Netflix looks to a darker future in Altered Carbon
With the return of Star Trek and The X-Files to television, 2018 is looking to be a good year for science fiction. On the big screen, we’ll soon see Natalie Portman in Annihilation and Spielberg’s Ready Player One (with a sure to be underwhelming Solo: A Star Wars Story in between) and hopefully a few smaller films and shows to engage the mind in thoughts of the future and the possibilities held there.
On Amazon, there’s Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams. Hulu will bring back The Handmaid’s Tale in April, although it’s less sci-fi and more dystopian nightmare. Netflix has combined the two in the most recent season of Black Mirror, a show that’s sure ruin your day more often than not.
This week, though, Netflix has released another original sci-fi show, one that’s more stylized and less preachy. It’s not so much a warning as a reasonable assertion, assuming the technology featured in the show is ever realized.
Altered Carbon is at its heart a detective drama, a whodunit set on a future Earth that isn’t as far off as it seems. The themes presented aren’t especially challenging or thought-provoking, as the show wears its philosophy on its sleeve. But it’s slick and beautiful, thoroughly detailed, and entertaining for the most part. It’s hard to ask much more.
In the future, man has the technology to live forever. Through what are known as “stacks,” the essence of what makes a person human can be stored forever. These stacks are housed in the spinal column at the base of the neck, in an extra vertebrae that is connected to the body.
Everything a person is and ever was is found in this small disk. As a result, bodies have become disposable. So long as the stack isn’t destroyed, someone can live on indefinitely, cycling through an endless host of “sleeves” or bodies.
Gender and age are no longer a factor—grandma might live inside the former body of a tattooed ex-con or a seven-year-old girl who suffers an accident can be dropped into whatever body is available at the time.
This, of course, leads to an easily defined class system, with the Meths (short for Methuselahs) at the top. The Meths are the super-rich, the endless, people literally live forever by constantly backing up their stacks and having an unlimited supply of cloned bodies at their disposal.
The show itself is about a man out of time, an elite soldier from another era, who was placed in stasis for 250 years. He is “respun” into a new body to help one of the world’s richest men solve his own murder. While the show seems complex, with a dizzying mythology all its own, the story is straightforward enough to keep the audience from becoming confused. For Altered Carbon to succeed, this world needs to feel real. It needs to be lived in. For the most part, it is. Obviously, the show borrows heavily from the Blade Runner universe.
At first glance, the cities we see are almost indistinguishable from Ridley Scott’s dystopian Los Angeles. But the more you watch, the more the Altered Carbon world feels unique.
There’s nothing unique about the story itself, or the characters, or the themes behind them. Rampant capitalism is bad and humans are naturally violent and depraved. Ho-hum. We’ve all been here before.
But given the hurdles needed to understand the world of Altered Carbon, simplicity in story is necessary.
Once the world is established, once the forces at play are explained, the series will have more room to breathe. Hopefully, future seasons will show more nuance and stronger writing.
There’s not much to be said for the acting in the series. It’s competent enough to tell the story, doesn’t devolve into soap opera territory, and generally hit all the high notes.
As I said, these aren’t the most complex of characters. But given the nature of the show, casting is wide open. If the show is successful, the showrunners won’t be limited to that one guy from The Killing and might potentially reach out for better names.
At any rate, Altered Carbon is a decent binge watch with a significant amount of potential for future seasons, provided the writers are allowed to reach beyond the surface.
Hopefully, there will be a sophomore season that really opens up the possibilities.