Early on in the second season of Altered Carbon, an off-world fight scene in a bar, complete with samurai swords and energy guns, gives the appearance of business as usual. But rather quickly, the Netflix show reveals exciting updates to the sleeve technology that allowed hero Takeshi Kovacs to take out his evil little sister in the first season. Now in a new body, this one belonging to Anthony Mackie, the show picks up 30 years later, with Kovacs still on the hunt for his first love, Quellcrist Falconer (Renée Elise Goldsberry). A stack of new allies, a brilliant new villain, and entirely new worlds populate a packed second season.
Now serving as protection for Mr. Axley (Michael Shanks), Takeshi’s new sleeve comes with personalized weapons augmentation that pulls any weapon within range to his hand. Guns and knives just out of reach “wingardium leviosa” across the room, adding a video game action sequence vibe to the show’s already dope fight scenes. Unfortunately, the Protectorate, the intergalactic colonial empire, owns the sleeve. In season one, the Protectorate took in Takeshi after he killed his father, and then took him down when he joined the Envoys. This new body also comes with canine genetics, making Takeshi the omega to the Envoys’ alpha wolf pack. When they say heel, he stops dead in his tracks.
In season one, Falconer attempted to course-correct the corporate corruption of stacks, which she intended to use for space travel but were instead used to extend the life of dusty millionaires. After more than 300 years, the Quellist Rebellion, as the movement Falconer that began is now called, continues on Harlan’s World. Current governor Danica Harlan (Lela Loren), who ran unopposed in the election, succeeded her father on the mining planet, whose metals are used in the production of stacks, making this world wealthy and vital to the Meths. Reileen (Dichen Lachman) once told big brother Takeshi that Quell lived somewhere in the stars; his search for her and his terrorist past put him at direct odds with Danica. Takeshi’s focus remains, building on the archetype of the lost, wounded, and revenge-filled soldier.
The events of Altered Carbon aren’t ever straightforward. Although some of the twists and turns are telegraphed, the journey remains invigorating. Everything from the intricate and stylish costumes to the lush sets and vibrant visual effects work in harmony to create exhilarating worlds.
Mackie kills it as the fifth representation of Takeshi. He not only convincingly carries action sequences, but also embodies the romantic lead, soaring in his scenes with Renée Elise Goldsberry. Both the chemistry of their characters’ long-lost love and the wisdom and wear of a decades-old romance radiates between the two actors. It’s refreshing to see Mackie in a leading romantic role: He gets to be vulnerable in a way that the soldiers he often plays aren’t allowed to be.
Altered Carbon deploys clever ways to keep Will Yun Lee around from season to season, and he returns here with vigor, as Takeshi Prime once again finds himself unleashed and working for the Protectorate. Takeshi’s been cloned again, but it’s his prime form, not the new soldier’s body that descends on Harlan’s World. This is the version of Takeshi that hadn’t yet found Quell, and desperately wants to be the best that the Protectorate offers. Mackie’s iteration of Takeshi is older and wiser than Lee’s, and the two go toe to toe, the former analyzing every decision made between then and now.
As Altered Carbon explores Takeshi’s history, it also delves further into the Meths’ lineage. The show avoids some of the more shopworn tropes so popular in vampire novels and films like Bladerunner that obsess over the question of what it means to be human if one is caught between the living and the dead, or is of artificial intelligence. Poe (Chris Conner), the hotel AI that frequently protects Takeshi from group attacks, loves, fears, and desires just as much as any of the other characters.
One question that Altered Carbon’s second season raises is how power can be distributed among the people when the disparity is impossible to remedy. The undying (read: the wealthy) struggle with a thirst for power—everyone is a monster if given an opportunity in this show. To the undying, the scales seem balanced, as they are presented with endless opportunities to correct their mistakes and change their luck. They forget or stop caring that the people who prop up their lives—by clothing them, feeding them, or stroking their egos—struggle to keep and maintain the one good sleeve they have. Extreme old age in literature is often associated with the supernatural, vampires, and soul-sucking witches. But here, advanced years manifest as the weary, who are unable to connect with the world and remain unsatisfied by all they own.
Altered Carbon does not offer any new answers to these questions. The journey, however, is well worth the time. Sci-fi stalwarts like Michael Shanks (Stargate SG-1), Jihae (Mortal Engines), and Alessandro Juliani (Battlestar Galactica) appear in guest-starring roles. Simone Missick has no right being as captivating as she is in the role of Trepp, but happily married lesbians with tech upgrades and combat skills are always a welcome addition to sci-fi. Dina Shihabi also makes her debut on the show as Dig 103, an AI that’s been forced into retirement by Danica’s new laws, sitting around for decades with the other archaeological help. When Poe stumbles into their clubhouse by accident, the two techs form an instant bond, and their sweet nerd love story becomes one of the best storylines of the season.
All of the body-hopping, impersonations, and lies could easily have grown messy, but the show manages to avoid any pitfalls around race representation. There was some concern during season one about a Japanese man being portrayed most often by a white guy. But the futuristic setting combined with the financial divide creates space for actors of color to play humans not instantly judged by their skin color. The same goes for gender—any person can choose to live as a defined gender or be constructed into any state of gender representation that makes them happy, provided they can afford it. Money remains the great divider between everlasting life and a humiliating, violent, and painful death. Money created a new type of human, one who could live without consequences. And over time, living without consequence made these new creatures immune to the suffering of others, while the poor humans became pawns in the Meths’ quest for power. Altered Carbon takes place in the future, but its message stands firmly in the now.
102 Comments
Hmmm…. “Money lets one live without consequences”, you say …does everyone know this? . tell me more.
This new body also comes with canine genetics…*Gasp*Is there a Space Princess? Tell me there’s a Space Princess!
There’s a Space Princess.
He’s his own best friend!
Half man, half dog???
She Druish
Funny, she doesn’t look Druish.
She had work done.
I wish shows that took place in the future didn’t use the “alpha dog” concept, since it is outdated scientifically now. The guy who came up with it has flat out said he made a mistake. He was observing children and their parents, not a pack led by one dog.
Pro-tip. Extreme Wealth is inhumane in real life too!
Thanks for chiming in, Bernie Bro.
Wealth is not cruel, the wealthy often are. All power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutly.- Lord Acton
Nothing about the shit Richard K. Morgan has said over the past few months? Huh, I must be on the wrong website.
Wait what did he say?
He went on a few nonsensical rants after people accused him of being a TERF.
I had to look that up. “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”LOL, now come on. People are just throwing words together for shits and giggles.
I’m too old to keep up with all of this. Feels like I’m reading an instruction manual written in a dead language.
….that’s missing the table of contents.
No, they’re there. In Braille.
No, there are a lot of anti-trans lesbians and feminists who don’t accept transgendered women as part of the cause.
So……ATLFWDATWPC?
So……ATLFWDATWPC?Yes. And it’s pronounced “AttlefwaDATwippicks”, thank you.
it’s weird to me that 95 percent of the time, you’re a thoughtful and intelligent part of this commentariat and then, every so often, you do this Tim Allen bit where having to learn one new concept is just too much for any reasonable person to ask
I’m flattered Officer, but I think that you’re being generous with the 95 percent 😉.
It’s rpretty insidious actually. People trying to shove the T out of LGBT. And the fuel behind it is right-wing trolls just trying to bust up the rights of queer folks by division.
Or they’re people who feel that the T was shoved into that acronym.I’m very much team “It’s 2020, do whatever the fuck you want as long as you’re not hurting anyone”…but I’m also not going to get overly bent out of shape by 50-somethings wringing their hands about letting trans women into women’s changing rooms, as long as they’re not actively trying to deny people their rights.
You seem to have a very specific view of TERFS as specifically in their 50s and of doing nothing but whining about the possibility of someone being in the wrong bathroom.
This is not the case. They are of a variety of ages and they actively seek to change laws to deny trans people basic rights and access.
I’m not talking about TERFs as such. Most of them are shitheads.I’m talking about people like Rowling and Morgan.
Which brings us back on topic: what did Morgan say to earn the label?
“I also hold these truths to be self-evident – facts are stubborn things; human sex is binary, you are either born a man or a woman, and neither sex can change into the other. The much vaunted phrase “Trans women are women” or “trans men are men” is a semantic nonsense; it is quite simply objectively untrue. It’s ideological gibberish on a level with Orwell’s War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery. And to note this fact is not transphobic.”
He basically got banned from twitter for saying this kind of stuff (this is from his blog) in defense of Rowling, herself in defense of that lady who wasn’t rehired for saying trans people weren’t people or whatever. British feminism doesn’t have the same intersectionality stuff interwoven through it that American feminism does, so there’s a lot of old turds there saying “I love the gays but men in dresses are just men in dresses” etc.
From the same page here’s his list of things that trans people could do, RIGHT NOW
a female waxing salon gets sued by a trans woman demanding the
workers there wax “her” balls and getting upset when they refuse; a Rape Crisis centre is defunded and vilified for denying access to male bodiesa
male rapist “identifies as a woman” and is relocated to a woman’s
prison where he then proceeds to sexually assault other inmates; a
woman is considered bigoted and transphobic for demanding that her
hospital examination be carried out by a female nurse, not a trans
woman;the protected status of women’s spaces in general –
changing rooms, toilets, battered woman shelters – stands in danger of
being annulled to allow in anyone who “identifies as a woman”; trans
women are able to enter women’s sporting events and crucify even the
finest female athletes because male physiology gives them a massive
unearned advantage; Eve Ensler’s famous and fabulous The Vagina Monologues must be renamed The [Blank] Monologues in order to be “inclusive” – people without vaginas may be upset.lesbians
are told that if they won’t fuck someone with a prick and balls, they
are transphobic because the prick in question belongs to a trans woman
and is therefore a “lady dick.”Seems a lot like he’s just fallen prey to hoary old political cartoons where some obvious unshaven palooka is willing to dress up as a halfway there lady in order to be in the wrong bathroom. Anyone who actually knows any trans people at all knows that this is just a scary list of bullshit.
That’s disingenuous.He was listing silly tabloid stories that he, a 50-something man, has been told on Twitter by “feminists” that he should believe.
I’m not sure what your specific cutoff of age is where it’s suddenly okay to believe lies and be a hateful dumbass. I go with “dead in the ground.”
I don’t have a specific cutoff age.I do, however, consider age when deciding if someone’s malicious or ignorant.I think people like Rowling and Morgan are the latter, and that it’s more useful to engage with them and explain why the ideas they’re parroting are wrong and hurtful, rather than declaring a Twitter fatwa against them.This might sound crazy…but lengthy campaigns of personal harassment don’t actually tend to change people’s minds, regardless of whether the ostensible goal is promoting intersectionality in feminist theory…or Ethics in Videogame Journalism.
Unfortunately in the US and Canada mainstream media is staying away from these stories because they don’t want to be vilified as ‘transphobic’. But sadly the trans ‘ wax my female balls’ yaniv is very real: https://theunionjournal.com/criminal-investigation-opened-into-wax-my-balls-trans-activist-jessica-yaniv-faces-up-to-five-years-for-assault/https://www.rt.com/op-ed/471582-jessica-yaniv-transgender-wax-balls/
The Vancouver Rape Relief centre, build and run by volunteer feminists for women was defunded because they wouldn’t admit Trans Identified Males.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/03/20/canadas-oldest-rape-crisis-centre-stripped-city-funding-refusing/https://globalnews.ca/news/5071122/vancouver-rape-relief-and-womens-shelter-funding-trans-women/https://globalnews.ca/news/5824446/vancouver-rape-relief-womens-shelter-graffiti/And they were targeted with a dead rat graffiti saying kill all TERFs – when transactivists started their campaign to force the centre to admit trans identified males inside the female only refuge.
That’s what women are upset about – they don’t want men in important female only spaces like change rooms, sports competitions, rape relief centres and prisons. They don’t give a damn about how men dress or who they sleep with – they aren’t bigots. Many are lesbians themselves who are being told by TRAs they should have sex with trans identified males or be considered bigots or TERFs!!??Anyway – I have great respect for Richard now – and have been reading all his books. He understand how inequalitity is structured in societies and how women in women’s bodies tend to get explointed by men in men’s bodies. TRA extremists pretend you can erase the physical body and be whomever who identify as – but you can’t erase the physical differences that give men and women different life experiences, and unfortunately make men more or a threat to women’s safety.
I’m glad you brought public attention to that issue. I had always like Altered Carbon and thought the women characters were very well written – but when I heard he was standing up for women’s rights again the TRA (trans rights activists – extremists – who don’t represent all trans people at all) I had to see it for myself (you should too): https://www.richardkmorgan.com/2020/01/the-trouble-with-twitter-2-2020-vision/
Then he says:
This isn’t a liberation struggle. It isn’t a human rights campaign.
This is a supremacism. A bid to erase women as a class, a new misogyny
in the making.Don’t believe that shit? Go google.Not that I’d blame you if you don’t believe it. It took me quite a
while to find this stuff out myself because, like most uninvolved men, I
was on the periphery of the issue and never gave it much thought. When
the issue of gender neutral toilets and changing rooms came up, I
shrugged and thought “Sure, why not; who gives a shit?”Then I started listening to women. And it turns out quite a lot of them do give a shit.It turns out the stats prove that the vast majority of sexual assaults in changing rooms take place in unisex facilities;
it turns out that even in our brave new inclusive society, women and
girls remain at risk from male predators pretty much everywhere and if
you eliminate female-only safe spaces, women get hurt.So that’s where I stand. Against women getting hurt. In favour of
facts. (But also, always, adamantly, for the human rights of trans
people along with everybody else.) And on that last point, it would be utterly wrong to lump all trans
people in with the headbangers currently purveying this insanity. There
are plenty of trans women and men who are just as horrified by the turn
events have taken as anyone else. And lots of them are out there
shouting the odds about it (and in turn – I kid you not – getting
vilified as transphobic). If you’re on Twitter, they’re well worth
following so look them up – here are a couple from my own follow list:@DebbieHayton @FionneOrlanderAnd for more on the nasty squeeze women now find themselves in, it’s also worth following these:@Womans_Place_UK@fairplaywomen
@ForwomenScot*Meantime, I’m going to sit out my time here in the cooler while the
Twitter appeals team deal with my ban, and hope they haven’t been
infiltrated by this same barking insanity. Because if they have, then I’m done with the platform. Don’t get me wrong, it’s been fun. I’ve learnt a lot, expanded my
horizons, met a shitload of people I otherwise wouldn’t have, made some
new friends, got back in contact with some old ones, generally felt more
connected to the pulse of the outside world, and maybe even helped a
couple of my IPs on towards greater things. Twitter has been great.But if the price for that is to let people come and insult me and not
insult them back because >bullshit woke ideologue reasons<; if the price is to deny material reality and line up to chant War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery with the rest of the ideologically sound – well, you know me.Fuck. That. Noise. And watch this space…….
Aw. That’s sad to hear. Still, I’ll always ask when people refer to such things as though everybody’s supposed to know what they’re talking about (unless they’re obscure old bits of pop culture trivia, which I expect everyone to have encyclopedic knowledge of).
Exactly!He’s the precise type of mid-50s person wringing his hands about women’s locker rooms whom no serious person complains about.
Sure, if you don’t give it the barest sliver of serious consideration. But it’s pretty self-explanatory — someone who is so absolutist about feminism that they don’t consider trans women part of the fold. Is that not worth talking about?
I’m writing from the distant future 17 months later, and people are still using “TERF” as an insult, sometimes with merit, many times online it means “research that goes against what I feel should be true”.
Imagine caring about enough things they could make an acronym out of it. They needed two modifiers for that one huh?
When I had Netflix, I watched part of the first season. Never finished it (read the book instead), but I’m thinking I better give it another chance.
No Poe, another hope shattered.
Although some of the twists and turns are telegraphed, the journey remains invigorating.As someone who found the 1st season to be the polar opposite of invigorating, can anyone tell me if this season actually fixes any of the 1st season’s (many) problems?
Well, it doesn’t have Kinnaman, so that’s an improvement right there.
I think this season has fewer episodes, which is a start. Holy hell, did Season One drag.
It doesn’t sound like they’ve gotten rid of Quellcrist or suffocating backstory deep-dives, so I guess no.
Yea, I liked the books where the person who invented the stacks, the person who trained the envoys, and the person who inspired a revolution aren’t all the same person.
Whatever-her-face’s name showrunner…it feels like she had no idea of the books, and instead Netflix just got some intern to type up a 5-page summary for her to skim over. Then she just did whatever the hell she wanted with the skeleton.
No. And everything that made season 1 fun is gone. This one has all the forward momentum of a blobfish.
at least with season 1 i understood the point.i have no idea what season 2 was about and i just finished it.
season 2 is really bad.season 1 was bad because it started off interesting and then you find out about the weird sister stuff, but you still want to see what happens.in season 2, you literally never care about what happens next.
It appears to have more Poe, but they really missed a trick in not getting rid of the zero-redeeming-qualities pair of Kovacs and Falconer. Protectorate, Envoys, Uprising, blah blah blah, can’t we have a show that focuses on the interesting parts of a fictional setting instead of Portentous Nouns just like the Portentous Nouns from a million other works of D-grade pulp?
Damn… I appreciate your pre-air review Joelle, but this probably means no episodic reviews then?I hope I’m wrong, but the minimal level of content on this site when it comes to reviews that just a couple of years ago would have been automatic, is depressing.
It’s sad and dreadful. One last shiv in the back after the Kinjapocalypse. This site has become a dead whale carcass, slowly drifting to shore while every nibbler in the sea takes a bite out of it along the way.I might have to finally give in and subscribe to Vulture since they seem to have episodic reviews on the shows you’d think the old AV CLUB would’ve reviewed in the past, but now don’t. They do a pretty competent job too, and some of the reviewers even did some work here back in the day, but unfortunately there is no commentariat, and like I said earlier it’s limited page views per month before you hit the paywall.
Incognito Mode!
And honestly, while I appreciate the professional reviewers on here, I’ve gotten at least as much enjoyment and insight from the thoughts posted in the comments. If they could even just open up a discussion space with no formal review for each episode of a show like this, that would be most appreciated.
Agreed. In some cases the comments are better than the initial review. Some reviewers do a very good job and can help point out little details I may have missed on first viewing. Others just read the synopsis, fast forward through the episode and bang out a quick review so they can go back to what else they have going on.
But how is their commenting system? Because hot damn I still hate Kinja so hard. I used to loathe Disqus until I saw this monstrosity.
As far as I can tell the Vulture commenting system seems fine, but like I alluded to, you might get 1 to 5 comments per review. Even now, it’s nonexistent compared to what you have here.
I honestly was just thinking today about subscribing to Vulture for just this reason. AV Club used to cover what I needed, but not recently. Vulture seems to do a damn decent job. Might be worth $5/month.
Yeah, it’s hard to sustain a conversation about a show without episodic reviews. The season review comes out a week before the show drops, and no one is going to come back to the review 10+ days later when they’ve finished watching the season in order to have a conversation. I mean, I’ve got thoughts about season 2. I wasn’t as taken by Mackie’s performance as Joelle–I actually thought he was pretty wooden and one-note. But there’s no sense is posting about that here, now. The conversation has moved on. Episodic reviews give you the time and space to develop those conversations. It’s a shame that AV Club isn’t really doing them anymore. Heck, I still haven’t forgotten that they stopped recapping Fleabag midway through season 2 last year. They just…didn’t do… reviews for the last two episodes, which were the best of the bunch. It really is sad to see what’s happened to the content recently. It’s a marked rollback, not necessarily in quality, but in scope. They cover much less.
imagine what a dumb, boring asshole you’d have to be to watch this drivel
kill yourself
In season one, the Protectorate took in Takeshi after he killed his father, and then took him down when he joined the Envoys. This new body also comes with canine genetics, making Takeshi the omega to the Envoys’ alpha wolf pack. When they say heel, he stops dead in his tracks.
So he’s like a sci-fi witcher with more control mechanisms built in to replace sterility?Fair enough.
So is this season an original story/plot, or is it leaning on elements from the other Kovacs books (Broken Angels / Woken Furies? I honestly hope it isn’t. Altered Carbon was a hell of a book. The other ones were… books.
The guy who owns Netflix is worth how much?
Looks like they skipped adapting Broken Angels (the 2nd book in the Takeshi Kovachs series) and went straight into book number three – Woken Furies.Pity. I was hoping to see the Martian artifacts…
They seemed to have kind of combined the two. Season 1 had a few bits from the other books too. As well as stuff not even in the books. The mention of archaeology seems book 2 ish. Sadly I don’t think we’ll get the video gamey opener from the second book of them running out of the ship and dying and then re-sleeving and running out of the ship and dying over and over.
I haven’t watched this season, but when you say “wingardium leviosa”, do you mean “accio?” The former is levitation, where you describe something that sounds more like summoning a nearby object
Glad you’re the one who said it!
Boy I really hope someone got fired for that blunder.
Are you telling me this is some kind of *snort* magic magic spell?
I am looking forward to this! The first season was very good and very underrated, despite its massively good and costly special effects. The “PC” nitpicking about it was way off the mark and ignored that this is science fiction and the entire point is people can be whatever when you get a new body and race and really sex in this futuristic world are beyond irrelevant. This one of the better sci fi stories out there outside of The Expanse.
Indeed. Much umbrage was expressed that Joel Kinneman was somehow taking a job an Asian actor should have gotten but, if you do the math, Kovacs was portrayed by three actors, two Asians and one Caucasian. I don’t think the people who were making the noise were at all familiar with the material, because you’re right—the whole point of the story is about how the ability to change bodies affects humanity.
Joel Kinneman was somehow taking a job an Asian actor should have gotten I mean there’s an entire side-plot and soft-porn sex scene dedicated to ramming home the point that Joel Kinneman isn’t even Tak’s body. Like, it’s literally NOT HIS BODY. It’s someone else’s body that Takeshi Kovacs (half-Asian) has been shoved into against his will.
Indeed. The same with the sleeve he was in for the majority of Season 2, played by Anthony Mackie. It should be noted that Kovacs Prime, played by Will Yun Lee, is Asian. And Tak briefly inhabits the sleeve of an Asian woman (Jihae Kim) when the series opens.That brings Tak’s sleeve count in the series to five (actually six, but one of them is a clone)—two Asian males, one Asian female, one African American male and one Caucasian male. And screen shots on various tablets and displays in the series show that Kovacs has used numerous sleeves of assorted males and females of multiple races over his lifetime.It’s a pretty diverse cast for one character in a story where race and gender are pretty fluid.
I’ve managed to get about halfway through the first season due to extreme boredom and distaste for much of the content. I don’t like the sleeves technology at all. I’ve never heard of anyone named Falconer. There’s a Latina actress who can’t act. I remember that. And I also don’t like the main actor at all, though somehow I put up with him and the ridiculous slangy accent he did on the detective mystery show he was on previously.
So happy they’re changing actors for the main protagonist. His performance was so wooden you could build a dining room set from it.
sorry to say, this season will help you build a matching bedroom set.
I’m guessing Season 3 will have a woman in the lead role. My picks:Obvious Choice: Gina Carano. Not-So-Obvious Choice: Diane Guerrero. Completely Out There Choice: the lady from the H&R Block ads.
Tilda Swinton! (I haven’t seen this show, but Tilda should be in everything)
If it’s Gina Carano I hope they upgrade the terrible fight scenes (cause obviously the actors aren’t fighters) and use her skills smartly like Soderbergh in Haywire, not like whoever-directed-that-Fast-and-Furious-Gina-Carano-one in that Fast and Furious that Gina Carano was in.
The canine genetics is actually a pretty cool twist. It’s already been established in season 1 that even though human DHF can be saved on the stacks, the sleeve’s genetics and hormones have a profound effect. A huge part of Kovacs’ relationship with Ortega was the fact that he was occupying Elias Ryker’s body. On an intellectual level they both knew he was a different man, but on a physical level the pheromones and muscle memory of the previous relationship were still in play.In season 2, even though Kovacs still rejects what the Protectorate stands for and is very much still The Last Envoy, this is an ingenious way to literally keep him on a short leash.
I hope Mackie gets as naked as Joel did in the first season.
Great review Joelle. Excited to see the show. One editorial note Jihae (Mortal Instruments) should be Jihae (Mortal Engines). Mortal Engines was the Peter Jackson Sci fi on Universal in 2018.
I think I’m in the minority in that I liked the first season when it was a smaller story, detective/noir kind of stuff and exploring the envoy/special training as an aspect of that. When it delved into exposition backstory about the Envoys and then turned into save the world evil-sister twist BIG sci-fi I lost interest.That said I still enjoyed the show more than I think most, and will definitely check this out. Though I will miss Kinnaman.
Extreme wealth is inhumane in the second season of Altered CarbonIt was inhumane in the first season so that’s not a revelation. I mean it is in real life but in Altered Carbon world where even death is something wealth protects you from it creates a special kinds of evil. The whole first season was about the many shades of wrong it comes in.
Yeah, I would argue that season 1 is more about the inhumanity of extreme wealth, and that season 2 largely sets that aside in favor of pursing themes of colonization/imperialism and political corruption. The wealth of meths and the immorality of immortality (say that five times fast) takes a big back seat in season 2.
i don’t get the headline at all. in season 1 it was all about the rich people in the clouds. season 2 was a an aggro dick measuring contest between a bunch of ex military meatheads with no real point.
Yeah, the headline doesn’t fit well at all. I’m perhaps a bit more charitable toward S2 than you are, but it definitely wasn’t as thematically complex or sophisticated as S1. S2 was a more personal story for Kovacs and that didn’t resonate as deeply with me. It felt to me like a season that is meant to set up the next season. Like they had to get the “Kovacs searches for Quell” story out of the way before they could move on to better stories. Or at least that’s what I’m hoping. ETA: Dick swinging aside, I did really like Torben Liebrecht as Carrera, though.
ooo finally someone to briefly discuss this season with.i think the headline would have been suitable for season 1, which i found for the most part intriguing and very bingeable, as i constantly wanted to see what would happen next. it was a huge letdown when a major plot point turns out to be a weirdo sister with separation anxiety. but the whole rich people using working class for pleasure outside of the law plot was sensible enough.i really can’t tell you what season 2 was about. and a website that is typically pretty harsh on what many consider good acting/writing/direction, i am befuddled by the praise here. i haven’t seen a show with more wooden and stilted dialogue on what i consider a premium network in a long time. this was borderline NBC season 4 of enchanted quality. and i really wanted to like the actors playing the roles, so no bias against them.but the point of this season seemed to be…the planet leader wanted a weapon of some sort, for some reason, and hired her crew of off the books henchmen to get it, only they turn around on her and want the weapon for a higher power that employs them. our main character has a flashback and is suddenly back on mission to find his lover.turns out his lover and the weapon are one and the same.season ends.
Yeah, I had a similarly rough time finding the through-line on S2. It nibbled around the edges of some larger ideas, but never really planted a flag in any of them. Did you get the sense that a significant part of Neal McDonough’s role as Konrad Harlan got left on the cutting room floor? What little there was of him did not seem commensurate with McDonough’s status as a top-tier character actor. I feel like there was more that we didn’t get. Really, I feel like there was a whole, more developed storyline about Harlan’s World and the Founders that got cut and condensed into a single flashback with voiceover. It really cut the legs out from under that storyline about the revenge of the Elder or whatever was stuck in that songspire and then in Quell. I think that’s what made it mostly not work for me. One of the things that I think Altered Carbon will have to grapple with in future seasons is the role of secondary characters. This season gave a lot of time to developing Trepp, who ultimately because of the show’s format will more than likely be a one-season character only. And yet we got a ton of her backstory, which is time that could probably have been spent developing the main plot with a bit more sophistication. Every season they’re going to have to work on this balance—between introducing characters well enough so that we get invested in them, and not letting the plot get bogged down by needless explication of minor characters. I’ve rewatched S1 now after seeing S2, and the dialogue in season one is a lot sharper and more clever (some of the S1 voiceover is still pretty bad, though). Part of the problem in S2 is delivery—there is a consistency between how Will Yun Lee and Joel Kinnaman play Kovacs in S1. They throw away the same lines, they take the same beats, they deliver the same pathos. Anthony Mackie doesn’t do that, and it’s a jarring change. In S1, a character like Dimi the Twin inhabits a handful of different sleeves, and all of those sleeves have his Russian accent and his general bravado. In this world, the stack and not the sleeve dictates things like personality and speech patterns and accent. But then we get Mackie and his delivery is so different it’s hard to see the same character we met in S1. That, coupled with some truly horrid dialogue, made S2 a harder watch (still enjoyable by and large, but harder to love).
i’m an admittedly shallow tv viewer, so i often don’t pick up subtleties or things like allegories and hidden themes and whatnot, but this show also didn’t really deserve that sort of attention to me.i completely glossed over the neal mcdonough scene, i remember it, and then it was gone. the whole season felt like i was watching something starting in the 3rd or 4th episode, like a bunch of the story and background was never explained, and then ended with 3 or 4 more episodes to go, when something you actually care about is supposed to happen.my guess for all the focus on Trepp is part fan service (Poe was the fan favorite of season 1) and part writing/directing capability (Poe was the best character in Season 1). it’s probably much easier to flesh our a character and background if it doesn’t need to align with any particular in the overarching story.finally, it pains me to say this, but i think anthony mackie just might not be a very good actor. i’ve followed his career since near the beginning as far as i can tell and have always liked him and been waiting for his big break, but movie after movie, i just don’t think he has the range to do much more than what he does, semi-serious brooding action man.
I’ve always felt similarly about Anthony Mackie. For a classically trained actor, he lacks a certain depth and delivery. He doesn’t have a very expressive face and he can get quite monotone. I was hopeful that Altered Carbon might give him a chance to stretch within a genre that he was already comfortable with, but that didn’t really happen. He couldn’t capture the sardonic quality that both actors in S1 brought to Kovacs. You could tell there were moments in the script where the writers were trying to emphasize that part of Kovacs that would be identifiable to viewers of season 1, but Mackie couldn’t make those lines land. That became all the more clear later in S2 when Will Yun Lee reappeared as Kovacs Prime and reminded us all what the character really should be played like.
So who knows if anyone will read this, but I figured this was the best place to share my thoughts after having finished this 2nd season. I remember thinking the 1st season had some clunky dialogue, acting, and plotting, but I liked it overall for its world-building and the political and philosophical questions brought up (though probably inadequately explored). On that basis, I was looking forward to the 2nd season.But I thought the 2nd season was kind of bad. Maybe it was just because the newness of the concepts of stacks, sleeves, and meths had worn off, but I thought the clunkiness in all the aforementioned areas was still there, the world-building was poorly executed, and the political/philosophical questions were pushed to the background to allow the Takeshi/Quell story to take centerstage. Maybe I wasn’t paying close enough attention, but I feel like the whole deal of Harlan’s World was badly explained. They kind of hand-wave towards standard sci-fi tropes of ancient tech from an alien civilization that we don’t know how to work anymore, exploitation of workers on some mining planet, etc., but they don’t really provide the backstory to get you to understand or care about the specifics of this situation. Who are the Elders? Who are the Founders? Who are the Archeologues? What’s the deal with the Renouncers? The Expanse did its version of these same tropes MUCH BETTER just a couple months ago.
Never thought I’d agree with a sentient allium, but here we are.
There was also very little exploration of the problem of people living for a long long time. There were a bunch of people in this who’d lived for hundreds and even thousands of years who seemed … totally fine? Whereas in the first season they spent a lot of time justifying Quell’s quest to make everyone mortal again, and it made sense in the universe (even though the real problem seemed to be massive wealth disparity and runaway capitalism).
This time she just stuck single mindedly to something that was demonstrably false. People don’t need a finite lifespan, they just need something to care about, some training, and some hardship in order to not be dicks after a few hundred years. She seems unable to identify the capitalism and imperialism as the real evils and it makes her look stupid. Which made Takeshi look stupid. Which was a problem.
They did say that Harlan’s World was the only place that had the secret sauce metal, right? If Quell had been following her own logic, wouldn’t it have been an even better decision to let the Elder win and annihilate the planet? Her only other plan was to start another revolution on another planet and get even more people killed, so like… just let the gargoyle turn the microwave on and then leave it on. No more stacks = revolution won, roll credits.
And for that matter, why didn’t the planet’s defense system automatically melt the first settlers? The gargoyles are described as a warlike civilization of brain-geniuses, so how could the entire society be asleep at the wheel when a bunch of strangers show up?None of which addresses why a character is named Trepp.
season 1 was about a weird sister thing and rich people in the clouds. it wasn’t great but always held my interest.i have no idea what season 2 was about and never held my interest.
The main story of this show is just awful. Kovacs and Falconer are absolutely not good enough to merit a place in such lavish settings and set dressing; the world is great except for the usual Portentous Nouns that you get in all low-grade pulp genre fiction (Protectorate! Uprising! Envoys!) and hog centre stage to no good end.A show that was just about Poe being an unfashionable sentient hotel in this world would be a hundred times more interesting. As would a show just about Ortega being a detective in this world. But I don’t think there’s anything that could be done to make the Kovacs/Falconer situation interesting.