There's something of a Cyberpunk resurgence, what with Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell getting shiny new movies, and now Altered Carbon is elbowing its way onto the scene. I've not read any of the books, and right now I'm not sure if I want to. Before we even start, I admit I've gotten bored of the cyberpunk genre, at least in the way it keeps getting portrayed: dismal rain, neon billboards, miserable prostitutes, concrete pillars, mega corporations and grumpy detectives. It's like Steampunk's obsession with airships; if you are setting out to tell a cyperpunk story with all the same tropes every time, you are at best only going to produce something derivative.
Altered Carbon is about a criminal super-soldier called Takeshi Kovacs who gets killed, frozen, put in a new body, and then released on probation. He has been thawed out because some rich guy wants to hire him as a detective to solve his own murder (he too has been killed, only to be downloaded into a new body). Before the audience and the protagonist have had chance to find our bearings, there is a ton of world building exposition to get through. Altered Carbon has new words for practically everything: There are envoys, and skins, and stacks, and sleeves, and needlecasting, and Meths, and AI hotels, and Jesus goodlord there is too much of this to remember. We don’t learn about these things organically as we set foot in this world, we have it explained to us by some foul-mouthed cop who's name I can't remember because of all the other words added to my glossary. It probably is better set out in a book, but this show rams it down your throat.
Despite the constant explanations, I still have a lot of unanswered questions about this universe. Firstly, what's the point in freezing a criminal? If they're asleep the whole time, you can't rehabilitate or punish them, and in the end you are just releasing the exact same person back out onto the streets. Also, how are we supposed to relate to the protagonist? Kovacs is a super powered badass with amnesia and intrusive memories about characters we know nothing about, and has hallucinations about yet more characters we don’t know about. On being released, the first thing he does is sulk and turn down a ludicrously generous offer just so he can go back in the prison freezer. Whether or not Kovacs finds anything particularly untoward about the task he's being railroaded isn't clear. If killing a trillionaire has no permanent effect other than making him forget what happened that day, then that is presumably the entire reason for doing it. Seems like you don't need to hire a terrorist supersoldier to work that out, so it should seem kinda suspicious that he did.
The only relatable character is an AI version of Edgar Allan Poe, here presented as a lonely, overly-attached-girlfriend type whose desperate for quality human interaction. Like him, you won't find them amongst this miserable cast and story.
A Carbon Copy of Staid Tropes
There's something of a Cyberpunk resurgence, what with Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell getting shiny new movies, and now Altered Carbon is elbowing its way onto the scene. I've not read any of the books, and right now I'm not sure if I want to. Before we even start, I admit I've gotten bored of the cyberpunk genre, at least in the way it keeps getting portrayed: dismal rain, neon billboards, miserable prostitutes, concrete pillars, mega corporations and grumpy detectives. It's like Steampunk's obsession with airships; if you are setting out to tell a cyperpunk story with all the same tropes every time, you are at best only going to produce something derivative.
Altered Carbon is about a criminal super-soldier called Takeshi Kovacs who gets killed, frozen, put in a new body, and then released on probation. He has been thawed out because some rich guy wants to hire him as a detective to solve his own murder (he too has been killed, only to be downloaded into a new body). Before the audience and the protagonist have had chance to find our bearings, there is a ton of world building exposition to get through. Altered Carbon has new words for practically everything: There are envoys, and skins, and stacks, and sleeves, and needlecasting, and Meths, and AI hotels, and Jesus goodlord there is too much of this to remember. We don’t learn about these things organically as we set foot in this world, we have it explained to us by some foul-mouthed cop who's name I can't remember because of all the other words added to my glossary. It probably is better set out in a book, but this show rams it down your throat.
Despite the constant explanations, I still have a lot of unanswered questions about this universe. Firstly, what's the point in freezing a criminal? If they're asleep the whole time, you can't rehabilitate or punish them, and in the end you are just releasing the exact same person back out onto the streets. Also, how are we supposed to relate to the protagonist? Kovacs is a super powered badass with amnesia and intrusive memories about characters we know nothing about, and has hallucinations about yet more characters we don’t know about. On being released, the first thing he does is sulk and turn down a ludicrously generous offer just so he can go back in the prison freezer. Whether or not Kovacs finds anything particularly untoward about the task he's being railroaded isn't clear. If killing a trillionaire has no permanent effect other than making him forget what happened that day, then that is presumably the entire reason for doing it. Seems like you don't need to hire a terrorist supersoldier to work that out, so it should seem kinda suspicious that he did.
The only relatable character is an AI version of Edgar Allan Poe, here presented as a lonely, overly-attached-girlfriend type whose desperate for quality human interaction. Like him, you won't find them amongst this miserable cast and story.