Altered Carbon is rated TV-MA and may not be suitable for everyone. Please use discretion when choosing to watch this episode or series.
 

Netflix’s new show, Altered Carbon, is based on a 2002 book by Richard Morgan. This is the first book in the Takeshi Kovacs series. The other two novels are Broken Angels and Woken Furies. Fun fact, Richard Morgan wrote two Black Widow graphic novels - Homecoming (2005) and The Things They Say About Her (2006), wrote for the video games Crysis 2 and Syndicate. So he has a little nerd cred in addition to these sci-fi books.

The story is set in a dystopian world that felt similar to the cyberpunk style we see in Blade Runner. It’s very easy to see that Morgan’s vision in this show pulls heavily from what we get from Philip K Dick and Ridley Scott. At least that’s what we get on-screen. I can’t attest to what the books are like, but I would imagine something similar.

The first episode, titled “Out of the Past” starts with a body floating naked in a vast ocean and quickly cuts to someone in the shower. The fact that there is nudity - although at this point barely any - isn’t surprising given the rating.

What we realize eventually as the story is played out is that the body floating in the ocean and the man in the shower are the same person, Takeshi “Tak” Kovacs, even though they physically are not the same. This is due to an advancement in technology that makes the body what it really is: a shell. People are “re-sleeved” - given new bodies when they die unless their “stack” is destroyed. The “stack” is basically a chip attached to the top of a person’s spine. We see Tak get killed, along with his partner in a raid by a group of military sentries.

250 years later, that floating body is pulled into a medical bay and unzipped from a bag filled with some sort of goop that I suppose is a holding tank for an unused body. This one, though, happens to be the new sleeve for Tak, as well as the former body of a convict.

As Tak is essentially reborn and given the rundown of his current circumstance here, we get to get some flashbacks and not-so subtle exposition about the world Altered Carbon is set in:

Tak is a highly-deadly, highly-skilled, and highly regarded assassin known as an Envoy.

To truly kill someone, you have to destroy their stack.

When it comes to religion, sleeving is, as you would imagine, frowned upon. (It’s essentially reincarnation, but with someone else’s body.) The idea of sleeving being a bad thing is shown when a 7-year old girl comes out to see her parents, but she’s in the sleeve (body) of a middle-aged woman. The parents, of course, are unhappy and are told that if they want a better sleeve they’ll have to pay for it instead of getting it for free from the government.

We also find out the reason Tak has been re-sleeved: a rich man by the name of Laurens Bancroft wants him to solve his (Bancroft’s) murder because he doesn’t remember what happened. The explanation here was interesting to me. As we’ve watched Tak make his way through this new-to-us world, it’s shown that just because you’re re-sleeved, it doesn’t mean you lose any memories. Tak has flashbacks over and over again, as well as hallucinations. Bancroft explains that his stack was destroyed, but he has a backup copy uploaded to a satellite every 48 hours. This enabled him to not just be re-sleeved, but essentially reborn from true death.

Tak isn’t interested in helping Bancroft, even though the man has promised him everything from unlimited money to a new sleeve of his choice. Instead, he decides he would rather “go back on ice”. This leads him to buying a ton of drugs from a guy on the street, getting high,