Altered Carbon S2 (Netflix) - February 27

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Famine

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No idea how there isn't an Altered Carbon thread on here already...

Anyway, due to the unique way in which people's lives are prolonged in the AC universe, the role of Takeshi Kovacs - as played by Joel Kinnaman (... and others) in S1 - is now played by Anthony Mackie of MCU fame (the Falcon), and that's actually entirely consistent.

Have a trailer:
 
Do we have no Altered Carbon fans (saving your presence, @Danoff)? This is one of my favourite sci-fi shows of the last decade.

Okay, basic premise: at some point humanity has discovered a new - alien origin - material (this is not explored in the first series, but one assumes it is a form of carbon, which has... been altered), which has the capability of storing the human mind. All people now have a disc - "cortical stack", or just "stack" - implanted in the back of their neck which stores their mind. Should they die, their "stack" can be installed into a new "sleeve" (body) and they can continue to live.

This has more-or-less ended the concept of death, with a few caveats. Should your stack be destroyed, you are dead ("real death"). Your new sleeve will not be the same as your old sleeve - the sleeves of drug addicts or prisoners may be available, as we see early on in the series when a young girl's parents discover that their insurance only covers her resleeve, after accidental death, into a 50-year old woman. The wealthy have clone banks to avoid this - more on them later.

It also opens up some unusual possibilities. People killed can testify at trial, by having their stack "spun up" in a new body for the trial - though some people (NeoCatholics, in the S1 plotline) - do not believe that they should be resleeved, and campaign for a law to prevent it. Interstellar travel is now a mere matter of beaming ("needlecasting") your stack data into a new stack in a new sleeve on another world. You can also backup your stack to storage, again a practice of the wealthy, so that if you experience RD you can simply download it back into a new stack and sleeve. Of course you don't have to stay in a body that looks like yours - which allows for people to borrow sleeves to masquerade as someone else - or is even the same gender. There's also the illegal possibility of putting your data into two stacks in two sleeves - double-sleeving.


Of course such a world, there are a few who abuse the technology - and their power. The mega-wealthy, and incredibly old "meths" (named for Methuselah) live above the clouds on floating houses, free from the realities of the world beneath. They are effectively free from death, with banks of clones and satellite backups of their stacks so that even in the event of real death they can resume life almost uninterrupted. With 15 lifetimes or more, they've seen and done it all and live a life of privileged boredom - although we do see some engaging in philathrophy, literally giving human interaction to plague sufferers (in the full knowledge that they can cast off their now-diseased body for a new one), others are vain and live out their every revolting fantasy with acts of pure cruelty and violence.

The "hero" of the piece is Takeshi Kovacs, a young boy recruited into an interplanetary marine corps (CTAC) who defects to a group known as the Envoys. The Envoys were a supersoldier faction trained (and with chemically enhanced bodies) initially to exploit stack technology by a woman called Quellcrist Falconer - who has her own link to altered carbon - but ultimately becomes opposed to the consequences of life without death. Shortly before the Envoys were able to implement a plan to make stacks useless, they were wiped out by an attack on their base. Kovacs survives, but is eventually hunted down by his former employer, killed and placed in stack storage.

Waking up 250 years later in another man's body (Joel Kinnaman), Kovacs is indentured to meth Laurens Bancroft (James Purefoy) who wants the last remaining Envoy's abilities to solve Bancroft's own murder which occurred five minutes before his daily stack backup.

Kovacs finds himself in the middle of a bizarre plot involving the meths, a prostitute who apparently converted to NeoCatholicism just before she committed suicide, a hotel who thinks he's Edgar Allen Poe (none of that is a typo), the sister he joined CTAC to protect 250 years before, a police detective who seems to delight in badgering him and Bancroft, and the man who used to own the sleeve he has cast into.


Also, so much sex and tits. Plus James Purefoy's wang.
 
Do we have no Altered Carbon fans (saving your presence, @Danoff)? This is one of my favourite sci-fi shows of the last decade.

I liked season 1. I'm currently not a netflix subscriber but I'm sure I'll be checking season 2 out at some point.
 
Do we have no Altered Carbon fans (saving your presence, @Danoff)? This is one of my favourite sci-fi shows of the last decade.

*Raises hand*

I love the first season. Been waiting for something concrete other than news and the teaser trailer that dropped a while back, and this is more of that. At least we finally see Mackie/Kovacs this time.

As long as Poe wasn't actually destroyed everything will be okay, otherwise we're going to have significant problems later this month. :lol:
 
I was hoping that series 2 would have Takeshi Kovacs played by Will Yun Lee, as he found his original sleeve back at the end of series 1.
 
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My sleeve is ready. Fully ready.

Also of note: Michael Shanks is in S2.
 
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Thoughts about S2? I recently finished watching both seasons and was quite impressed with both of them. For some reason S2 is getting a lot of flak, but not sure why?
 
Thoughts about S2? I recently finished watching both seasons and was quite impressed with both of them. For some reason S2 is getting a lot of flak, but not sure why?
I haven't actually finished S2 yet. For some reason I'm not getting on with Mackie Kovacs.
 
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