Netflix’s Altered Carbon was too foreign to this world and that’s a tragedy

As a fan weird and crazy sci-fi tv shows, I’m used to having my hopes dashed by sudden network connections. Heck, I’m still not over Fireworks never get a second season. That’s when news on Wednesday hit that Netflix canceled the mind-boggling sci-fi thriller Altered Carbon, I was sad but not shocked.

If I were to try to lay it out Altered Carbon to friends they would react with confused expressions as if to say, “This sounds like a lot of work.” They are not wrong. I have notes on random sheets of paper that I scribbled on seeing, just to stay on top of who who is who and what they did in the show.

The World of Altered Carbon (based on the novel with the same name) is a mix of rare scientific and personal identity problems. A person’s memories and consciousness can be stored on an alien-designed disk called a cortical stack, which is then implanted in the back of a person’s neck.

Stacks can also be transplanted into new human bodies called sleeves. A person’s consciousness can live forever, as long as it moves from sleeve to sleeve. But if your pile is destroyed, you die. Only the rich, known as Meths, can afford stacks and the new human sleeves to insert them.

This body exchange explores the idea of ​​identity on multiple levels. Some people decide to swap genders and may split their consciousness into two sleeves instead of one. These are the basics for Altered Carbon, but even that can be difficult to follow.

In season 1, the consciousness of mercenary Takeshi Kovacs (now played by Joel Kinnaman) is loaded into a new body, with the task of finding the killer of a murdered Meth. He must also find clues to his own past with his sister Reileen Kawahara (Dichen Lachman).

Season 2 jumps 30 years into the future and now Kovacs (a new sleeve brought to life by Avengers alumni Anthony Mackie) is determined to find his lost love and revolutionary leader Quellcrist Falconer (Renee Elise Goldsberry). Falconer also happens to be the original creator of the stacks and sleeves.

The second season had plenty of twists and turns that kept the story interesting and confusing. Recruited to work on a planet called Harlan’s World, Kovac’s Falconer discovers that he is actually the host of an alien entity known as an Elder, who seeks revenge on the founders who originally took over Harlan’s World. These founders wanted to eradicate the other Alders and put the technology behind the stacks. Still with me?

The Remaining Alder uses Falconer’s sleeve to get close enough to kill the remaining founders. But just as the Elder decides to kill everyone (founders and humans), Kovacs takes the Elder into his own pile and lets the uber-laser energy weapon destroy him and the Elder to save the human race. Now that both Kovacs’ sleeve and his stack have been destroyed, he’s dead, right? But he is not. That yes, then things get even weirder and more confusing.

And herein lies the problem with Altered Carbon. As you can tell, the storyline has a lot of characters switching bodies and then trying to kill each other, and then switching bodies again. This can be too complex for most sci-fi fans.

I like my sci-fi shows to have a lot of layers, but in the case of Altered Carbon the layers have layers and then these layers change layers. I had the murder wall of a detective with notes I had written, just so I could remember who died and who resurrected in which person.

I’m the type of fan that likes to put a better understanding of a work set. I get obsessed with versatile characters, parallel plot devices, and hard-to-understand futuristic science. I love a TV series like Altered Carbon that does not provide its viewers with everything. But if you want to understand the world of Altered Carbon, you have to work at it.

Maybe that’s what ultimately killed this show. Attention span becomes shorter and shorter. Superhero movies and TV shows rule over streaming. A lot of sci-fi entertainment is broken down into bite-sized, easy-to-understand stories full of related characters with a big pop of nostalgia.

If Altered Carbon was about a group of kids from the ’80s who jumped in and out of bodies, or maybe about a bunch of superheroes who could take over a body to defeat it, Netflix might be better off getting the show in. keeping their lineup, But there’s something naturally troubling about Altered Carbon for most mainstream audiences who are likely refraining from a runaway hit.

Altered Carbon was cyberpunk fiction at its best, with stunning graphics and special effects. But at the end of the day, when not enough people can relate to the characters and the story, it is as dead as a destroyed human memory pile. And that’s a real shame.