Altered Carbon (netflix series) created by Laeta Kalogridis

Altered Carbon (netflix series)

created by Laeta Kalogridis

  Altered Carbon (netflix series) created by Laeta Kalogridis Since this is only the 3rd time I've reviewed something that isn't a book and the second time I've looked at an adaptation. Let me explain how this is going to be set up. I will be discussing Altered Carbon the series, both how it works on it's own as a series and how it does as an adaptation. As such this review will have two grades. One on how good a television series I found it to be and one on how faithful and good of an adaptation it was. First we'll be tackling how it stands on it's own, let's start with the series creator. Fair warning there will be some minor spoilers below. You are warned! Laeta Kalogridis was born in Winter Haven, Florida in 1965. She would graduate college from Davidson College in North Carolina and end up in the UCLA school of theater, film, and television graduating from there with an MLA in screenwriting. Before that she had a brief flirtation with being a lawyer in college before deciding to become a screenwriter (Editor’s Note: She wanted something stable, dontcha know). Her first big fight was for a script rewriting class in UCLA (that at the time did not exist), where she learned to keep pushing if she really wanted something. She didn’t get the class but did get an independent study program that got her what she wanted. It was while in that independent study program that she actually ended up selling her first script, a Joan of Arc film titled In Nomine Dei but it was never filmed. Since then she’s worked on a number of projects from X Men, to Birds of Prey, Avatar, Alexander, Shutter Island, and Terminator Genisys. She is the lead screenwriter and one of the producers of Altered Carbon. 

 Altered Carbon takes place hundreds of years in the future. Space exploration turned up evidence of an extinct alien civilization that had spread across the stars. Reverse engineering their technology led to, among other things, the creation of the stack. A device implanted in your neck that copies your mind digitally, allowing your personality and your memories to be transplanted into another body. This allows for what is practically immortality, as you can move from body to body as age, accident, disease, or violence overtakes it. We also discover a means of Faster than Light communication (but not transport) which means your mind in a digital form can be beamed across the lightyears to another world. Slower than light ships are sent out to create colonies on dozens of worlds and more colonists are sent via this communication system called needle casting. This could be used to create a Utopian lifestyle especially with the creation of VR and AI systems. Instead humanity has found itself increasingly dominated by a class of super rich immortal degenerates called Meths, after Methuselah, the figure in the Bible. Because life and death are now rendered cheap, after all if you kill someone, as long as their stack isn't damaged they can always be brought back, the elite classes increasingly treat them as commodities. Meanwhile the average person is lucky if they can afford to bring back dead family members for the holidays and those who qualify for a new body through government programs can and will end up in anything (Editors Note: Yay for seven year old murder victims stuck in the bodies of eighty year olds! This system seems set up to maximize body dysphoria and existential angst for the working classes. I’m writing in red right now, you can guess how I feel about that, dear readers <sings the Internationale>.) [I would like to remind everyone that I am not responsible for my editor and this review does not condone communist revolutions]. As prisons sell the bodies of their prisoners while they serve their time simply having their stack sit in a drawer. To put it bluntly the system has clearly gone out of control and only works for a small elite and their favored servants while the common people are fighting for scraps. 

      Meanwhile Neo-Catholics, a fundamentalist sect, renounces the use of stacks, calls being re-embodied (called resleeving, as bodies are called sleeves) a mortal sin and demands that they be left dead, even in the case of murders. As you can imagine that makes Neo-Catholics popular targets for murder and other terrible crimes. Crimes that can't be solved because the law forbids bringing back anyone who is formally coded as a Neo-Catholic. A recent attempt to pass a law making it mandatory for murder victims to be re-sleeved and testify in their own murders failed and there is both relief and anger in the streets and with some people the question of who benefits from this lingers. 

        Into this wakes up our main character Takeshi Kovacs, a man with a complicated past. A man who lost everything over 200 years ago. A man who is considered one of the most dangerous criminals alive. He was a member of the military, but deserted and joined a rebellion led by a woman named Quellcrist Falcon. Trained to be a member of her elite force, named envoys. Kovac fought a doomed battle to bring down the system and watched everyone he knew and love killed for it. He is brought back to a life he's not sure he actually wants by Lauren Bancroft. A man of insane wealth, privilege and influence who was found dead, his stack blown apart along with the rest of his head. However, Bancroft escaped death due to a modification in needlecast technology, where a copy of your stack can be sent remotely to a computer and updated at set intervals. For Bancroft it was every 48 hours. He was shot right before his backup. The police were happy to call it a suicide. The deal Bancroft offers is simple, Kovacs will investigate Bancroft's killing, using resources from the vast fortune that three centuries can provide. If Kovacs can discover the killer and the reason behind the murder, then he gets a pardon and millions of dollars. If he fails, he goes back on ice. Unfortunately for Kovacs, the world he's woken up into is full of enemies both within Bancroft's own family and without, as everyone from the police to the crime world keeps trying to convince him to drop the case. Additionally another murder keeps popping up as he investigates, that of a girl named Mary Lou Henchy. A girl who was, bluntly, a whore and who died by falling out of the sky from nowhere. On top of that Police Lt. Ortega is practically stalking him for reasons that need to be figured out as Kovacs gets deeper and deeper into the mess and finds himself following a trail of bodies that the Bancrofts left in their wake and the damage that the Bancroft family has done to each other and to the innocent people around them. He's also gonna have to figure out whose body he's parked in because that seems to bring a bunch of issues all on it's own. 

      There are a number of themes running through the series.  Through Quellcrist, we're told that the issue is immortality. That with immortality it is inevitable that a small group of increasingly old people will own everything and do as they please. That immortality also inevitable leads to immorality is another message of the show. Every meth character is shown as degenerate in one way or another, losing their empathy for other people as they increasingly believe their age, wealth, and power sets them apart. This actually works better as a metaphor for class conflict. We have one class that controls everything and gets everything, including immortal life and other class that has been reduced to a commodity, their very bodies and lives bought and sold for amusement (Editor’s Note: Karl Marx would call this the ultimate manifestation of alienation, as now the working class is alienated not just from the value of their labor, but from their own bodies. Stripped of everything that they might consider theirs.). This is also supported by the running theme of violence against women in the show. It's interesting to note that the two most powerful women in the show Miriam Bancroft (Lauren's wife) and Reileen Kawahara have their power because of men and the victimization of other women. One of them for the most part turns a blind eye to such things, the other one actively aids and abets it in order to profit. Violence against women is centerpieces in the show as an example of a degenerate system and what happens when people are allowed to act out their darker impulses. There's plenty of violence against men of course. Men die in job lots in this show but for the most part men aren't shown as victims, as most of the men who die, do so because they're trying to kill someone else. There are innocent male victims shown, I want to state that for record but it's my view that the show pays much more attention to the innocent women who are turned into commodities and lined up to be butchered, often for the most trivial and petty of reasons. That said, it's not entirely one way, to give an example, when captured and tortured, Kovac is allowed to keep his pants and his dignity on screen. The woman who was killed for trying to help him is cut apart as naked as the day she is born and not allowed much in the way of dignity or anything else. So this may come down to where you're focusing your attention.  

      The show becomes a struggle for Kovac not just to discover the truth of Bancroft's murder and earn his freedom but to create some justice in the world he's found himself in and win some dignity for the many victims strewn in the wake of the monsters who run it. As you might imagine the show earns its R rating and I have to strongly suggest that you don't watch it with the kids around, as there's a lot of nudity, blood, violence and disturbing imagines. However, Altered Carbon doesn't depend on it's shock value, the shock value is there to serve it's plot and characterizations. It has a good solid plot and rather good characters from the always fun to watch Poe, the AI running the hotel that Kovacs makes his base of operations to Lt. Ortega the fiery young lady trying to wring out justice by main sheer willpower and brute force if needed and the Elliots, a local family scarred deeply by it's contact with the Bancrofts. There are a number of amazing actors here as well, Matthew Beidel deserves recognition for playing three different people in body and making them all distinct in voice tone, word choice, and body language. Chris Conner as Poe was amazingly fun to watch. Dichen Lachman also stole the show in many of the scenes she was in and I really enjoyed Martha Higareda turn as Lt. Oregta. I thought Josh Kinnaman did good work as well as Kovac but a number of the people above were just stellar. 

       Altered Carbon is an enjoyable show but held back by it's overly black and white treatment of human society and at times the lack of trust in its audience. Things are turned up to 11 so we can understand that we're supposed to consider all the Meth's bad people. This undermines my suspension of disbelief and I find it hard to believe it's their long lives that does this to them. There are plenty of wealthy people we've caught acting like psychopaths both in the past and in the modern day and they didn't need centuries to reach levels of insanity that turns a man’s stomach. Honestly I would argue the issue is a system that rewards acting like a sociopath with wealth and power. If your upper levels are full of people who could only get there because they were willing to use people like things to get there... Making them immortal will of course result in a bunch of immortal sociopaths. Additionally I don’t think you need to turn it up to 11 for the average watcher to get that these are terrible people so I feel they failed to trust their viewers. That means I can't give it an A or an A- in good faith despite how much I enjoyed it. Altered Carbon as a television gets a B+. I do recommend it as long you know you're watching some decidedly family unfriendly Cyberpunk.

     Now for it as an adaptation. Massive changes were made, a number of these were good changes or just didn't matter that much. For example Lizzy Elliot in the book is a young blonde woman who attracted Lauren Bancroft because of how much like his wife she looks. In this show she's mixed race, with a white mother and a black father. While that does undermine Bancroft's behavior slighty, it's not that big a deal, as men can be attracted to more than one type of girl in looks and personality and it's possible that Lizzy reminded Lauren of his wife through her personality or something else.  So I'm willing to give that change a gimmie.  However the Elliots have their role in the story massively expanded. In the book Lizzy never appears on screen spending the entire novel in VR. Vernon, the father of the family appears once and Ava, the mother of the family has her  role remain more or less the same in length and importance but changed by having her cross-sleeved into a man's body. I'm decidedly neutral on those changes.  They don't hurt anything but I'm not wildly excited about them maybe because I never really got attached to any of them. 

      A good change I feel was bringing the Bancroft's children on screen. Isaac never shows up in the book but in the series he's a recurring character and shows how Bancroft and the existence of his generation keeps their children trapped in a permanent adolescence. As they are never allowed to move forward and assume their own responsibilities but will always live directly under their father's hand. I regard Isaac with a mix of pity and contempt with the pity increasing and the contempt lessening as the series went on as it became clear that Isaac was more then the angry spoiled brat he appeared to be. Miriam’s character is actually dialed down a bit I feel. In the book you pick up real quick that there’s a psychopath hiding behind those pretty blue eyes but much of that is removed in the series, perhaps to make the final revel more shocking. Another great change is the expanded role of Ortega and her family. Her family doesn't appear in the novel and Ortega actually isn't given that much time on screen. In the series her role is massively expanded and her family serves as a viewpoint on a society that Kovac can't give us because he isn't a member of it. He's outside of society, not interested in joining it and his investigation pushes him to the fringes of society.  Instead we have a family who is living a decent if not wildly comfortable life as members of society and we see their positions and thoughts on the issues affecting their lives and times. We see how they struggle with the idea of the stacks and what they mean for their belief in the human soul. That said, I found Ortega's Mother's theology to be just flat out heretical and she would have been banished from my table for something so... Sloppy and lacking in faith in the Lord Almighty. She suggests in the show that it's possible that the Devil created the technology to lead humanity astray. My reply is that the Devil cannot create! To suggest otherwise is to place him on a level with God which is blasphemy. That part really stuck in my craw, in what was otherwise a very interesting scene that is nothing more than a family dinner.  To be fair it is a stance I've run into before but I always find it infuriating, we're a monotheistic religion folks, quit trying to make Satan God's equal (This of course only applies to my fellow Christians). On a side note, the change I like most? Is Poe. In the novel the hotel is called the Anderson and really doesn't have a distinctive personality. Poe through Chris Conner drips with personality and charm and I really enjoyed that.  In fact I liked the expansion of the AI's in general.  In the novel we don't hear much from them but seeing their discussions in the television series was interesting if at times chilling.  

     On the other hand I am not wild about the changes to Kovacs’ backstory, gone is his membership in the gang world of Harlan's world (that's passed off to his sister, who never appeared in the book) and in the books Envoys are a government created armed force to suppress rebellion and re-engineer problematic governments for the Protectorate. Additionally a lot of the Envoy's more terrifying but subtle abilities are gone and replaced with things that really don't cut for me. With the Envoy's becoming a maligned terrorist organization from centuries past, we lose a first hand look at just how out of balance this system of government and control has become. Again everything is pinned on the Meths with the message of ‘if they would just go away and die everything would be better’. Which is frankly too simplistic. This ties into the massive change in Quellcrist in the series. In the book, Quellcrist is a historical figure for Kovacs, but as of Altered Carbon he never met her. Additionally from what we see in the novel Quellcrist didn't preach an anti-immortality message but a message of overthrowing corrupt authority and refusing to bow to oppression and exploitation. Making the relationship between them a personal one is again taking away the subtly and going for a more black and white presentation of Kovacs as many of his more unpleasant personality traits are offloaded onto his sister. This turns him into a more heroic character and I don't like that. Kovacs in the book is brutal, violent in the extreme, and willing to do awful things to achieve his goal. Kovacs is also willing to do good things if it will achieve his goal and in fact would prefer to do good things but feels that the system won't let him. He's a man who’s frustration with life and his own constant exploitation has led him to buy into the belief that the only way to win is to be meaner, harsher, and harder than the other guy and he hates himself for it. A lot of that self hate is because he knows much of the blame for this is his own terrible life choices. The show's Kovacs is more sympathetic because he's suffering from survivors guilt and alienation as he has woken up in a world that honestly has no place for him. While I don't dislike the show's Kovacs, but I think the book is a more compelling character because he is in large part responsible for what he has become and how he deals with that is a character arc that the show won't be able to follow. Meanwhile I've seen poor heroic man suffering from alienation and survivors guilty enough times that I don't feel there's anything new to see here. So if you thought Kovacs was incredibly violent and brutal in the show? He's really toned down honestly.

    There are also characters that were removed completely such as Trepp, who is a mercenary for hire who has lived a long time herself. In fact, in the book Kovacs kills her the first time they met. Trepp doesn't remember that since that happened in-between backups and accepts it philosophically responding that if Kovacs could kill her, she likely deserved it but that was a different Trepp and it's the here and now that matters. She then proceeds to take Kovacs out to party, get high on drugs, and discuss everything from kittens to literature. I thought Trepp was incredibly fun as a character and provided a counterpoint to how Meth's treat immortality. Showing that there was more than one way to be an immortal. Her removal is another step in making the setting and the story vastly more black and white than it really needs to be. I can understand why they did because she does undermine the idea of a class of immortals as the problem in society but since I failed to buy that theme so I'm left missing her presence in the plot. Of course her professional amorality wouldn't work very well with Kovacs in the show so I suppose that’s another reason she had to go. Lastly is Reileen, who in the show is Kovac's sister. In the book she's a crime lord that Kovacs briefly worked for and loathed as a terrible person. Making Reileen his sister is actually one example I think of where the show makes things a bit more complicated and provides extra depth. I could believe in Kovacs struggle to try and find a way to save his sister from herself and his utter despair at realizing that he was too late and might have always been to late. Reileen is shown as a truly monstrous person, however you can see in the show that she was molded into this monster by society and the system of government and economics that she found herself in. She was an orphan, who was unknowingly betrayed when Kovacs joined the Protectorate forces on the condition that she be cared for. She was instead sent to the Yakuza who turned her into a cold blooded killer. When she found her brother again, he starts running off on suicide missions to save a society she really can't give a damn about. After losing him, she fights for safety and really only knows one way to do it: on top of everyone's else bodies. The show Reileen is honestly more tragic and human in a lot of ways even if she does deserve death... For everyone's safety at least. 

      It's that removal of subtly and the introduction of the immortality bad subplot that really drags this down as an adaptation. That said if you're a fan of the book, the series isn't going to enrage you but a lot of it is going to center on how you feel about the theme of immortality itself being the problem and the removal of most of the gray in the story. For me, as an adaption Altered Carbon gets a C+. I'm used to a lot worse but that doesn't mean this was a great adaption. Let me note that doesn't mean it's a bad show (see the grade I gave above) as this is the grade on how true an adaptation from book to screen it was. So next week a brief break from Cyberpunk as we take a look at Mice Templar. After that we jump right back in with Snow Crash and then, we're gonna look at Ready Player One. The book and the upcoming film. Keep Reading!