Altered Carbon Season One Review: so close! **Spoiler alert**

Seeing banners for Altered Carbon in the streets of New York City, years after having read the Takeshi Kovacs books intrigued me. Realizing it was available on Netflix was a good surprise. And watching the first episode got me really excited. I semi-binged the whole season.

What struck me at first was the director’s commitment to (post-)cyberpunk themes, without ending up producing yet another Blade Runner clone. Some of the “noir” tropes are conserved and the photography is mostly sensational.

The production quality was overall remarkable for a sci-fi miniseries. Syfy shows always have a cheap feel to them: what is supposed to be an army is clearly just a small group of extras filmed at narrower angles; CGI regularly looks obviously synthetic and doesn’t integrate well; actors beyond protagonists are often second grade at best. This does not apply to Altered Carbon. I found the visual effects convincing. True, some actors didn’t sit well with me: Tak’s sister Rei, played by Dichen Lachman, felt awkward most of the time, as if chosen for her singular look rather than her acting skills. Even Kristin Ortega — Martha Higareda, at times, would just feel off. But the acting was decent overall. Dimi’s sleeve inhabited by Kristin’s mother was particularly fun and shockingly seamless to me.

I also liked the dense subtlety of the storytelling. For example, in the first episode, Ortega crash-lands the Meth’s limo and the story moves on without missing a heartbeat. It is up to the viewer to piece together that this was a deliberate act of spite, not a lack of skills on the driver’s part.

I also enjoyed the absence of compromise or viewer education on sci-fi concepts. The show considers that you will either get it eventually, through various hints, or you’ve already come across the idea and have assimilated it.

It isn’t a perfect picture however. Most importantly, and I can’t remember if the book had the exact same storyline but, the sister’s motive makes no sense to me. She wants her brother to stay at her side and to love her. And to achieve this, she has become a planetary criminal kingpin. She put together a very elaborate and cruel plan in the hopes that, after living through much sister-caused pain and suffering, after realizing that she is a heartless sadist, her sibling will conclude that living at her side is the best possible future. On top of that, the brother-sister relationship had some pretty incest-rich vibes. Probably on purpose, yet positively deal-breaking when considering how plausible the sister character builds out. I get it, she’s a psychopath. But the roots of her condition are glossed over and Tak’s ambiguity towards her is confounding at best.

Similarly, Tak’s undying love for Quellcrist is barely fleshed out. They slept together once. She was awe-inspiring and he was a witty, resilient, skilled warrior. I’m not seeing nor buying the undying love, here.

Some of the fight choreographies were over-the-top with acrobatics that barely made sense, like backflip kicks. They were pretty though.

Boobs were also pretty but the amount of boobs in a tv show follows, for me, a curve (pun intended) that, with each additional pair shown, will first rise in appreciation to a high of “oh, a pair of breasts” and then quickly descend into negative review territory. If you show me a pair, fine. If you show me ten, I start to wonder what it is that you are not showing me instead. Let’s not kid ourselves, naked bodies on tv are a powerful distraction. They can help you sell something or steal attention. But it makes me wonder: “had the director shown less body parts, how much more interesting and compelling could the story have been?”

And finally there are the fog-filled sarcophaguses. Spare sleeves are kept in high tech cocoons with glass panels that are impenetrably fogged up, until someone uses their dirty hands to wipe the condensation(?) off and reveal the content. What a cheap overused trick that was! And, really, how advanced is a civilization that has mastered conscience backup and restore, as well as immersive simulations, but can’t reliably fight off a few water droplets?

Am I looking forward to the next season? Not really. Will I watch it? Most likely, yes.