Altered Carbon

Altered Carbon

Created by Richard K. Morgan

If you like Blade Runner, you will like Altered Carbon. This is the thought that dominated my time with Altered Carbon, the latest Netflix Original Series. But now that I think about it, I don't think this show appeals to just fans of Blade Runner. To correct my previous statement; if you like Blade Runner, Total Recall, Deus Ex, Cyberpunk in general, film noir, Firefly, or just creative and interesting ideas and worldbuilding, then you will like this.

This show is a combination of things that I like but didn't know how much I would like when put together. It's a cynical view of humanity in the far future, it's a cyberpunk dystopia, it asks deep and philosophical questions, it's very violent, and there's a lot of nudity. What's not to like?

The show opens with Takeshi Kovacs, a terrorist and criminal, who is tracked down by a squad of Protectorate soldiers and killed. He wakes up in another man's body 250 years later and is told that a wealthy man named Laurens Bancroft wants to see him. He meets police lieutenant Kristin Ortega and is flown to the Aerium, a series of lavish mansions in the sky that are as far removed from the clutter and dirt of the city as possible. He meets Bancroft who informs him that he was murdered and wants Takeshi to solve the case. Takeshi ends up accepting and is led through a convoluted series of twists, turns, surprises and betrayals before finally solving the crime.

Even though I tried my best to keep the plot synopsis as simple as possible I realize that a lot of this is just flat out strange and confusing so I will attempt to explain.

The world of the late 24th century is much different from ours. While exploring the stars humanity found evidence and artifacts from an alien race known as the Elders and have used knowledge they gained from the Elders to essentially grant immortality. Human consciousness is stored in "stacks", basically computer chips stored in the nape of the neck, and this allows them to survive the death of their bodies if the stack is not destroyed. This has led to physical bodies being referred to as "sleeves", as people can transfer their consciousness in and out of sleeves almost at will. Most people must live out their entire lives before resleeving so they only choose to do it a few times. But the wealthiest people can not only resleeve whenever they feel like it, but can also clone their own bodies to live forever; they're called Meths. Have I lost you yet? Good, because there's more.

The resleeving process takes time to get used to, as waking up in someone else's skin must be, but there are certain people who are trained to be able to do this without the negative side effects, they are called Envoys and are used in intergalactic warfare. Takeshi Kovacs (Will Yun Lee, 

Byron Mann, and Joel Kinnaman) is one such Envoy, the last alive. In the show it seems that the only Envoys were part of a rebellion against the Protectorate, basically the United Nations' intergalactic military arm, but the rebellion was crushed leaving only Takeshi. He is killed sometime later and resleeved centuries later at the command of Laurens Bancroft (James Purefoy), a Meth who has been alive for over three centuries. He tells Takeshi that he was murdered and his stack destroyed, but he didn't die because his consciousness is uploaded every 48 hours to a satellite, basically making him immortal. The side effect is that he can't remember the two days before his death and wants Takeshi to use his Envoy training to solve the murder and find the culprit. He offers a fortune and an official pardon for completion of the investigation.

Along the way Takeshi meets Lieutenant Kristin Ortega (Martha Higareda), an officer of the Bay City (formerly San Francisco) Police Department who knows who he is but also knows whose sleeve he currently inhabits. Takeshi stays in a hotel named The Raven run by an artificial intelligence named Poe (Chris Conner), and soon after meets Vernon Elliot (Ato Essandoh), a man whose daughter was killed and believes that Bancroft had a hand in it. All the while Takeshi is being haunted by vision of both Rei (Diechen Lachman), his dead sister, and Quellcrist Falconer (Renee Elise Goldsberry), his dead lover.

The story is a lot to take in and the first episode doesn't exactly hold your hand. The opening episode of the series has an attitude where it just throws you into the thick of it with little explanation. It doesn't explain what an Envoy is, what a Meth is, who Takeshi is other than some basic information, what Bancroft is about, what Resolution 653 is, what Neo-Catholics are, or much about the world at all. I think my explanation is as succinct as is possible and I'm leaving out a lot. As someone who eats all of this Cyberpunk stuff up, I found it to be really overwhelming and it got off to a very shaky start, but it's after this initial dive into the deep end that you start to get ahold of everything and start to truly enjoy what Altered Carbon has to offer.

The series is centered around a really interesting and unique concept, that of human consciousness not being stored in a single body, and it takes that idea and runs with it in several interesting directions. It adds another layer of mystery when you realize that a person can inhabit anyone else's body, and there are a lot of really cool ideas and great scenes that highlight this concept. One of my favorite scenes of the whole series comes in episode four where Ortega resleeves her grandmother into the body of a tattooed white supremacist man and brings her to family's Day of the Dead dinner. Watching a tattooed gang member acting like the world's coolest grandmother is hilarious but also raises interesting ideas, like a whether it's right for humans to stay alive indefinitely, the nature of life and death, and the religious implications of such a thing. It also explores some horrifying ideas, like a virtual reality torture room where you can be tortured to death, revived, and tortured to death again over and over until you break while your body is perfectly fine in the real world. It's the stuff of nightmares really, but there are also some more benevolent applications, such as "psychosurgery" where mental trauma is treated in virtual reality to heal mental and emotional wounds. The show is rife with these interesting concepts and it's a joy to watch and think about.

While transhumanism is a major theme in the show another theme that is touched on is the nature of humanity. The more you learn about the Meths the more then appear as amoral monsters who use their vast wealth and influence to skirt or outright break the law without repercussion. Laurens Bancroft initially seems like a detached businessman who occasionally partakes in humanitarian work to keep up an image of the wealthy humanitarian, but in one early episode he pays a husband and wife to fight each other to the death of their sleeves with the winner getting an "upgraded" sleeve and the loser getting a "downgraded" sleeve. Another aspect of this theme is Poe, who wants desperately to understand and help humanity and grows to become, in my opinion, more human than the Meths. 

You can see the influences of Blade Runner all over the series. From the entire aesthetic ripped straight out of both of the movies, to some of the themes that both of them explore, to what I think are direct nods to the films. I also detected a bit of Deus Ex in them when it dealt with transhumanism, which I think is great to see onscreen. I think this is as close to television versions of both of those franchises as we'll ever get while still having it's own identity set apart from the two.

I was enthralled the entire way after that first episode, I couldn't wait to see where it would go next. It doesn't stay on Earth the entire time, we also get to see glimpses of other worlds too, and I think I detected a little influence from Joss Whedon's phenomenal show Firefly (seriously, go watch that. It's a hidden gem if ever there was one) which I liked very much.

If I did have a problem with the story, it's that it can sometimes be a bit convoluted for it's own good, doesn't explain some things very well, and it leaves a few threads hanging that I would have liked them to at least acknowledge. First, I don't think it explains what Resolution 653 is until the end of the last episode. Perhaps it does early on but if it did I missed it, and in that case they could have been clearer about it. They also take forever to explain just what an Envoy is, but for like half the season they repeatedly say "wow, he's an Envoy" or "all the Envoys are dead, they were so cool" and things like that.

The point about it being convoluted really applies to two plot threads that I can think of, and those are the sleeve murder of Mary Lou Henchy and Lizzy Elliot, Vernon's daughter. Both of them are prostitutes and their sleeves were killed but their stacks were removed with Mary Lou's missing. We are told that Bancroft may be connected to Lizzy's death in some way, but Mary Lou's just comes out of nowhere and it doesn't seem to have any relevance to the larger story until the last episode or two which makes it kind of confusing to watch up until that point.

As for hanging plot threads, the most major one is that of Jaeger. Jaeger is the Protectorate soldier who kills Takeshi at the beginning of the season and is mentioned a handful of times throughout the rest of the season, particularly in episode seven. It's clear from the first scene that Jaeger and Takeshi know each other, but they don't mention what became of him after that. Is he dead? Is he alive? Why isn't he in the rest of the season? The show doesn't even attempt to answer this and while it isn't an important question I'd still like to know, I like the scenes with him and Takeshi.

I loved the characters in this show. The standout is Takeshi, played by Byron Mann, Joel Kinnaman, and Will Yun Lee. We spend the most time with Kinnaman as Takeshi and is suitably my favorite version of the character. You'll recognize Kinnaman as Rick Flag from the god-awful Suicide Squad but he is much better here as a hardboiled cyberpunk private detective with a bit of a smart-ass streak a la Harrison Ford's Rick Deckard from the Blade Runner movies. He is able to totally sell the lovable asshole character and the tortured survivor of a lost war character without fail. I really liked him and I think he was the perfect choice.

I can say the same for Byron Mann and Will Yun Lee, though they get far less screentime in this season, I hope that changes for season 2. Byron Mann has the least screentime but he's great as the hardened mercenary Takeshi at the beginning of the show before being gunned down. I would love for them to explore more of Takeshi's life after the war but before his death, seeing Mann get to be more fully fleshed out and doing cool mercenary things would make for great episodes I think. Will Yun Lee really gets to shine in the episodes where they have flashbacks to Takeshi's formative experiences as an Envoy, especially in episode seven. He is a lot more emotional than most of Kinnaman's time on screen, and has some cool scenes with Quell, the Envoy leader.

The supporting cast is similarly fantastic, with Martha Higareda as the most visible of the support. She plays a vet of the BCPD who doesn't trust Takeshi as far as she can throw him and has had a relationship with the man whose sleeve Takeshi now uses. I found her very likable throughout the whole series and her no-nonsense attitude is a bit clichéd but it's a cliché for a reason, it's just cool. I liked the remainder of the cast but I especially liked Chris Conners as Poe. He's just a cool character and I love his arch, I don't want to say any more for fear of spoilers

I love the show's aesthetic and cinematography. If you know me (or read my review of Blade Runner 2049), you know that I love the Blade Runner artistic design. Something about rainswept, dirty city streets just does it for me and this show does that flawlessly while also adding unique elements of it's own. Perhaps what sets it's design apart from Blade Runner's the most is the addition of the Aerium, the place above the clouds that the wealthy Meths use to house their mansions. Whereas Niander Wallace and Eldon Tyrell had their homes in gargantuan pyramids that rose above Los Angeles, the Meths are literally separating themselves from the rest of the population, sitting almost as gods over the unwashed masses (the show actually brings that up at one point). It's a cool world choice that I loved.

The action scenes are pretty cool too. There aren't too many, but the ones that are there are pretty well done I think. My favorite action scene is a shootout with Takeshi and his sister teaming up to gun down both Yakuza and Protectorate henchmen and uses some slow motion to pretty decent effect. There are other action scenes I liked but that one stood out to me the most.

The soundtrack was pretty good. I don't remember many of the original tracks though I choose to believe that I didn't notice them because they contributed to the other elements to totally engross me in the show. There are a couple of standouts in the form of cover songs though, my favorite use of one was a cover of Rob Zombie's "More Human Than Human" (is that another Blade Runner reference thrown in?) with an electronic beat reminiscent of John Carpenter's Halloween theme used in a very cool fight in episode six.

This show is nothing short of fantastic. I seriously believe that this is in the running for the next great sci-fi show. This is a show that I think you should watch, because you can almost see the care and attention to detail that went in to every single frame of this fantastic show. It introduces cool and original concepts and then analyzes what their impact might be. The acting is fantastic across the board, it's world is interesting, and it's probably one of the best things on Netflix right now. It's going to be a long year as I wait for season two to come out.