If it is not already obvious, I quite like dystopias. Apparently, so do lots of people as we jointly appreciate the ways in which our own world is becoming one. Fortunately, Netflix has just the thing to satisfy everyone’s newfound appreciation of the genre with Altered Carbon, a sci-fi, cyberpunk, dystopia where human consciousness can be stored and uploaded via ‘stacks’ into any human body, or ‘sleeve’ as they are disturbingly named, essentially doing away with death. The show makes for some very enjoyable viewing for anyone after a mature sci-fi series, especially if you like violence and or sex. However, much like Game of Thrones, behind that marketable exterior lies an impressive commitment to storytelling and world-building that will really leave you thinking about the state of our own world and the parallels that this extreme and futuristic version offers.

The two seasons of this show do vastly differ from each other and overall I think I have to give my preference to the first one. As much as it breaks my heart to put my favourite Hollywood troublemaker Anthony Mackie second, I have to be honest and say that his season just did not have the same impact as Joel Kinnaman’s. Both actors play Takeshi Kovacs, an elite soldier and last member of an uprising who is brought into the present day of the show, having lost the war two centuries earlier. Here, he is hired by the impossibly wealthy Laurens Bancroft (James Purefoy) to solve his own murder alongside the begrudging help of Detective Kristin Ortega (Martha Higareda) and former soldier Vernon Elliot (Ato Essando). This first season sees Kinnaman’s Kovacs play the lovable brute as he explores this new world that he hates, discovering all the horrible things about it for the audience to see as well, while he attempts to uncover a deep conspiracy kept secret by the rich and powerful. The rich are in fact so powerful now that they can effectively never be killed with the advent of expensive clones just for themselves and satellites with saved copies of their consciousness, adding just one more reason to hate them.

The second season takes a different approach, although it begins fairly similarly. Having sworn to find his long-lost love and leader of the defeated uprising Quellcrist Falconer (Renee Elise Goldsberry), he is summoned by another rich bastard into the body of Anthony Mackie to protect him. Here he meets a new cast of misfits as he attempts to uncover another mystery while trying to save the life of his previously mentioned lover.

What the show does incredibly well is the full execution of the story’s ‘What if?’ device. The hypothetical scenario where a technology has been invented removing death as a permanent problem for humanity is used incredibly creatively. It really does feel like a fully realised idea, covering all the areas you expect and then some more on top of that. As I mentioned before, the incredibly rich exploit the technology and make it very exclusive, so not everyone receives its benefits equally. Human bodies, or ‘sleeves’, are very expensive and one heartbreaking scene in the first episode of season 1 demonstrates this by showing a couple have their deceased daughter brought back as a woman older than both of them. Unless one can afford to pay for a rare type of sleeve, or pay even more for cloning, most people get whatever is available, which is usually very undesirable. Meanwhile, those who can afford to create clones of themselves essentially live as ageless gods, looking down from their satellites and towers in the sky as generations of ground-dwellers die. This combined with their smug attitude really makes you want to see them perish and suffer as everyone else does, rather unsurprisingly. The general message about how vast imbalances of wealth and power lead to corruption and the general degradation of life for most people is very welcome and done with the perfect amount of realism to make one angry at real-world bourgeoisie.

On the subject of gods, religion is also an aspect of human life that is considered in this vastly changed world. A few characters we see still observe recognisable religious practices and the fictional ‘Neo-Catholicism’ plays an important role in the plot, with its practitioners refusing to have their consciousnesses uploaded into new bodies. This cemented my respect for the show, as it took the time to examine all the implications that this technology would have and the ripple effects it would create across society. What happens to the afterlife if people can live forever? Is a person’s soul truly confined to their body or can it live past it? It really is some meaty philosophical stuff.

Another aspect that is taken full advantage of is the body swapping. Due to the nature of the technology, there are lots of moments where one actor has to portray multiple personalities or, alternatively, lots of actors have to play the same personality. It lends itself to plenty of comedic moments, but also some very serious ones as well. Not to spoil anything, but there is a very disturbing scene where the main villain takes a hold of a body and when it became clear that they were in that sleeve I was quite stunned at the performance. Most actors are bringing their a-game for this, especially when they have to perform double, or triple duty. My personal favourite is the unsung hero Matt Biedel, who plays a random drunk, elderly Hispanic grandmother and Russian thug across a few episodes and does it incredibly convincingly.

While the first season can be a tad convoluted and commits the egregious sin of forcing me to keep looking up the synopses for each episode to understand what is going on, the second fixes that quite well by keeping a more narrow focus. This is something that I thought a Netflix series could never achieve after having to sit through the drudgery that was the latter seasons of their Marvel shows, but it is not all for the better. See, while the first season can be criticised for being clustered, convoluted and a bit frustrating to follow, along with that came all the wonderful things I have mentioned above. However, I do not think it needed to be as confusing as it was in order to accommodate them, so I will not be allowing it that excuse. It is those interesting ideas that make me prefer season 1 to season 2 though, where very little is done to push these ideas forward and we instead get a more character focused narrative. This is not necessarily a bad thing when done properly, but too much is sacrificed for the sake of character development that takes too long and is somewhat predictable. A lot of time is dedicated to the story of an A.I., a companion to Kovacs who has taken up the persona of Edgar Allen Poe, and him potentially having to sacrifice his memories in order to properly function again. Poe was actually one of my favourite characters from season 1, serving as the eccentric servant and aggressively protective bodyguard for the heroes, but his arc in season 2 is quite predictable and not as interesting as the main plot, so his development felt forced to me.

While I am excited at the prospect of a third season for this show, despite my complaints about its progression, I do hope that when they do return, it is closer to the explorative, hypothetical style of narration that the first season so openly embraced. To me, this is what good fiction does. It looks at the world as we understand it, changes something about it and then builds to create a cohesive and engaging story that is both familiar and exciting. A bit of gun-ho action and sex help as well, but the important parts are the world-building. This show really does have a lot of promise, and I look forward to see how it lives up to it.