Stream It Or Skip It, ‘Altered Carbon’, Netflix’s Sci-Fi Series About A World Where Bodies Are Just ‘Sleeves’

Netflix has dabbled in the sci-fi and noir genres in the past, but with Altered Carbon, the streamer goes heavy into both genres. Based on a Richard K. Morgan novel, can the highly-anticipated adaptation live up to Netflix’s reputation of elevating genres?

ALTERED CARBON: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A moody shot of a body floating in a pool of water, a mask attached to his mouth to keep the body alive.

The Gist: We’re in a world where consciousness is portable, able to be digitized and stored in a device called a “stack”. Bodies are just “sleeves”; when added to the body’s spinal column, the stack helps a person live on in another body. The only way a person can be killed is if the stack is destroyed by an electrical pulse or it’s physically blown to pieces.

Takeshi Kovacs is shown as an agent/assassin, known as an “Envoy”, showering with his girlfriend to clean off blood from a job. When the authorities come in and kill the girlfriend, they take pains to keep the stack of the highly trained Kovacs intact. We cut to see the body that was floating in the water (Joel Kinnaman) wake up, and immediately start cracking skulls. Turns out Kovacs’s stack has been put in a new body and has been in stasis for 250 years.

He’s woken up because he’s been hired by Laurens Bancroft (James Purefoy), an aristocrat so wealthy that he lives in a mansion above the clouds. He wants Kovacs to find out who killed him. Uh, what? Turns out, he’s wealthy enough to be able to back up his consciousness via a satellite link. So, even though whoever killed him destroyed his stack, he was able to live on in a new stack and sleeve — except for the 48 hours before the murder, as he was killed shortly before another backup was to take place. The police felt it was a suicide, but he’s convinced he was murdered.

Kovacs is reluctant to take the job — even if it means he goes back to stasis forever — until a bunch of thugs try to kill him in a no-tell-motel (that’s so loyal to its guests that it even shoots people who try to shoot them).

Our Take: Like most sci-fi series, Altered Carbon spends most of its first episode trying to unpack its world and explain it in a way that won’t get viewers lost. It’s only somewhat successful in that regard; the noirish visuals of the future version of San Francisco are spectacular, but in giving those visuals, the explanation of stacks and sleeves and who exactly Kovacs is gets lost.

Once you get to the heart of the story, though, it’s a pretty straightforward murder mystery, albeit with the twist that the murder victim is now alive again and looking to avenge his own murder. Of course, the deeper Kovacs gets into his case, the more complex and twisty it’ll likely go, and hopefully we’ll get a look into the psyche of a man who was a soldier/assassin hundreds of years in the past, and how he deals with being in a new world and new body where morals are even looser than they were in his day.

The visuals and Joel Kinnaman will keep us watching. We’ve been fans of his since he played Shaggy-look-alike cop Stephen Holder in The Killing, and he brings the same sort of “I’m tough and can beat anyone’s ass but I generally want to be left alone” style to Kovacs. We just hope that the mystery deepens a bit as the first season goes on.

Sex and Skin: The scene described above where Kovacs from the past is showering with his girlfriend comes right after the first scene. There’s also a scene where Kovacs talks to Det. Kristin Ortega (Martha Higareda), the police officer assigned to tail him, in a strip club where the dancers shape shift to whatever their customers desire.

Parting Shot: We see Bancroft through the data-filled eyes of Kovacs. Then we flash to Kovacs, beaten and bloodied by the attack, saying “I’ll take the case.”

Sleeper Star: We like Higareda’s attitude as Det. Ortega. And the mysterious muse-like character played by Renee Elise Goldsberry has us intrigued.

Most Pilot-y Line: “Stuff it. I’m not a goddamned chauffeur,” Isaac Bancroft (Antonio Marziale) says to his mother Miriam (Kristin Lehman) after getting caught DUI. He was supposed to drive Kovacs to the mansion, but Ortega interceded.

Our Call: Stream It. There’s definitely more to this show than the somewhat simplistic mystery in the first episode. Until then, we’ll just enjoy Kinnaman as the wishes-he-was-asleep-forever Kovacs.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Watch Altered Carbon on Netflix