What Makes Altered Carbon Excellent Nerd Viewing
Altered Carbon. Image courtesy of Netflix.
Season 2 of Netflix’s sci-fi mind-bender Altered Carbon is out now. So what better time to take a look back at Season 1 and reflect on all the ways it was such excellent nerd shit?
What exactly is Altered Carbon? Based on a series of novels by author Richard K. Morgan, Season 1 of Altered Carbon was produced and distributed by Netflix in 2018. Starring Joel Kinnaman and James Purefroy, it showed off the full range of Netflix’s essentially bottomless piles of cash as they poured millions and millions of dollars into creating the intricate, layered techno-futuristic world of the show. Altered Carbon’s main hook is a technology whereby a person’s consciousness can be downloaded into little mini-disks and then transferred between bodies.
The possibilities that such a technology would create, from a narrative as well as a moral and philosophical and social standpoint, are vast. People with means could essentially live forever, transferring their consciousness from one body to another, even to a synthetic duplicate of their original biological body. Your consciousness could be constantly backed up, so that in the event of your untimely death all you have to do is download it again. It also means you could have your consciousness put in deep freeze for a couple centuries, before it’s pulled out and you are reactivated in a world you don’t recognize.
That is, funnily enough, exactly what happens to the show’s protagonist - Takeshi Kovacs (Joel Kinnaman). Once part of an elite military unit, he is captured and put in deep freeze for a couple hundred years until a wealthy, ageless robber baron (Purefroy) brings him back to life in a new body to investigate a murder. Purefroy, you see, is part of an upper-class of super wealthy immortals. Someone killed him; so he downloads his backed up consciousness into a new body and hires Kovacs to find out who.
This is an instantly classic plot structure, pretty much irresistible to a nerd. It has an intriguing sci-fi hook (the transferable consciousness) which is then mashed up into a classic neo-noir plot, wherein a hard-boiled detective is tasked with rummaging around in the dankest shadows of a society in moral crisis investigating leads. It just so happens that, in this case, the detective is 250 years old and wearing someone else’s body. This structure also gives plenty of opportunities for exposition (a necessary evil when you are creating an entirely new fictional world), as the investigator in the natural course of his work has to follow leads, talk to people and ask questions which are often the questions that you, as the viewer, would like to ask.
Pretty much any sci-fi lives and die on the strength of its world-building. The characters are usually fairly stock archetypes, and the writing is often workmanlike at best. So good sci-fi is almost always defined by the strength and intricacy of its ideas, and the way in which these ideas are projected onto an imagined world which is some version of our future, past or present. This translates into most screen adaptations of sci-fi novels, and it’s no different with Altered Carbon.
The characters are fairly flat, and by the end the plot has gone completely off the rails (a mannequin on a space shit comes alive with the soul of a dead girl, is basically all you need to know). But the noir narrative structure and the limitless Netflix budget allowed the filmmakers to really spend some time creating a richly textured futuristic world that is interesting, disturbing and quite fully realized. And they explore this world and some of the ideas that it pokes around in, such as what extreme social inequality might mean in a world of unimaginable technological possibilities. Or what immortality might drive a class of depraved and unfathomably wealthy people to do in order to keep themselves entertained. Those are interesting ideas, and the show uses the power of its world-building to run with them.
The backstory I found to not be that interesting, and the characters were fairly one-dimensional cut-outs. But any true sci-fi nerd knows that the genre’s real allure is its ideas and its world-building, and how it combines these things to make interesting and sometimes illuminating connections with the time and the place we actually live in. I think on that front, Netflix’s Altered Carbon delivered, even if some of the story-telling might have lost the plot at times. That is par for the course, and any nerd worth their salt would expect no less, content to simply let the day-glo colors of an impossibly bleak imagined future of transferable consciousnesses and cloud-dwelling rich people wash over them.
