Altered Carbon - Netflix, cyberpunk

Am I the only one kinda worried that we haven’t heard anything about a second season? Aren’t Netflix usually pretty fast with these kind of news? LOVED the show - probably one of the best looking sci fi shows I’ve ever seen, and everything just worked for me. Well, except for the fight at the end,but I’m not really interested in mock fights these days.

The first production was probably too expensive. And then too the fact the second book is so different from the first is problematic for viewers who may expect more of the same, while Kovacs is definitely done with Earth so they can’t just come up with more noirish stuff in the same setting.

But was she really in love with Kovacs? I’d say that is debatable. She didn’t seem to be too heartbroken when he left since she was getting her real boyfriend back in his own body.

Hope they do give it another season. The world has allot more stories they could tell even if they went to an anthology format.

I think they’ve stopped being quite so aggressive about early renewals (they used to do it before the first episode dropped in some cases), but yeah, it seems like they’d have a good sense of its appeal by now.

I had to stop watching the episode with the virtual torture. Is there a lot more of that sort of thing because if so I will pass on the remaining episodes.

Not a lot more, but there are some additional scenes down the road that might be hard to watch if you struggled with the VR torture, and the reveal of exactly what is going on in the final couple of episodes is pretty disturbing as well. That said, it is totally worth sticking with if you can.

As for a second season, it looks like the show runners and writers have brainstormed what they might do with another season, but are still waiting on Netflix to make the final decision. Joel Kinnaman (Kovacs) is already signed on to a different series on Amazon, but the premise of Altered Carbon means they can have a Season Two with a completely different actor playing Kovacs in a new “sleeve”.

WARNING : Article contains some Season One spoilery information…

Thanks @SlainteMhath. I’ll fast forward and continue on.

Watched the last two episodes. All in all I liked the show, but I think the narrative was a bit messy at times.

Some of the changes from the book worked okay, such as moving from only Kovach’s POV and focusing a bit on the other characters as well. A lot of the other changes didn’t really add anything and, in my opinion, were worse than the book.

I thought conflating the envoy trainer Virginia Vidaura and the rebel philosopher Quellcrist Falconer was odd. Making the Envoys into rebels, likewise. In the book the Envoys are a still-extant elite government force from which Kovacs was discharged, not a defunct “terrorist” organization.

I thought this was entertaining but I couldn’t really get past how easy it was to destroy stacks yet somehow people act like true death is barely a thing and spinning up murder victims was an important point several times. How many murderers can there possibly be that are too stupid to either take or destroy the stack of their victim(s)?

Plain old revivifiable murder is a lesser crime in this world than stack destruction. Which is why they call Ortega’s department “organic damage” instead of homicide. But yeah, it doesn’t make all that much sense.

Stacks, at least in the book, are embedded in the spine and are tiny and deliberately extremely durable. A professional killer who’s there to deliberately extinguish all traces of the person can take steps to make sure, yeah. Occasionally someone fucks up spectacularly and manages to accidentally destroy it. There’s a running line in deliberately stealing stacks for dark purposes. But your garden variety murderer probably doesn’t have the tools or the know-how and a lot of the time isn’t acting out of a premeditated desire to completely wipe someout out of existence anyway. In the real world, very few people go around cold-bloodedly murdering people, and covering it up in an organized and effective manner. Doesn’t mean murder solve rates are all that high, but it’s not because of rampant criminal genius, it’s because if the murder isn’t open and shut it gets really difficult to nail down, really quickly. (Read Homicide: Life on the Streets. It’s not only informative, it’s a great read.)

Good to know the source material makes more sense. Maybe I’d get a better experience with that. In the TV show, they get blown up by shooting in the general direction of the neck.

Just finished this, never read (or heard of) the books before and don’t really care if it followed noir or whatever genre. I thought it was fantastic and I hope we get more. The ending was a bit rushed but it was fine for me at least. I can’t imagine how much it cost to make it.

I’m debating getting the book now.

They can easily be destroyed in the books too. In the book Kovacs RDs everyone in that medical/torture facility on the way out. It’s just odds are in a person’s favor for any “casual” death.

I wouldn’t call it easily. You have to make a special effort to do it. (Otherwise they wouldn’t be much use as a backup, really.) But I mean they’re not adamantium or anything.

Kovacs used a sunjet to melt the stacks iirc. Whatever the sunjet is, it outranges and outpowers all the ballistic weapons so I wonder why they bother with the guns.

Presumably an energy weapon, which in the show they often cited as basically an instant stack-death.

This started promisingly enough. Great production quality for a setting like this, enough good actors to carry the cast, and a nice twist on the whodunnit that could allow time for some world building & character development.

But I quickly hit the point of world building fatigue and abandoned all hope for the writing after it seemed they were working on the level of “Grrr! I say fuck a lot cause I’m a badass! Arrrgh! I’m so tough cause I power thru torture! Such manly! Much tough! Rrrrrr!”

That’s pretty much my impression of the show & why I have no interest in continuing. I’d go back & finish on a slow media week if there’s a fun twist at the end?

I mean they drove home the point of how he was specifically trained to resist said exact torture into the ground to the point that most of us got sick of seeing it, but apparently they needed another 5 hours on it so you wouldn’t overlook it?

It’s like a full quarter of the entire series. Guess they needed to make it half so you’d pay attention or something. Maybe another series that is nothing but him training that exact scenario.