So my Uber nerd co-worker is finally watching Altered Carbon.. and I can't wait for him to finish watching it.
There's literally been no one to talk to about the book in 15 years, and now the show because nearly everyone didn't like it or didn't really have much to say about it. I'm not going to assume that means they didn't understand the story but it does make me think that explaining certain things about the society within the series would take too long and not really add anything to their experience.
But that's the issue with things being made for TV. Except that obviously that doesn't apply to Netflix. The showrunner responsible for the adaptation of Altered Carbon did a fantastic job.
There's changes sure, some that didn't need to be made, but on the whole those changes softened the story and made it a little more relatable.
I say it isn't a problem though because I read the book back in '02 and have my copy in the drawer next to my co-worker.. kinda thought to myself that I might be forced to make him read it because he's asking the right questions about the story, only being 3 episodes in, but even if he figures out the plot, Takeshi Kovacz's lives are an epic journey. That's why it's great television and probably wouldn't have been possible to create until now. If argue also that you need to see it in 4K in principle but that's just me. I heard it was coming to Netflix so I bought a subscription, an Xbox One X and a 4K TV set (not all in that order)... Just to see the series as it was intended to be presented. Ultra HD and in surround sound. I'm not disappointed at all even if as usual the surround sound wasn't spectacular. Actually disappointed there's still so little else to watch. Just watching the occasional Netflix Original documentaries and can't stop falling asleep.
He stated that he's sure Bancroft killed himself. Then goes to rationalize why he thinks that and hits the concept of why on the head. I kind of shut him down at that point because just guessing that Bancroft kills himself is fine and he's right about the motivations behind it to a point.. but the story is darker than he expects it to be.
It isn't just that the Methuselahs live a long time and might just eventually get tired of living and one re-sleeve might just have wanted off himself. Each sleeve will eventually die, that's inevitable. The concept of immorality that their society runs on necessitates those constant deaths. But your consciousness can be revived in a new body.. either someone else's or a cloned body that's just waiting to receive it. If Bancroft wanted to die permanently he would have destroyed all the clones first etc.
There's also that my co-worker ignores that Bancroft (states very early on) that he can't have killed himself and been so sloppy about it. It's a faint but an important one that's supposed to set up that the death was complicated and motivated by external factors because over the centuries there's nothing that so far would have motivated Laurens Bancroft to want to end his life.
One difference to the book which I'm really annoyed didn't get into the show was the wolf scene at the end.. which could have helped drive home the depth of the depravity of these monstrous Meths.. but I guess it wasn't necessary and that making the violence against the.. um.. hmmm.. captives I guess on board Head in the Clouds could have turned the show pure black. Up until the end it was clear they didn't want to go so far as to showing exactly how dark the book suggested Meths could be. It was just something personal to Takeshi that the show being presented without an internal monologue and thus without acknowledging throughout that Takeshi exists as a being inside Ryker, just wasn't written to support.
It would have been very different and would have helped about the idiot backlash about the show white washing a character that was 'supposed' to be Asian. That's a catastrophic failure in conveying the fundamental concept of the show. The character that is Takeshi is centuries old and can be re-sleeve into any body. Race doesn't matter. You're meant to them look beyond each person and see humanity as basically livestock within the polity because the envoys failed in their fight to the possibility of the corruption of human civilization by people that would become Meths. Obviously Morgan could have done a better job of making them actually monstrous but still balancing it with the basic principal that the are still citizens of the polity and even if they come off as evil and ambivalent to the suffering of mere mortals (who can't actually afford to live forever) they don't actually treat them like livestock other than economically to make themselves even richer regardless of their misery.
So one of his other questions was about the AI characters.. who owns them.
I had to explain that no one owns them. They are self incorporated and work for themselves the way humans have to.
So he assumed that Poe has an owner and is obviously a good guy.
No and no.
Poe is his own owner and he operates his own business, successfully enough apparently to have enough independent wealth to operate for decades without actually hosting any customers.
The argument that the AI are also misrepresented in the show is easier to make because Poe was based on Hendrix in the book and played a minor role. But because they went the extra mile with them you're supposed to take away that the AI are motivated by self interest and that they, especially Poe, see humans as a source of profit. Though Poe might operate drastically differently to the other AI this motivations can be seen as typical. And you could have guessed that each of the other AI also have their own methods to earn money, that they bring to that virtual poker table, or stock market etc, but they all got it the same way.. by taking it from humans.
Is Poe good? He has his own motivations so probably not. If he's evil and breaks any laws he'd run himself afoul of his AI brethren (no major loss) and then if the polity.
Again the problem is the novels start out on Earth as an incubator for these concepts which aren't really self-evident. You're supposed to come out of Altered Carbon thinking.. omg what is the polity what else is out there. There's that sense after the show too but they don't really set it up like there's actually any government ruling everything at all. I mean when there's hundreds of billions of nameless faceless people that love and die like flies over a field of dung... Who really cares about them their lives are utterly meaningless. Of course they are only there to be taken advantage of.. that's how it has always been. But it's far less bleak than it could be if the Meths were truly lawless and evil. So even though there seems to be nothing that exists after the envoys were destroyed, that can put an end to the Meths (and AIs) milking the grounders, there is more to it, and it'll make season 2 even bigger than season 1.