Or, 'When I paratroop into the middle of a TV series and I think I have license to over-analyze it'

Last night, while my boyfriend and I were mutually ignoring each other, I asked him to put on something I didn’t care about for background noise while I window-shopped for swimsuits. (Yes, I am that basic, thanks.) To comply, he put on Altered Carbon where he left off: Season 2, Episode 2. To be clear, not only have I never seen this show, I have never seen a clip of this show—I haven’t even seen trailers of this show. I do not know character names; I do not know back stories; I do not know main premise—I cannot overstate that I could not possibly know less about this show. And after watching three or so episodes, my immediate and sustaining reaction to seeing this is the same:

What the hell?

To be fair, for the first few minutes or so, I was totally on board. One of my favorite things about stories at their most fundamental is world-building, and with that comes slang and lexicon. Without rambling too much on that subject on its own, it’s a great way to give depth to the world and make it more immersive without Mr. Exposition breaking the fourth wall to spell things out to me. So at the beginning of Season 2, Episode 2, when a wolfpack of big, impressive humans with equally big, impressive future-tech guns strides into a crime scene talking about ‘sleeves’ and ‘stacks’ and ‘skulljumping,’ I was impressed with how well I could follow it entering 12 episodes deep.

From what I gathered, in Altered Carbon, humans are able to store their brains/consciousness/ ‘them-ness’ or whatever in some sort of hard drive called a ‘stack,’ which is implanted at the base of the spinal cord and renders physical bodies as mere ‘sleeves’ that can be exchanged easily like a phone case (p.s. ew at calling it a sleeve). This is obviously neat-o because in this world you don’t really die if your sleeve alone (again, ew) gets damaged, since as long as your stack is intact, you can just be plugged in to a new sleeve (last time, I promise: EW).  

Admittedly I’m a bit confused here because I don’t know where these sleeves/bodies are coming from: the bodies seem to organically-made-the-old-school way, ifyaknowwhatImean, as opposed to being synthesized by a lab…most of the time…I think…but some of them have upgrades that permit superhuman strength and other nifty skills? Or something. Anyway, regardless of the reason, there seems to be a scarcity of bodies compared to the number of consciousnesses, and to spice it up, this world is also a capitalist dystopia, meaning that all these problems are exacerbated by money. Only the rich are able to back up their stacks to safeguard against ‘real death’—which teleports me back to True Blood every time, tbh— and they also have easier access to sleeves. Therefore, if your stack gets destroyed and you happen to be of means, someone just grabs your back-up stack and you might be out a couple weeks’ worth of memory; if you’re not of means, however, your stack waits around like an unused GameBoy cartridge at GameStop for potentially decades before you’re assigned to a rando-sleeve, or even worse, your stack might find its way to some sort of cerebral brothel where patrons pay to vicariously experience your memories. Because that’s a thing here, apparently.

…. Which brings me to my problem. Now I love a good futuristic dystopia as much as the next person, but what the hell kind of world is this where we can upload humans’ consciousness and swap bodies out like I swap lipsticks, but somehow that consciousness isn’t directly connected to a cloud? Or direct back up? Or anything? Are you telling me that the pinnacle of technology is everyone just running around with floppy disks plugged into their spines? Likewise, you’re telling me that human civilization has advanced so much that people can load themselves into an electronic platform where (presumably) they would require significantly fewer resources while simultaneously having a higher quality of life if they just created a virtual world for everyone to live in, but for whatever reason society chose a physical world of terror and poverty where characters have to pay exorbitant rents on a child-sized sleeve for their kid who was killed by a land mine—because that all happened in the next episode I watched. To be fair, maybe some or all of this was addressed in previous episodes: for example, maybe there’s some weird-ass data storage issue that prevents moving everyone to a digital world (but that seems unlikely, seeing how an AI character visits a virtual world a couple episodes later); conversely, maybe there’s a lack of organic material that prevents them from easily synthesizing sleeves for everyone. I don’t know.

Look, I get that I’m supposed to suspend my disbelief because it’s just a story and no story is much fun when people incessantly pick at the most minute, insignificant plot-holes. After all, The Matrix would be no fun if I insisted that machines couldn’t possibly take over the world and therefore the entire film is bogus. No one would invite me to parties. In my defense, though, the power that drives every good sci-fi medium is that the world is still realistic in spite of the extraordinary foundation beneath it; in other words, the plot bends to the constraints of the world it’s built within to tell an impactful story. My problem with Altered Carbon is that instead, the world-building is bent around the plot to make convenient whatever dark, gritty moments the writers want to include at that time.

For a world that is immensely high tech and advanced, the amount of cruelty and barbarism Altered Carbon displays borders on the absurd. Most apparently, the stacks are engineered to still perceive damage to the sleeves as physical pain, just as our minds are wired to perceive damage to our bodies. It doesn’t have to be this way though; for example, you could imagine that if humans were to re-engineer our bodies, we would want to trade out pain for an alert system of sorts. In this way, we could be promptly notified that our bodies were being damaged without actually feeling the pain of it happening. It would kinda be like warnings that pop up when a computer overheats or a submarine valve is leaking: “Hey, dude. Your arm is on fire. You should probably fix that.” No such luck here: somehow, while humans in Altered Carbon have beaten death, they have not beaten the much more biologically-simple problem of pain.

Furthermore, even though sleeve-availability is apparently at a premium, everyone from bounty-hunters to the sanctioned government seems to delight in inflicting fatal damage upon sleeves, even though stack-only alternatives are available. When a character is tortured for information in Episode 4, her interrogator does so simply by pulling her sleeve’s teeth out with pliers. Hell, the way that the Governor decides is the best way to execute the protagonist in Episode 3 is through gladiatorial combat, in which they drug him and then send in soldier after soldier to fight him one-on-one, resulting in the loss of over a half-dozen sleeves. And to clarify, this isn’t surprising to anyone: the soldiers are aware that they will not easily beat him, as they’re told beforehand that whoever strikes the final blow will get a handsome bonus. Everyone knows their sleeves will be damaged/destroyed—one soldier, trying to up the ante, even quickly prints a new sleeve that mimics the protagonist’s dead sister, so these sleeves clearly aren’t that hard to make at all, which makes this whole lack-of-available-sleeves foundation to the world harder to accept. You could attempt to dismiss this as just another example of the show’s allegory for wealth inequality: except this is a public execution that the citizens are told is their duty to view. It’s analogous to a country with a massive food-shortage holding a public execution at which the starving citizens witness a man be force-fed with caviar and escargot until his stomach explodes. In a later scene, the Governor wants a minor character with compromising information to disappear, so the Governor decides the best way to do this is to strap this character to giant firework rockets and blow her up in the sky during a holiday party. It’s shocking and sickening of course, but I think it goes without saying that at the very least, it’s not the most efficient or clever way to get rid of your political Achilles’ heel.

Sure, I guess you could say this is no different than how the villains in spy movies always devise complex and fallible death traps for the heroes instead of just shooting them in the head; or more generally, how over-the-top events occur and questionable choices are made in a lot of stories to make it more ‘fun’ or ‘dramatic.’ And sure, fine. It goes back to what I said about being a kill-joy: not everything needs to be super realistic, and I’m fine actually with dramatization, if you will, in a lot of scenarios: I’m fine with that in spy movies when the whole point is to revel in what a BAMF the lead spy is; and I’m fine with it in high school rom-coms where feelings are trampled for no other reason than miscommunication before things are bandaged up neatly in the end. Even so, if done right, my two examples of the spy movie and the rom-com still touch upon lessons with these seemingly illogical choices, like the dangers of hubris or the consequences of not being forthcoming. I suppose I just expected more from a show like Altered Carbon, where its fundamental premise opens so much in the way of both philosophical and political commentary, but in the few episodes I saw, it almost exclusively chooses the low-hanging fruit of gritty fight scenes and unnecessary plotting.

And, yeah, I get that this is actually one of the main points of the show, something along the lines of “you can take the man out of the nasty-brutish-and-short-Hobbesian-nature, but you can’t take the nasty-brutish-and-short-Hobbesian-nature out of the man.” People are and forever will be unnecessarily cruel and wasteful because ‘errare humanum est,’ or whatever, but plainly speaking, there are much more succinct and elegant ways to explore this theme.  Watching Altered Carbon gives the same vibes as a college freshman’s essay that doesn’t have a tight enough thesis: sure, there are some good ideas here and there, but overall, the construction is lacking, the ideas are scattered, and the message is rehashed and underwhelming. I think this is why Altered Carbon ultimately falls short: because it tries to do so much, having one foot in the realm of cerebral meditation and the other in that of action-heavy adventure. Others have straddled these two spheres successfully, but the lack of meticulous worldbuilding in Altered Carbon gives it no footholds and renders it half-baked on both accounts: a mediocre sci-fi series that brings nothing new to the table.