The Review: Altered Carbon

Altered Carbon 9/10

There will for sure be some spoilers. Holy shit damn balls! What a strange show Altered Carbon was! I had not even seen a trailer for this. All I knew about this show is that it had a creepy ass moving billboard near my bus stop and that it was on Netflix. That's it. After a coworker suggested it who has great taste in TV shows I checked out the first episode and was immediately baffled by everything that I was seeing. I am still trying to figure out how to even write a review about the entire season because it bounces between the future-future and future-past.

I was not excited about this show considering it stars Joel Kinnaman. The only exposure I have to the guy was Robocop and Suicide Squad which weren't exactly good movies. This is based off of a series of books and I need to read them now. Had no idea what this show would be about and when describing it to people sound like a crazy person. I'll try to explain a bit about this. It takes place in 2384. When people are about one years old they are implanted with what is called a “stack.” These are in the back of your neck and where your consciousness is downloaded.

Once you are downloaded if something happens to your body if you have enough money you can be implanted into another body which they call “sleeves.” People are not all that hung up on the bodies they are place into. Its just like “Cool, I am still alive.” There are people that are hundreds of years old but those are mostly rich people who live for so long that they just start doing weird shit. They have places in the sky where you can have sex and kill people but the rich people go too far and kill them permanently. Some people are so rich they can clone their original body and just pop into it. Fucking nuts.

Kinnaman's plays a guy named Takeshi Kovacs. I am not going to even try to explain why he has that name. Okay, fine. I'll try. Years and years ago a guy named Takeshi and his sister grew up in an abusive household. After murder death killing their father he is taken away by this special force team of killers. He later slaughters a ton of them after seeing his sister for the first time since they were children. They work together until some point way after he gets captured and imprisoned for 250 years. This is where we pick up the story.

Kovacs is hired by this guy named Laurens Bancroft to solve his murder. Bancroft, played by James Purefoy, is one of the wealthiest people in the universe. Oh, they are on different planets. This is not all on Earth. It makes sense when you watch. Solving his murder should be easy because they have the ability to bring witnesses back from the “dead.” Whoever killed him did it at this perfect window of time where his system was being rebooted for a few seconds. It was the perfect crime.

There is this detective named Kristin Ortega played by Martha Higareda. As soon as Kovacs is woken from his sleep in that bag of goo she escorts him to Bancroft and lets everyone know that she doesn't like nobody. When it is revealed why she is so hard up on Kovacs it is pretty damned cool. She is a total bad ass and her story gets better as the season goes on. She isn't one of those characters where it is like they are just making a lady super tough just to have a super tough character that happens to be a woman. Jesus, there are too many interesting people on this show and I can't get too into them without spoiling more shit.

One of my favorite characters was this AI named Poe played by Chris Conner. He runs The Raven which is a hotel that no one has gone into in fifty years. The hotel is licensed to protect its guests and just its guests which led to a scene that I had to watch again because it was so cool. Unlike other AI that run businesses Poe loves humans and wants to be like them. The hotel is described like a crazy ex girlfriend in its desire to protect and be with its guests. Since Kovacs is the only one there he gets a lot of attention.

So much more to say about this show and I should have covered it by every episode but I had no idea I would watch this show let alone dig it as much as I did. This show is super bloody, sexual, and complex. Apparently the books are the same way and it is not something they can leave out or try to avoid because it would downplay how fucking nuts the rich people in the future are or the lengths people will go to just to continue to live forever. I love the groups of people that do not think you should live forever because no matter how nice and logical you think you are once someone says “Maybe we shouldn't live forever...” people get upset.

You can not do other things while watching this show. So much is happening and detail based so if you miss something or don't pay attention for sure you will miss a piece of information that comes into play in later episodes. I have read in some reviews after watching the show that it is different than the book which makes me glad I watched this first because now at least I have visuals for the people when I read it soon. If you watch this I suggest watching the first two episodes before deciding if you're gonna check out or not because the first episode is such a mind fuck. But I assure you that it all makes sense later.

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