Has anyone else watched this yet? I loved it. Definitely has the Blade Runner vibe going for it. The cinematography is beautiful and the story line is pretty solid. I haven't read the book yet, but it looks like season 1 encompasses book 1. There are 2 more books in the series so I expect at least 2 more seasons to come.

I've heard a few people say the writing dropped off around episode 6, but I don't think that's the case. At first I didn't like the direction the story went right around that time, but by the end I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I haven't been this impressed with a new show since True Detectives season 1.

Summary taken from the Wiki page link

More than 300 years in the future, society has been transformed by new technology, leading to human bodies being interchangeable and death no longer being permanent. Takeshi Kovacs is the only surviving soldier of a group of elite interstellar warriors who were defeated in an uprising against the new world order. His mind was imprisoned for centuries until impossibly wealthy businessman Laurens Bancroft offers him the chance to live again. Kovacs will have to do something for Bancroft, though, if he wants to be resurrected. Bancroft's request of Kovacs is to solve a murder -- Bancroft's. "Altered Carbon" is based on Richard K. Morgan's cyberpunk noir novel of the same name.

 

The constant abductions got boring after the second time and they just kept doing it.

 

I plan on reading the books here soon. I didn't know anything about the Altered Carbon world until this show came out.

 

I didn’t feel like cooking or homework so I just binged the show when I got home today. It’s pretty good, and they did a fairly decent job on the mystery. It’s not terribly easy to pick out and the twists allong the way are interesting. The sci-fi was also well done and ended up as a decently interesting dystopian extrapolation of current trends.

My biggest issue was the main villain just didn’t really engage me much.

Spoiler

The fact that she was his sister was a bit of a surprise, but she was just so bog standard crazy Bond villain that I just wasn’t interested.

 

The books are one of my SF favourites of the last 20 years. Hard boiled, vicious and they make you really think about the social consequences. The 3 episodes I've seen so far capture the feel of the society of the first book as far as I can recall.

Superb production quality and what I've seen so far looks like "The Expanse" has SF genre competition.

 

Boring as hell and exceptionally whiny compared to the books

 

It's good. Not as amazeballs as the book though, but that's hard to do. That's about all I can say.

The main dude is not a great actor, but is passable for what they need him for: delivering tough guy one liners and being obscenely muscled.

 

I enjoyed it a lot! Especially loved Poe, or more accurately, The Raven. As both a character and a setting, I loved it.

The main villain is kinda meh, but the show was still a lot of fun.

 

Eye-catching visuals, sort of interesting premise/world... terrible writing.

Cookie-cutter characters, bland dialogue, with some standard "caveman science fiction" themes thrown in for good measure. Even with how "evil for the sake of evil" the villain was written, I identified more with them than the main characters.

Poe was interesting though, liked him.

 

Solid show. The flashback episode was great at tying everything together. Especially that museum scene, holy shit.

Lots of changes from the books apparently -- sounds like the tv show made it more personal for Tak.

Didnt quite like the main antagonists plot from episode 8 onwards though, felt a bit eh.

 

Enjoying it so far. I feel like there's a lot of potential in the world that's not going to be explored, but they're going deep enough for a television show and I can have fun watching it.

The AI council I've only had a glimpse of so far was great, and it'd be neat to see that expanded. The episode I'm on just mentioned the alien tech that made this all possible, and I'm hoping it goes into that as well.

 

It doesn't, but if season 2 and 3 happen, then we should get a lot more exposition. Broken Angels and Woken Furies both focus heavily on Martian (Elder) tech.

 

Okay I am necro'ing this thread because during the early months of the pandemic I binge watched all of Altered Carbon for the first time. I went into the series completely cold, with no exposure to the series at all. It became my favorite show on Netflix, and then it was canceled. This week while I was sick I took some time to rewatch it. I have a lot of thoughts.

I thought the series did an incredible job pairing its soundtrack to what is happening on screen. I know that this is expected for large budget productions, but I've found myself really enjoying it in this series more than most others.

Spoiler

For example, this scene to close out the climax of Season 1with the echo of Quellcrist Falconer narrating a not even remotely veiled parable with the entire first two seasons, which forms a beautiful chiasmus across the scenes of Takeshi watching Quellcrist die and Ortega watching Takeshi die.

I think that the show definitely went a little heavier on the flashbacks than I would have liked. They spent a little too much time trying to emphasize that the present is between past and future by focusing on how the past impacts the future, instead of what was going on in the present and that got really annoying. The series also fell victim to a little too much dialogue and long expository monologues instead of showing or conveying information as part of the narrative. That was pretty annoying.

I take a lot of issue with this.

Spoiler

The main villain in Season 1 is not Reileen, even if that is not communicated exceptionally well. Is she an antagonist? Absolutely. But the villain isn't Reileen. The villains are Meths. All Meths. They're living gods who can live their entire lives devoid of consequences caused by their actions while everyone else remains trapped in the universe they own. Unless something goes spectacularly wrong, like picking a fight with The Last Envoy, or another Meth, or the echo of an Ancient ghost possessing Quellcrist Falconer hellbent on revenge there is no chance whatsoever that they ever actually die.

Reileen isn't the villain; she's barely even a bit player in the evil in this series.

 

I was quite taken by the show at first, I really liked Joel Kinnaman's performance, Laurens Bancroft was a great character imo, I liked Dimi the Twin, the whole cortical stack thing really sparked my imagination, and made for some absolutely hilarious scenes, especially the whole 'let's spin out Grandma for Christmas thing' - hell, I even downloaded an Altered Carbon mod for Rimworld... But then I got to episode seven, Fightdrome, or whatever it's called, and I rapidly lost interest.

Quellcrist Falconer's ideology makes no sense, Takeshi choosing to align with her over his sister made no sense, all of the flashbacks to the Envoys absolutely dragged and imo added very little.

Still, I liked the core concept of the show enough to give the first book a try. I quite liked it, but was shocked by how far the show had deviated from its source material. In the case of the AI hotel playing a much greater part, it was a good thing. In a lot of other aspects, it really disappointed me. I have no idea why the showrunners changed the Envoys so radically, basically from special forces to an edgy death cult who mope around all day and haze the hell out of each other.

Basically what I'm saying is that the show was decent on its own merits but had a weak last few episodes, but when compared to its source material it's only superficially a good adaptation, but deviates quite wildly when it comes to the overall story in ways that broadly make it worse for some inexplicable reason. I haven't watched the second season, and I'm probably not going to.

 

Spoiler

Falconer's ideology in the show doesn't really get fleshed out until Season 2, and it is somewhat different than in the books. But the very tl;dr version of it is that due to the inequality created by the existence of an immortal super-caste, death needs to come back. Takeshi aligning with her, in part because of holding that ideology in common and in part because of love, over a sister who he's just been reunited with and who is radically different, isn't super far fetched.

Spoiler

Poe is the best character in modern science fiction. I'm not sure what their thought process with the Envoys or merging Natalia with Quellcrist was. I'm guessing screen time, but that is not a very satisfying explanation.

Give the second season a shot. It continues with the somewhat radical divergence from the books, in some ways which are good and some ways which are not.

 

And they change the main actor to the guy who plays Falcon in the Avengers, right? I might give it a go.

 

Yes, and it's a significant improvement over the actor in season one.

 

Hard disagree.

Mackey felt like Mackey playing Mackey.

Kinnaman exuded more of a gritty charisma than Mackey and was disappointed he wasn't going to be back. Though obviously understand why.

 

Yeah. I like Mackey in most of his roles but he has zero range. He always plays himself. Didn't think the og actor's performance was particularly nuanced either, but they felt like very different people, which kind ruins the whole "they're the same person in a new body" thing.