I'm trying to figure out why I like the show Altered Carbon so much, the first season, and why I don't like the second season.
The show shows great contrasts. Great poverty, great wealth, great beauty and disgusting violence, close friendships and horrible enemies. Technology, nude women, and cynicism. Kovach is willing to die any second but he's also perhaps immortal. The mindful samurai cast into the future, is on a mystery where we only see interlocking pieces and foreshadowing. The only thing extraneous are all the nude bodies. The rich visual details present a world of temptation and disease. Ortega is hispanic heart, but is also a bad ass warrior, played by Martha Elba Guadalupe Higareda Cervantes. At least the women are small breasted in the future.
I read the book and it was a rare book that wasn't better than the show. I can count on my hand those exceptions and it means the story tellers really used the medium, better than the printed language medium, which is hard to beat.
Obviously all the nude women help, undulating, throwing themselves at Kovacs. I want to have women throwing themselves at me. I can identify easily with the hero. I'm a badass that nobody understands. I wish money was no object to me. Every character seems to be well wrought, from Poe to the other AI, to his sister, to Ortega's sidekick who encourages her to follow the rules and be less reckless and has a relationship with her mother.
The PTSD flashbacks also present a scared past that intrusively but seemingly positively guides our hero. What is left to care about in this soulless world? The woman who trained him to be ruthless and win.
The houses in the sky have a Miyazaki element. The Blade Runner setting has become the default setting for the future, often raining. Have you seen the floods in China? It rained 200mm of water in one hour.
Stacks and sleeves are easily adopted, they make sense in a kind of way, and yet are far off technology. The future is hispanic and Asian, the way the USA is trending.
There is just enough mystery, and there are regular revelations.
Holograms attack Kovacs when he's high, at the museum, trigger his training and PTSD. He's mean and gentle, jaded but human with a heart. What is illusion and what is real? He utilizes relationships enough to suit him. He's just as brutal as Bancroft, and yet he's somehow softer. Money has not corrupted him even though he's a mercenary. The noble mercenary, doesn't care but is nice.
Other people are too intrusive. Ortega's sidekick, her mother. Ortega in Kovacs' life. Kovacs in Bancroft's life.
Ortega lives in a basement apartment. The high and the low. She has the stereotypical Marionisma mother, who cares too much, and the stereotypes in the future are useful, they seem more valuable in their endurance. She pushes the church.
Past flashbacks provide some psychological justification and sophistication. When the fighting couple says they have children 5 and 7 both Ortega and Kovacs say the children are not used to their parents having new sleeves. Their psychological awareness and sophistication includes empathy for children. Ortega is just as disgusted by the party, we see their values start to align.
People who are not selling themselves to survive, loving family or fighting for justice, as only out for their own pleasure, and that is dangerous. To get so much of what you want is dangerous. The children of Bancroft never grow up, they are still children. The selfishness, and the vacuity of selfishness, the chasing of urges and pleasures. We want it, but on the other hand we look down on it. It's enticing and repulsive like all the dualities in this dialectic masterpiece.
"You're just the intersection between Bancroft's nostalgia and Clarissa's business sense." To owe your existence to such contingency. We all do. I was reading the other day that your likelihood of coming into being going back in time, makes you highly improbable. The galloping selfishness, grandiosity and contempt for others, is what makes them sickening. The rules don't apply to them.
It's Jeff Bezos wondering why everyone doesn't think it's cool he went into outer space, why they are such kill joys and want him to pay taxes and help the poor. He'll say he gives his money away and helps the poor. He's given away billions, even though it's a sliver of what he has and is one of the reasons he doesn't pay taxes because charity is a tax write off.
I think there is a danger in getting too much of what you want. And the goal posts move, you will want more. That is why the purchases of the ultra rich seem so frivolous to us normals.
When I have gotten what I wanted, it really ruined me. I'm not going to go into it, but it precipitated a crisis that I'm still recovering from. I'm haunted by what other people said about feeling used.
The gladiator battle between husband and wife is enhanced by adding in the rare ancient fighter, but it's still as gruesome and macabre. Bancroft is just trying to feel something. The implication is that humans are not meant to mate, that they build up too much anger. It's the idiocy of the ancient Greek Gods with their petty jealousies and lack of compassion, trampling normals and ordinaries.
Bancroft seems to have a line he won't cross, and a code of honor.
Your limited comprehension can't comprehend the complexity and depth of my life, though I can suspend that empathy to others because of ...
Episode 4 is about the day of the dead, and Kovacs gets tortured by Dime the Twin, because he is in Richer's body.
The torture scene could be an examination on how to live. Delete the chains. Get to the next screen. Watch fear in others multiply. Exploit the weakness. Kovacs defeats Quellcrist "Quell" Falconer by kissing her. Love is the final ingredient for defeating hate.
You could argue that life is torture, and that these techniques could defeat the torturer. Don't let them know your strength. Play weak until that supreme moment. Kovacs is a highly trained warrior. I wish I used that type of discipline in my meditation.
Meanwhile Abuela doesn't want to wake up again. She didn't have the religious coding on her stack, and Ortega wakes her up for Dia de los Muertos, puts her in a sleeve of a criminal she just killed. It's a weird updating on the Mexican tradition.
Not wanting to wake up again is the idea of Buddhism, when you become spiritually advanced, and the desire to live doesn't rule your life.
Every thesis has a antithesis. Humans have the illusion of living forever, however fragile, and then someone wants to make life not forever. It's hard to imagine future technology, but it changes things. For every vaccine that promises to protect, there are people who want to die. The life instinct, and the death instinct.
Reliable backstory. Interesting subplots. The trauma girl. Gladiator fighting. The revelation that the police are bought for by the rich. Kovacs starts to honor Ortega's desire to protect the sleeve, he wants to not just resleeve. He's starting to act on the notion that we shouldn't live forever.
The ending 3 episodes is plot. The naked killing scene is amazing. Reileen Kawahara is played by Dichen Lachman, who has the utmost courage to play so naked. Double sleeving creates some interesting problems. How to you win at scissors paper rock if you know your own strategy. I guess you go against your strategy, but then you'd think of that too. In a way the last 3 episodes are so horrible, they're hard to watch, despite the righteous outcome. It is a story about overcoming trauma and the gothic element of life. I want to read Poe, he's supposedly the anti-Transcendentalist.
Poe is back in Season 2, seems his decompiling didn't take. Poe is on Magda Prime. I can't figure out why I don't want to watch the second season.
Links:
The Music of Altered Carbon: Season 1 episode 3, Vera Hall Death Have Mercy. I didn't know who Vera Hall was. Trouble so hard is her most played song on Spotify.
Rotten Tomatoes gives season 2 a 81% and season 1 a 69%
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