Altered Carbon (Season 2)

Title: Altered Carbon (Season 2)
Showrunners: Laeta Kalogridis, Alison Schapker
Writers: Laeta Kalogridis, Sarah Nicole Jones, Michael R. Perry, Sang Kyu Kim, Cortney Norris, Adam Lash, Cori Uchida, Nevin Densham, Alison Schapker, Elizabeth Padden
Network: Netflix

While the very word “Adaptation” implies change, I wish more adapters would err on the side of changing too little rather than too much. This Carbon would have been better if they’d altered it a bit less.

The Altered Carbon series on Netflix is an adaptation of a three-book series about super-soldier turned lone gun for hire Takeshi Kovacs, by author Richard K. Morgan. Series 1, released in 2018, covered the first book in the series, which I wrote about here and here. If you’re lazy, and hey we’re on the Internet so yeah, the gee-whiz SF premise is that human consciousness can be digitized, stored in a “stack” implanted in the spine, and downloaded into any available “sleeve” (what people in far future land call bodies).

This second incarnation of the Altered Carbon series is a bit of a mashup—in the messiest sense of the word—of elements from books 2 and 3 of the Takeshi Kovacs series, Broken Angels and Woken Furies, altered to the point of almost unrecognizability.

Carrera and Kemp from Broken Angels show up, though their motivations and characters are completely altered. The setting has been moved to Harlan’s World, as in Woken Furies, and it follows book 3’s hunt for legendary rebel leader Quellcrist Falconer plot line, though of course they had to make this literal by turning it into a hunt for the actual person rather than a copy of her consciousness. As I said before, we are in the age of incredibly literal SF. Oshima from book 3 is transformed into a black lesbian woman named Trepp (Simone Missick), though amazingly without raising the kind of outcry that casting white actor Joel Kinnaman to play a white character with a half-Japanese half-Czech name did in season 1.

Can’t imagine why not.

If you’ve never read the books that’s going to make as much sense as alien hieroglyphs, so here’s the plot: Kovacs (played by Anthony Mackie this time) is convinced his long-vanished lover Quellcrist Falconer (Renee Elise Goldsberry) is still alive. He is lured back to his home world of Harlan’s World by the prospect of finding her, only to discover he is suspected of murdering a cabal of super-rich “Meths” (short for methuselah because of their money-fueled longevity). He enlists the aid of Trepp and Poe (Chris Conner), the holographic hotel AI from season 1, and is hunted by Colonel Carrera (Torben Liebrecht), who creates a clone of Kovacs based on a stored copy of Kovac’s consciousness (Will Yun Lee) to help track down the fugitives.  

None of these details actually matter much. Here’s what the show is like to watch: Bam! Aaah! Watch out! [Voiceover] Memories, are, like, ghosts, you know? Nanoswarm! The construct is destabilizing! Smash! Waaugh! Gyaaa! The End.

The first two episodes in particular are written by idiots for idiots.

Two examples from the first couple of episodes may illustrate:

Kovacs is stabbed in the shoulder and knocked unconscious. He awakes with no memory of what happened. To make himself remember, he stabs himself in the shoulder. Thank god his assailant didn’t kick him in the testicles.

In another scene, Colonel Carrera and four of his men (despite being a Colonel, Carrera only seems to have about four—alas for streaming TV budgets) investigate the scene of a murder. The police allow them in, but confiscate their weapons (why, I have no idea). Carrera and his men kill the cops anyway: Carrera takes one cop’s gun, shoots the cop, then tosses it to one of his men, who does a pirouette and then shoots another cop, the ballet guy then tosses the gun to yet another solider, who does a backflip, then shoots a third cop, backflippy tosses the gun YET AGAIN … Anyway, at the end of it all Carrera reports everything he found at the crime scene without covering anything up, so. What. The. Fuck. Was that all in aid of?

The dialog is enjoyable in its schlocky cheesiness. Colonel Carrera gets most of the best (worst) lines: “If we’re talking wolves, I’m the alpha and you’re nothing but my bitch.” Though frankly this is slightly let down by the fact that as the big bad, Carrera looks like a middle-aged metrosexual with about as much menace as Mark Ruffalo.

There are attempts at a serious tone, with laboring weighty voiceovers about the way we are are haunted by memories and vainly attempt to recreate our pasts, but the seriousness is undercut by the nonsensical action. The treatment of the virtual and digital is especially silly: Poe, the holographic AI, carries a shotgun, drinks whiskey and manipulates other programs by waving his hands around in midair.

To be honest, the show doesn’t seem that interested in its own themes, anyway. Character motivations are impossible to follow and don’t matter, as every problem is resolved by punching or shooting things. Carrera is working against the planet’s governor, no he’s working for her, Quellcrist is a murderer, no she’s a victim, no she’s a willing accomplice. Clone Kovacs is a ruthless killer who murders Trepp’s father, no he’s a caring, sensitive guy you’d like if you got to know him personally. Maybe if given enough time these changes would sit better, but with a season of just eight episodes character arcs get rushed in the mad dash to get through the convoluted plot involving about four double-crosses and a lot of unconvincing technobabble.

I get that streaming TV is not words on paper, and each medium imposes different needs. However, as I argued with Star Trek Discovery, if all you keep is the surface level stuff—the names and places, some of the technology, one or two lines—then why not go all the way and make something totally new? Using original works of fiction for little more than name recognition feels an uncomfortable combination of both horribly cynical and terribly hubristic—assuming you as the TV writer know better how to craft a story than the bestselling author whose works you’re plundering for your story line.

Think back to the Lord of the Rings movies, probably the best-loved and most widely acclaimed SF/Fantasy adaptations in recent memory (Game of Thrones had a shot at the title before that last season, sigh). Now, what do people remember about those movies? Was it Legolas surfing down an elephant’s trunk while no-scoping orcs with his bow? Was it Aragorn somehow grabbing a green ghost by the neck and threatening it with his sword? Was it the incredibly literal interpretation of the all-seeing eye of Sauron as a gigantic searchlight? Or—or were these dismissed as risible additions by the writers to an otherwise vivid portrayal of one of the classics of modern English literature?

The Takeshi Kovacs books are certainly no Lord of the Rings, but there was a core to them, a bitter suspicion of the corrosive effects that the convergence of money and technology into the hands of a few can have, but also a deep wariness of fanatics and extremists of any stripe—people who believe deeply in a cause often don’t care too much about the people who follow it. That gets thrown out the window—season 2 ends with Quellcrist vowing to travel to some other planet to continue her bloody revolution.

It’s a light, mildly diverting, disposable time-filler, something Netflix can dump on the service to keep you busy for a week or two until the next show comes around, but that’s pretty much the only mileage I got out of it.