiting new content after Westworld, and ends with a standard YouTube call‑to‑action.
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Hey guys, welcome back. Today we're going to talk about the new science fiction show Incorporated, and this will be a review of episode 1 entitled Vertical Mobility. So Incorporated is set in a future where companies have seemingly unlimited power The corporate centers around Ben Larson, a young executive who risks everything to infiltrate the all-controlling corporate world and save the woman he loves. In the process, he will take on the entire system with deadly consequences. This is Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Ted Humphries, and Jennifer Todd. So right away we have Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. They were the wonder boys or whiz kids of Hollywood back in the 1990s. When they came up with the screenplay for Good Will Hunting. We generally just look at them as actors. However, both have done quite the job when it comes to directing and writing screenplays. They have both been involved in science fiction film, so I have full confidence they know what they're doing here. When we get into the show, we're first introduced to a place called the Green Zone. The Green Zone is more of the perfect future we imagine. Now the show takes place in the year 2074, so a lot of things are modeled after an advanced technological world we may imagine. So you have advances in transportation, medical science, plastic surgery. Food seems to be mostly synthetic, and actual food being hard to get or quite expensive. Green Zone looks very sterile, very clean. However, there are a few things politically vastly different. Corporations pretty much run the world. They tell senators what to do. They literally have the control of the government. Due to climate change, things are getting worse and it looks like a more bleak future. Everyone has to live around the Great Lakes. They try to sneak into Canada, which has become more favorable to live. Canada has created a big wall to keep illegal Americans out. The show is just full of walls and barriers and separations of groups of people to to the extreme level, whereas there exists another area called the Red Zone where it's the future where everything has been exhausted. There's a lack of resources, lack of technology, lack of many things that people in the Green Zone don't have to worry about. And of course, the people in the Red Zone want to get to the Green Zone. So the story centers around Ben Larson, as mentioned earlier. Ben Larson comes from the Red Zone. He infiltrates his way into the Green Zone, and as the show opens up, we're getting flashbacks to his past. However, this is just episode 1, so they aren't letting us know how he got into the Green Zone yet. So first, I just want to try to paint a picture of the feel of the place. It does give me a feeling like films I've seen or other ideal futures imagined, such as Gattaca. You know, Gattaca is one of these places where you You have classes where certain people aren't considered as good as others, so they are divided literally from certain groups. Elysium, the movie which starred Matt Damon, same premise. And the overall feel has a kind of Blade Runner-esque type feel as far as the future looks. So if you're a real science fiction junkie, you're going to love the scenery. However, if you're a science fiction person who's looking for something unique or new you haven't seen before, then you won't get that in this series because this series is going to be very similar to many things you've already seen. So again, we don't know how the main character Ben gets into the Green Zone. However, we do know one of his motivations in particular, and that he's trying to find a woman he loved from his past. Apparently she was either taken by force or choice to the Green Zone, but to serve as a high-end escort only available to certain high-level executives with a certain clearance level. So Ben has been moving up the corporate ladder trying to get to this point so he can get back his lost love. At the moment, he is married to a woman he met from the Green Zone. Whose mother owns the corporation he works for. So not sure how this is going to work out, if it's going to be a love triangle. However, the show is giving us very limited bits and pieces. So corporate security is very important, and if one infiltrates a company or compromises it through espionage or what have you, the consequences are generally seen to be fatal or very bad. So the head of security is played by the president from 24, or the guy who plays the Allstate commercials. He does a great job as a very threatening security chief. And the thing about being security chief of corporations that literally and politically control the world and have their own armies and power, he's more like the Secretary of War or Commander of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. So our main character is seemingly, you know, it's pretty clear he's gonna have to go toe-to-toe with the corporate security chief. And as mentioned, he's quite intimidating. Interrogating. And although it's not quite shown what he does with people he interrogates, it's not hard to understand it's something very bad, worse than being in the red zone. So being in one major scene to move up the court ladder, he uses an interesting technology, and what it does is it makes his boss very ill because he needs his boss's position in order to have access to certain levels of— in the, in the, in the corporation where he can find his lost love. And, um, so he needs to get his boss out of the, out of the office so he can frame him with incriminating evidence to get him fired, which may in this future mean him dying or being lobotomized, because, uh, when you Make a mistake in this future or in these corporations, uh, it's not good. We really don't know as of yet. However, the technology he uses is, is using some type of wave of technology, like, um, it's emitting some type of wave. Uh, he has to wear these earphones, and so it's working well. His boss keeps getting sick, having to go to the restroom, but in the process, his earpiece malfunctioned, so he becomes very ill as well, meaning Ben, and he barely is able to get the incriminating data put on his boss's computer before he returns. So it's a well-done scene. It was pretty edge-of-your-seat type stuff. You know, we also get introduced to a few more characters, one being his wife, his new wife, who now is attempting to have a baby with him, and apparently In this future, uh, maybe I, I would imagine it's due to population control of the Green Zone. You need a permit to have a child. So she also has this dark, mysterious past where she's either captured or goes to the Red Zone and ends up being tortured or assaulted. So she suffers a type of post-traumatic stress condition where she can only stop or cope with it by cutting herself. But cutting yourself in this future is quite safe, you know, as they have a healing spray you can just use to heal you very rapidly. So she has a habit, you know, where she'll cut herself and then she'll use the spray right after. We find out about another character in the Red Zone. I'm not familiar with his name. However, he was a friend of Ben's. While Ben was in the Red Zone. However, not only a friend, but the brother of his lost love that he's looking for now in the Green Zone. So he's caught up in a fighting cage match, and how he gets involved in that is through Ben getting him real tobacco from the Green Zone and many other expensive things he can sell and live off in the Red Zone. However, he's now coming to competition with organized crime. They threaten him but find out he's a fighter in the process, so he's kind of forced into fighting in these cage matches, which is interesting. It also seemingly is entertainment for executives in the Green Zone that venture into the Red Zone for excitement or risk or thrills. And then we have Ben's mother-in-law, or the mother of his wife, and she is the CEO of the corporation he works for, and she's very clever, Her daughter and her don't have a real good relationship. It's clear there's been a strain, and the mother doesn't seemingly feel she's capable or competent of taking care of herself. So she wields a lot of power on a global scale, and she's very committed to the system how it exists and very much against company espionage, which we can already see that Ben or her son-in-law will be her enemy once she finds out he's not supposed to be there. And the last character we see who's very mysterious— and again, I'm sorry about the names, but it's a new show and it's really hard to keep up with the names, and I don't think this guy has a name— but he plays this character. For those of you all who know the movie Gattaca, Terry Shalhoub played that character who got Ethan Hawke into Gattaca, and this, this character is much like him. And he meets him in a park, and he seems himself to be from the Green Zone, but he knows they're being infiltrated into the Green Zone. And he tells him the higher up the corporate ladder he climbs, the more likely it is he'll be caught, as privacy is even more limited the higher you go. So my thoughts and feelings about the show, the good things about the show, the bad things about the show. Let me start with the good things. I like the fact it looks and feels like Gattaca and Blade Runner and Elysium and The Hunger Games. You know, I'm one of those science fiction junkies who likes those type of future representations. I also like that the scheduling of the show, you know, I feel Westworld is the leading science fiction show on television, but it's only one episode left, so We need something to fill that TV time, and I think Incorporated can be a good candidate for that. So let's get into what I don't like about the show. What I don't like about the show is the very thing I like about the show, and that is it is not unique. It's very predictable. You know, it's all these same futures we've seen and imagined So you won't get, you know, anything you haven't seen before. Also, what's bad about the show is I don't ever think it'll be a great show. It will be one of these okay, it's on Science Fiction Channel shows, but it will never be just this off-the-charts science fiction show. But I think it is worth watching. I think it's worth being someplace on your science fiction TV watching schedule. So guys, that's it. That's my review on the new show, episode 1, Incorporated: Vertical Limit. And if you like this content you've seen today, please be sure to like and subscribe to my channel as we'll be bringing you much more reviews like this one in the future. So take care, folks.
