Altered Carbon - Season 1

Who wants to live forever?

This age-old question is being answered in Altered Carbon with the following solution: what if you can digitise your essence, your consciousness and store in it on a disc and place that disc in a new body? Then your body will become nothing more than a shell you can discard.

Choose a new body, or 'sleeve', transfer your disc, or 'stack', and live as long and happily ever after as you want. This, of course, offers limitless possibilities: you can transfer to a young body, an old body, another sex, or even have copies of your own body at the ready. What kind of body will I wear today?

Obviously, a new body is expensive and that makes it only available for the ultra rich. One of those ultra rich is Laurens Bancroft (James Purefoy, Hap & Leonard) and he wants to have a special murder case solved: the murder of himself. When regular police work fails, Takeshi Kovacs (Joel Kinnaman, House of Cards) is pulled out of storage and outfitted with a new sleeve from the freezer, so he can solve the case and subsequently gain his freedom. Not a bad reward, considering he spent the last 250 years in the freezer.

How to solve a murder which seems virtually unsolvable? Facial recognition is useless when a murderer changes sleeves. Moreover, recently defrosted Takeshi is confronted with a lot more attention than just from his employer. For instance, his new sleeve attracts the attention of criminals out for revenge and the police. Detective Kristin Ortega (Martha Higareda, Royal Pains) is watching every move he makes. As the last one responsible for trying to solve the murder on Bancroft, she has a hard time letting go of the case. Or is there more going on?

A good sci-fi series should be able to combine two issues in an exciting way: the introduction of technological innovations and the impact of these innovations on our moral principles. Just like in the hit show Black Mirror or the classic movie Blade Runner, and this show could be its derivative. Just like Blade Runner, you can expect a series which shows a tough society, visual innovations and flamboyant, weird characters. In contrast with this visual splendour, there is the tough and sometimes uncivilized 'brave new world'.
Considering the subject matter, you can expect a lot of nudity and debauchery, but also intense violence, too much violence, at times. Fortunately, there's also room for much-needed comic relief in this otherwise brutal series. Hotel proprietor Poe – who even looks like his namesake the author Edgar Allen Poe – regularly tries to thaw the iceman Takeshi. And a special mention of the scene where Kristin's grandmother's disc is placed inside the body of a biker and both a hilarious and absurd family dinner ensues.

This show doesn't reach top level.

Philosophical issues are also always there in the background, but unfortunately the show makes not enough use of them.
For example, as a logical reaction to the power of the elite, there are people who try to resist this way of prolongation of life. Groups who resist for religious reasons – God decides on matters of life and death – and rebel groups who fight the oppression by the rich.
There is this sly dig at the American health care system when Takeshi drags his seriously injured partner to the ER and gets told she doesn't have enough credit for treatment and has to take a seat in the waiting room “because everyone gets treated in this hospital.”

Netflix has dedicated a big budget to the show, gathered an impressive cast and thanks to the novels by Richard K. Morgan, there are enough stories to draw from. Still, this show doesn't reach top level. One of the reasons is the cast: their acting is quite limited. For example, Joel Kinnaman can play the detached elite soldier very well, but fails when he has to do more than that. James Purefoy is just as hammy as in The Following and ironically enough, newcomer Martha Higareda seems to have already had some cosmetic surgery done, which makes her facial expression quite static.

Sometimes the show goes off the rails for a bit with extremely violent scenes, for example one particular episode with virtual torture scenes or one with clichéd love scenes including the requisite saxophone solos, which makes them unintentionally funny.
Fortunately, the show doesn't completely derail. Especially in the second half of the season, the show proves its potential when actor Will Yun Lee (Hawaii Five-O) provides the necessary background to the character of Takeshi Kovacs in a flashback episode and several story lines come together. From that moment on the series really starts to work and ends in an excellent finale.

At the same time, this shows that in spite of the visual splendour and the entertaining story, a lot more would have been possible. That doesn't mean Altered Carbon is a bad series. Thanks to the exciting cliffhangers and plot twists you can't help but watch how it all unfolds.