I think they did have shitty cheap(ish) clones but like, that still costs money, whereas whoever happens to be on hand in the prison tanks does not.
You’d think if nothing else they’d just raise mind-dead children to serve as sleeves for the less privileged. Presumably it’s relatively cheap compared to adult clones from the 3D printer (!). Ethically vile, perhaps, but it’s not like anyone cares about that in this world. However it seems that instead there are vast stack libraries of people who couldn’t afford to be resleeved after their first free one was used up.
Well, they obviously use criminals for it.
I think otherwise it’s vat-grown clones probably. Clones are only extra expensive if you want them to be exactly like you, from what I gathered. Or they could just farm it out to poor people. Have a kid, we’ll pay for your family, when the kid hits mid-20’s we get the sleeve, or some similar situation.
There’s a lot there they didn’t explain, but that’s perfectly fine for the narrative. I think most people probably won’t follow that thread too deeply or try to puzzle out the economics of it.
And if you do, you can come up with a lot of fun stuff for head canon. They told us that a bunch of those sleeves were criminals. They also told us that it’s really cost and resource prohibitive to create quick clones (or really, just bodies); that’s the whole son subplot. So, slow growing it is. And of course, sustaining a body is a resource drain. They mention that Ortega is paying to keep up her boyfriend’s sleeve before being outbid by Bancroft.
Maybe there is a cottage industry for people that sell their bodies and spend a couple few decades just as a stack. Maybe that pays to get them into a decent sleeve with some cash to spare down the road. Who knows? In any case, if you follow it far enough, I’m sure you arrive at the same conclusion as the show - regardless of how it all works, it’s just another tool the wealthy use to maintain dominance. Maybe cloning is cheap, or should be - but for them. It’s not like that kind of thing doesn’t happen now, here. Look at the pharmaceutical industry.
Fun to speculate; not crucial for the story to still entertain.
That’s not what I got. Putting stacks into a body isn’t hard but making a clone is, and having a regular backup of your stack even far more. That’s why at the very beginning the guy sees parents with their just died child who’s been stuck in some random old woman’s body because they can’t afford anything else., i.e. a new clone for her.
Another poorly thought out change from the books. In the books he’s from Harlan’s World originally, but had never been to old Earth. They still wanted the exposition fish out of water thing for us viewers. I don’t know why they changed this either. To simplify things?
I think the show kept the same Harlan’s World history. When he’s in the torture construct he makes the comment along the lines of “don’t you guys think it’s odd that a police officer would subconsciously come up with a location from Harlan’s World”.
It’s been a while since I read the first book, but I think that he had been on ice for more like 100 years?
Oh come on, Poe is totally neutral good. He’s the only really likeable character in the whole show, too.
Nah, he violently and completely protects his customers. Very LN.
Pretty accurate although I would switch Quell and the Detective around. And yeah, Poe was awesome.
In D&D as well as real life it’s good to defend people from evil by any means necessary. And he seems to actually love humans, unlike the vast majority of other characters. Now maybe he would have defended bad guys if they had registered as guests, but we don’t know that…
It was strongly suggested that he would have. Lawful Neutral can be really “good” a lot of the time. Protecting the weak and that sort of thing is generally in their wheelhouse.
But that’s a plot turn in the first episode. For the rest of the series Poe goes far out of his way to help people who aren’t his registered guests at all. And he actively despises AIs and humans who exploit other humans.
On the other hand, we could both be right.
This is a general pattern with the series: It starts out as French film noir with a nihilistic philosophy, a character with extreme anomie set adrift in an alien society ruled by people with no morals or ethics. But as the series progresses, the noir philosophy fades to be replaced by a conventional good-guys-vs-bad-guys plot. Our hero eventually has to lie about not caring about anyone and goes out of his way to obtain good outcomes for the people who help him, contrary to Envoy teaching which is that they can be discarded or sacrificed. The series trots out various grand guignol turns to further shock and titillate the viewer, but this occurs within a very conventional moral framework.
So Poe might indeed have been written to be quite neutral to begin with, but after a few episodes he turns into a charming loveable character who will help anyone in need who even walks in his front door.
I will incidentally be talking about this at a Noir in SF panel at Boskone tomorrow, which is why I watched the series :)
He accepts what her name in the stack as a “guest” and then works from there.
Regardless, he was probably the best character in the show.
Defiinitely. It was an easy role to play, but he did it well. Without him the lack of comic relief and human warmth would have torpedoed the series.
Not bad trying to one character into each slot, but some just don’t quite work. Det. Ortega is totally Chatotic Good not Lawful.
Hell no, Quell is CG because she wants to bring down the system for the greater good.
Ortega’s LG because, you know, cop. Upholds system.
Ortega is breaking a lot of laws and going against orders for most of the series.
Okay fine, but Quell wants to burn it all down.