Altered Carbon S1E1: “Out of the Past”

This review was commissioned by @Lupercal.


I'm not exactly sure why I didn't see this show on my own. Everyone's been recommending it to me. Everything I've heard about it makes it sound like the kind of thing I'd like. Honestly, I think part of the reason is because most of my media consumption in the last couple of years has been stuff I'm reviewing, and I just barely ever have the time or inclination to watch stuff on my own anymore.

Well, regardless! Altered Carbon is a Netflix original series that debuted in 2018, just before "Netflix original series" became a go-to punchline for jokes. Based on a 2002 novel of the same name, Altered Carbon is supposed to be an old school cyberpunk thriller about digitized consciousnesses being brought back in new bodies long after death. Or something along those lines. Let's dive into the pilot episode, "Out of the Past."


The intro really plays into the classic genre aesthetics, with the human brains turning into crystalline cybernetics and being superimposed over nighttime cityscapes and so forth. Very Gibson, much Snow Crash, so Matrix, wow.

There's also a snake motif in the semi-holographic visuals, which could mean any number of things. Cyberpunk likes its biblical motifs, so it could be a bad snek, but it also likes its gnostic motifs, so it could be a good snek as well.

Our story properly begins with a man floating in a tank of liquid, face hooked up to a breathing apparatus. From what I've heard of the show's promise, this is probably a fresh clone body about to be decanted. This is intercut with a scene of him (in his previous body) having an erotic shower scene with a woman that is somewhat de-sexified by the fact that they're cleaning blood and gore off of their bodies as they make out under the shower. A female voiceover (shower murderbuddy, I'm guessing) urges him to not trust anything, not to take any memories of his going forward at face value, and absolutely to not buy any ostensible authority figure's story.

As the intercuts with the bacta tank scene continue, the man and woman get out of the shower and start chilling out in their apartment living room. Which is full of guns, ammunition, and stacks of those crystalline neural-looking thingies that I suspect might be boxed/dormant human consciousnesses. I guess they're in the human (mind) trafficking business? I think something like that. The man walks over to the window, through which a lush tropical sunset is visible. I'll bet it's a hologram and the actual scene outside of the window is a polluted hellscape. He taps on the window/screen, and yep, just so.

It also appears that this scifi megacity is on another planet. Or more likely, going by the size and appearance of the stellar objects in the sky overhead, a moon orbiting a gas giant.

The voiceover from the shower scene continues, telling "them" that they are Envoys, which means that they're...really smart and observant and stuff. I'm having trouble following this. Also, it doesn't look like the woman he's hanging out in the apartment living room with is the same as the one he showered with a second ago after all. Are we cutting between three different scenes? I guess the confusion is deliberate, considering that this is a story about consciousnesses being flung through time, bodies, and real and false memories.

In the apartment, the woman is cleaning bone fragments out of those cyberbrain things. Human trafficking seems likely, yeah. Or else recovered comrades-in-arms whose bodies were shot up in battle and need the blood and bone bits cleaned out before resleeving.

Then she asks him "who do you think they are?" and he replies "who cares, we're getting paid." So yup. Transhuman trafficking!

Suddenly, something gets the guy's attention. He turns off the lights, and starts using some kind of X-ray vision power to see the small army of armed and helmeted soldiers (or are they robots?) taking positions outside the apartment and setting up a breaching charge against the door. Don't you just hate it when that happens?

His female companion expresses disbelief that he has X-ray vision. He assures her that no, seriously, he does, and that there are twelve heavily armed "praetorians" about to blast through the door and kill them both. She's convinced enough by this to get out the guns and hand one to him before the door explodes, knocking one if not both of the pair off their feet. Then we return, for the last time, to the body in the bacta tank before it is decanted and brought to a hospital-like environment covered in what looks like plastic wrap to be awoken. I'm guessing the explosion that blew out the door was the last conscious memory of the consciousness that's just been housed in this fresh biosynth.

Apparently, there are a number of others currently being reawakened here. It's actually something of an assembly line process.

Industrial commodification of human minds and bodies. It's almost like this is cyberpunk or something.

An experienced resleeving technician is talking a newbie through the process, and is just starting to pull the breathing tube out of the body's mouth when it wakes up, grabs his arm, and starts thrashing around as if having a seizure. Newbie lab bunny panics. Experienced lab bunny doesn't despite being grabbed, assuring her that this happens sometimes, it just means that the mind's previous host died a violent death, no big deal. Erm...shouldn't it be SOP to strap them down for this, then? I'm not saying that I expect the evil corporate autocracy that no doubt rules this world to care about its employees' safety, but you'd think they'd be concerned about efficiency.

Then we return to the apartment raid flashback. Apparently that explosion *wasn't* the end of his previous body's life, it continued for at least a few minutes after that. The criminal duo somehow crawled out of the living room and hid in back as the small army of soldiers flooded inside. More voiceover of...someone from whoever trained the guy to be an Envoy, or turned him into one...about how deadly he has the potential to be. Then he and his girlfriend start shooting, and I guess those praetorians aren't robots after all because they make very humanlike sounds from under their weird-looking helmets as they go down. X-ray vision is a very useful power when you're using high powered weapons in an indoor environment. His girlfriend wreaks more indiscriminate - but still impressive - havoc with wild machine pistol fire and some kind of EMP grenades.

Back in the present(?), the more experienced medtech continues being boredly nonchalant about the patient's thrashing until said patient pulls the (grotesquely long and invasive) breathing tube out of his own mouth, stumbles off the cot, and breaks the overconfident git's nose, prompting reinforcements to enter the room.

Why aren't the patients restrained for this, again?

One of the new orderlies comes in pulls out a scifi taser and threatens the patient with it, his demeanor much more prison guard than hospital worker. Which, considering what the patient was doing the last time he was alive, is probably exactly what this place is. The patient ends up being faster and stronger than they accounted for (I'm guessing this is down to his mental "Envoy" skills rather than any property of the body they themselves just put him in...) and subdues Corporal Taser as well. The patient finally speaks, his first words being a demand to know how long he's been dead for.

Another orderly has to look up the answer to that question on their tablet. It takes a minute. Which is a pretty effective communication of how little they normally care about the people in their care.

We finally get a name; Takeshi Kovacs. Kovacs, huh? No wonder he's such a handful, if he's related to Rorschach. "He" might actually not be accurate, though. The two faces in the screenshot above are of their new sleeve and their previous one, but the orderly scrolls through several others that came before, and these appeared to be female. So, Kovacs might have originally been anything as far as sex and gender go.

Also, it turns out that Kovacs has been dead for two hundred and fifty years. So, that's a thing.

Kovacs next demands that a mirror be brought to him. They don't have any mirrors here, in order to minimize violent dysphoria incidents, but since Kovacs can only really get *less* violent from where they are now the orderlies decide to hand them a reflective metal dish they can see their reflection in. Seeing their new face triggers a terrifying, howling scream, but after it subsides Kovacs finally seems to calm down. They explain to the orderlies that they know that whole fit was excessive, but they just really hate getting shot.

Mood.

Their next question is where they are. Alcatraz Prison, Bay City, Earth. I guess the tri-cities fused into one and somehow ended up NOT just calling themselves San Francisco in the future. And they reopened Alcatraz as an actual prison instead of a historical site, for some fucking reason? Maybe it's actually a new prison that they just named that as a nod to city history or something, that would make more sense. Kovacs' reaction to hearing that they're on Earth is a sort of blank bewilderment; they've either never been to the homeworld before, or it's just been a very, very long time even in subjective/conscious years. After his mind is done reeling from this this, he voluntarily heads off to the showers to clean off and await further processing.

...I'm gonna go with he/him for Kovacs. Their onscreen forms have been male presenting enough that I'll just keep slipping up if I try not to, heh.

Jump ahead to him and a bunch of other inmates getting an orientation speech from an annoyingly chipper hologram. And man, this is some C L U N K Y exposition.

Why would they need to be told the basics of their cortical stack implants, including how they got them, if they've had them their entire lives from one year onward?

They talked about partial amnesia being a possible side effect of traumatic resleeving, but this is basic background knowledge about the world they inhabit. If they forgot that, they probably also don't know what country they live in or what pants are for.

Also...apparently these prisoners have all just completed their sentences by spending time (a very long time, in Kovacs' case) in a disembodied state. That's a concept I've seen before in scifi, sure. But in this case, it seems like their minds are completely dormant - effectively dead - while stored in those cortical stacks. For Kovacs and presumably the others, it's as if they were arrested/killed a second ago. So then...what's the point, exactly? It's not really retributive justice, unless being thrown into a future you may or may not recognize is supposed to be the punishment. It's not rehabilitative or restitutional. What exactly is the point of this system? It doesn't have to actually live up to its intended purpose, given that this setting seems pretty dystopian, but there should at least be some *theoretical* logic behind it, right?

Hmm. Well, there is one possibility. The chipper exposition hologram mentions that the bodies they've been installed in aren't flash-clones or anything like that, but rather the bodies of more recent convicts sentenced to "prison." So I guess it's restitutional in the sense that the state takes your body and uses it for...another prisoner who just finished their own sentence. Okay, yeah, no, that still makes zero sense.

Hologram lady goes on to explain that to citizens with permission, it's possible to even send your consciousness wirelessly to another stack elsewhere in inhabited space and take over a new body there without needing actual space travel. So the personality data is all completely digital then. It seems like personality forks necessarily have to be a thing, in that case. She also cheerfully reminds everyone to avoid blunt trauma or energy weapon hits to the base of the skull, because that can kill you for real. This is starting to give me a Borderlands kind of feel. The bad exposition is then ended prematurely when Kovacs is summoned off to the warden's office.

The flashback continues! I thought we were done with it, but nope! Kovacs and his GF run out of ammo, and the last few praetorians are still up. They're forced to go hand to hand. Kovacs manages to close the distance and start punching.

Those helmets really make them look like bug aliens or something.

GF does not, and takes a full auto barrage to the midsection that ends her current biological existence. Then, flash forward again to the warden's office.

The warden, a very stereotypical dystopian middle manager looking type, declares that part of Kovacs' file is classified above his grade, but what he can see on it is pretty dire. Numerous murder charges, terrorism, spying and treason against the Protectorate government, etc. No word on the transhuman trafficking, but maybe that's just covered by "crimes against the state." Anyway, it's starting to look like Kovacs might have been a failed revolutionary before he turned criminal. Maybe the Envoys were a last-ditch supersoldier program of whatever independence movement he was a part of? That would fit.

Back in time, Kovacs in his previous incarnation is finally subdued. One of the praetorians takes off their helmet, revealing a face that...okay, maybe the actors just happen to look kinda similar. IS that the same body that Kovacs himself gets resleeved in centuries later? They look similar. If so, then that would mean that this is in fact a mass-produced clone body, since I don't think this particular praetorian would have lived that long. Again, maybe just similar-looking actors. Not sure. It would explain why Kovacs was so horrified at seeing his new reflection though, so...maybe?

Praetorian maybe-clone tells Kovacs that he's under arrest for, among many other things, being in the employ of notorious terrorist leader Quellcrest Falconer. Kovacs snarks back that he didn't work for Falconer; she was just the elected representative of a revolutionary cooperative. Huh, sounds like they were a socialist-adjacent movement, interesting. Also, if leader Falconer is a "she," then I'm guessing she's the one who's voiceover we heard telling Kovacs about his Envoy powers. A scientist, as well as a revolutionary firebrand? Maybe.

Also, Kovacs and the praetorian officer - named as Jaeger - keep switching languages mid-conversation. Not sure why they're doing that. They can both do it, and they both seem to know that the other can do it, so it's not any kind of flex. Maybe to confuse eavesdroppers? Not sure.

Kovacs tells Jaegar that he knows he has orders to avoid making a martyr of Kovacs, so he can just cut the threats and bluster and harvest his stack already. Jaegar acknowledges this, but tells Kovacs that he's still got to do something about him being such a smartass. He then grabs GF's body and shoots her in the back of the neck, destroying her cortical stack and killing her permanently, because Kovacs annoyed him.

And, back in the future, the warden recounts the official story that Kovacs murdered his own partner when faced with arrest. Shot her in the cortical stack from behind.

Kovacs is visibly rattled by that, but he manages to keep his cool. It's not like the warden probably knows any better than the official story himself.

There's a funny character moment here, where the warden pauses and waits for Kovacs to say something for himself, and Kovacs just asks if he missed a question somewhere in that monologue. Kovacs consistently seems to react with affected nonchalance when he gets hurt.

The Warden sighs, and just monologues on about how he's only being released due to a commission by a company called Bancroft Industries, who also specified that he be released to them in a body with military-grade neuromuscular augmentations and combat muscle memory. Um...they didn't strap this one down during reanimation? Really? Really? Anyway, I guess its not just Kovacs' Envoy training that made him so dangerous so soon after resleeving. So, he belongs to Bancroft Industries CEO Laurens Bancroft now, as legal property. Kovacs is stunned to hear this; apparently, slavery was illegal the last time he was alive, and no one filled him in on that having changed. Also, he'll be the property of Boss Bancroft until the lease expires, at which point he will be disembodied and imprisoned again to serve the rest of his indefinite sentence.

-_-

So, he has no incentive for compliance whatsoever. There's no way this could possibly go wrong for them.

Unless they gave him a killswitch or something, but I suspect that they didn't.

Kovacs walks out of Neo-Alcatraz, alone and unguarded. Outside, a pair of parents are reunited with their kid daughter, who has been released to them in the body of a woman older than they are. Apparently, little Cindy was killed in a hit-and-run, and the state owes her a fresh sleeve. But they just use whatever bodies they happen to have taken off of recent criminal arrests, and it's first come first serve. So, the seven year old girl will either keep her seventy year old body, or they'll pay for an upgrade, or she can go back into storage.

The dialogue is really clunky in this exchange. In the same forced exposition kind of way as the holographic lady's speech. I hope the whole show isn't going to be written like this.

As he watches this, Kovacs is approached by his newly assigned parole officer, Ortega. When he asks her about the scene he just oversaw, she reveals that "first come first serve" isn't actually quite it.

The way she says this is...again, expositiony, but also naively judgmental in a way that makes her sound like she's not from around here either. No world-weariness or cynicism in it. Then, when Kovacs expresses disgust with the system, she looks at him skeptically and asks "You don't approve?"

Either there's some very subtle character work going on here, with Ortega testing his character or the like, or it's just bad writing. Well...maybe not writing, exactly. It could be the direction or the acting that's to blame for how schizophrenically these lines are delivered, assuming it's not intentional.

...oh for the fucking hell...

He then says that that wasn't how it worked where he came from, and she asks him where that would be. In a way that suggests that she has no idea who he is or how long he's been under. So, that whole exposition bit was completely "as you all know."

...

I'm starting to feel like whoever adapted this into a TV show just took all of the novel's internal narration and forced it into the mouths of random characters in random scenes.

...

Ortega walks him out into the street, where a crowd of protestors are protesting in force. Apparently, the Roman Catholic church opposes resleeving, and Catholic activists have been making their displeasure known. That isn't the only change the Vatican Five council made, though; Pope Juggalo IX also completely reimagined the church's aesthetics.

As they cut through the crowd, some of the protesters direct their ire at Kovacs specifically for defying that intricate afterlife system that God spent so much effort on. Seemingly without thought to how much or little agency the resleeved have had in their own immortality.

They get in a hovercar, and she starts flying him across Bay City. She continues their latest conversation topic by telling him about some big legal battle that the Vatican and other religious interests won against the Protectorate government a while ago, preventing the state from resurrecting murder victims to testify about their own murders over the objections of their next of kin. That's actually a very interesting bioethics question; moreso than the derpy complaints being made by the protesters we just saw. I hope it'll get explored a bit more, at some point.

Then she asks him what he's in for. He decides to just play the psycho killer for now, and list off nonspecific things like "killing people" and "blowing things up." She then asks how he decides who deserves to die, like she's his therapist or something. He replies that his targets generally include dictators, participants in genocide, and people who ask too many annoying questions.

She then smiles and warmly tells him that her grandmother told her she could get anyone talking, no matter how bad their attitude is. Yeah, that's the kind of personal information you want to share with what you believe to be a psycho killer. Granted, this could all be affectation on her part, but I'm slowly losing my inclination to be charitable with this show as far as dialogue is concerned.

He tells her that it's easy to get people talking if they're stuck in a car with you. That shuts her up in a miserable huff.

She was totally blithe to the death threat, but telling her he doesn't like listening to her yammering is a bridge too far. Apparently.

-_-

In response to some further, much more sedate, prodding, he tells her that right now he's considering indulging his violent urges on a fellow by the name of Laurens Bancroft, whoever that is. She's shocked that he's never heard of Bancroft; apparently, he's been famous for just slightly less long than Kovacs has been dead. She then forgets all about being upset at Kovacs, and gives him some infodumping about Methuseluhs, or "meths." People who have been keeping themselves alive, pretty much uninterrupted, for centuries. Bancroft being one of the oldests.

Speaking of which, they break through the cloud layer and rise into the neighborhood of the ultra-rich, known as the Aerium.

The music here is really on point. Heavenly, but also hostile and foreboding. Alien.

Apropos of nothing, she then explains that the meths live up here so as to not have to see the clutter and squalor of mere mortals. Like normal humans don't even exist for them. Thank you once again for telling us what the themes of the story are, Ortega, you are a very well written character.


I'll pause it here. I'm sorry I've been splitting so many reviews lately, but holy fuck. I don't know why, but this is the slowest thing I've ever had to watch for this project. I'll finish this episode early next week.

So far, I like everything about it except the dialogue, which is just SyFy original movie shit.