Altered Carbon is much more than just a fascinating series surviving on Stacks and Sleeves. The science fiction series managed to grasp the societal constraints and the very nitty-gritty aspects of it, giving it a futuristic view and highlighting just how it could all turn out to be in a technologically advanced world.
It brings out the huge gap that prevails between the rich and the poor, the misogynistic rulers and politics that prevail in today’s world, identity crisis, and the way religion manipulates the mankind.
Altered Carbon views the human body as a mere product – an object that can be recreated, which can very well happen if technology ever manages to get too far ahead of us. It’s a world where killing someone and rebirthing them is as easy as deleting a file in your laptop and restoring it from the recycle bin.
The more technology advances, the devalued mankind is, losing its worth every step further in science. It paints the horrors of technology someday overpowering us, and just the amount of loose strings and loopholes that come with its advancements.
Because it’s a whole new universe with a set of norms and ways of living of its own, that too ones which are quite technical for a normal human to grasp at the first go, we’ve come to help. If you haven’t watched the series yet, here’s a brief recap of the series that can help you get an idea of what the series is like.
And for the ones awaiting on season three which is supposed to come soon, this can be a great last minute revision if you want to brush your knowledge up. Here’s a detailed index of Altered Carbon to help you through, check it out!
Index of Altered Carbon
Index of Altered Carbon Season 1: Downloading Consciousness May Not Be That Great An Idea
Episode Number Episode Name Link to the Episode
1. Out of the Past Check here
2. Fallen Angel Check here
3. In a Lonely Place Check here
4. Force of Evil Check here
5. The Wrong Man Check here
6. Man with My Face Check here
7. Nora Inu Check here
8. Clash by Night Check here
9. Rage in Heaven Check here
10. The Killers Check here
Takeshi Kovacs is what you’d call a part chameleon, part human, and part many other things. While this might seem weirdly unique to a normal man, that isn’t quite the case in the world of Altered Carbon.
It’s quite the opposite to be honest, as almost everyone there is the exact same creature in nature. What’s more, the consciousness of an individual can be downloaded and then consequently uploaded to be installed in just as many numbers of bodies as possible – yeah, that’s the Altered Carbon multiverse.
The season kickstarts with the convicted criminal Takeshi waking up over two and a half centuries later in a whole different body, by the filthy rich Laurens Bancroft so that they can piece together an uber-wealthy man’s murder. When offered a promising lump-sum, Kovacs agrees to work on the case and runs into Poe at a hotel.
In the meantime, Lieutenant Kristin Ortega keeps a close tab on Kovacs and his doings during the investigation. When he gets kidnapped and tortured for the same, he learns that Ortega’s former lover and a degraded cop was his sleeve.
Kovacs and Ortega take off to visit Carnage who runs a secret fight ring. Note that this was also the place where Kovacs runs into his old sleeve, someone saved up in a tube to be used for gladiator sleeve.
When Ortega gets almost fatally injured in a fight, situations call for her getting a prosthetic arm. Just as when Kovacs realizes that Isaac’s son might be the suspected murderer, he and Ortega are forced to fight, that too after being kidnapped. Before things get worse, Kovacs’ sister Reileen comes to their rescue.
A series of flashbacks take the audience back to Kovacs’ previous life. How he and his sister were under Quell’s training, the missions they undertook, and what happened – painting a detailed picture of how his life used to be.
Quell turns out to be the leader and creator of Stacks, Nadia Makita. Turns out that Reileen is now a changed person, much contrary to what she was and how she was before. Apparently, she broke the trust of the Envoys with the help of the chunk load of money provided to her by the Protectorate.
She eventually grew into a meth and crime lord, and was allegedly the same person who hired the men to attack Ortega and when on to torture Kovacs later. She is also multi-sleeved and depending on who she is meeting can switch between Rei, Hemingway, and Clarissa Severin.
Kovacs later learns that Ri wants to become immortal, in the process of which she sabotaged the Envoys’ shuttle, murdered Quell (which is presumed to be temporary), and dreams of taking the Protectorate down under her false disguise of “trying to save Kovacs”.
Ortega starts to follow Kovacs’ orders so as to take Rei down, along with her other clones. On the other hand, Kovacs starts to work parallelly and begins recruiting the services of Ava Elliot, an imprisoned dipper.
Both of them intend to work together into developing a virus that can wipe of Rei’s existence from all of her clones. However, things take a turn when the clones wake up launch an attack on Ortega when she trespasses into their storage area.
Rei gets alerted just in time and backs herself up before Ortega could get to her sleeve. Kovacs too, feels defeated when he learns that it’s way too late to save Ortega and her family from Rei’s men, but then still goes on to launch the virus and carry the plan out as devised.
Rei hires Miriam to drug her husband Laurens, with a powerful drug called Stallion that is capable of making men act wild and untamed. So much so that Laurens even ends up killing a prostitute and forcefully having an intercourse with Ava’s daughter, impregnating her.
Miriam then kills Lizzie who comes to her for help and then dumps her sleeve, manipulating her in such a way that she gets forever stuck in a traumatic VR-brain loop until she is re-sleeved by someone. When Lauren realizes that he has been on a death spree, he deletes his own stack so as to not have it saved as a backup to his D. H. F.
The whole debacle, chaos, and confusion were done to stop the re-sleeving of murder victims, to prevent them from testifying against their killers so that the Proposition 365 is rendered invalid.
By the end, the cat is let out of the bag, and the crime kingpin Rei’s plan is out in the world; how she incorporated religious coding into her murder victims so that they can be re-sleeved. The dead prostitutes are brought back so that they can testify against their murderers.
By the end, Kovacs’ plan works, and the virus spreads, but in turn, affects him and A.I Poe as well. The final few moments were that of Kovacs successfully killing Rei, moments before the pleasure house Head in the Clouds tattered into nothingness.
Meanwhile, Miriam and the Meths get arrested, thanks to Ortega and the cops. When Laurens gets to know the whole truth, he turns himself in and gives his estate over to Isaac.
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Index of Altered Carbon Season 2: The End or The Beginning?
Episode Number Episode Name Link to the Episode
1. Phantom Lady Check here
2. Payment Deferred Check here
3. Nightmare Alley Check here
4. Shadow of a Doubt Check here
5. I Wake up Screaming Check here
6. Bury Me Dead Check here
7. Experiment Perilous Check here
8. Broken Angels Check here
Season 2 portrays Anthony Mackeys in both ways, one Mackeys acts as Kovacs’ sleeve and the other his own personality – presumably something tht got taken up from Joel Kinnaman’s performance from the pilot season.
We also see the re-enrty of Will Yun Lee, as the original Kovacs who also goes by the name Stronghold Kovacs, and especially in season two as Kovacs Prime. The whole season basically revolves around Mackie’s Kovacs questing for Quellcrist Falconer. Quellcrist falconer has an interesting history – for example, being the former love of Kovacs, also his mentor, and hey, the mastermind behind the whole Stacks and Sleeves technology.
Protectorate has strict laws, one of them being how Double Sleeving is illegal. Now, theoretically, or in the Altered Carbon’s language, Double Sleeving is the process of using two uploads of the same Stack in two or more sleeves.
But as much as the laws are strict and people need to abide by it, there are no vigilance measures implemented for the same. For example, in the Altered Carbon multiverse, no one really checks whether you are double sleeving or not.
And Double Sleeving has been quite the side hobby for Falconer, who has been practicing it since she acted as the part host for an extraterrestrial creature called Elder. Consequently, Elder has a great memory, so much so that he remembers his home planet, the ones who founded it, now popularly known as the Harlan’s World in the series.
He also remembers that they nearly made the Elders go extinct or rather destroyed them in order to get their hands on the world’s state of the art technology and its creatures. So the Elder took control and intends to use Falconer as his pawn, in order to destroy the world and reclaim what was theirs on behalf of other fellow Elders.
This plan doesn’t quite make things easy for Kovacs, whose sole aim is to reunite with Falconer and bring the spark of their love back into existence again.
By the end, the surviving Elder decides to bring down Angel fire and burn the whole population down – including the humans, Kovacs, and of course, Falconer. But moments before things are doomed forever, Mackie’s Kovacs takes the situations into their hands.
They take Elder into their own Stack and call the whole troop of telecommunications upon themselves. The highlight of the show was this very scene, where they sacrifice their own selves for the betterment of the likes of their being, including Falconer and other Kovacs – and everyone else in general.
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This ends with both Sleeve and Stack getting burned down, the former which can be restored but the latter presumably was gone forever.
But if you think this marks the end of the chaos and confusion of the Altered Carbon universe, you’re in for a surprise. In the end, the artificial intelligence Poe returns after decompressing for a few months. And we later learn that he has some secret information stored into his system which can be utilized to extract a completely working D.H.F.
So this means the Kovacs will be back with yet another season, with apparently yet another juicier sci-fi action packed season, but no, sadly – a season three has been allegedly cancelled.
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Conclusion
So that’s a brief recap of both the seasons of the series. As season two ends on a note that leaves us with a series of questions, fans were sure that the series will be renewed for a third season, especially when its crew and director hinted the same.
But according to a recent report, it turns out that season 3 of this series has been officially canceled. Initial speculations stated that it might have been due to budget constraints and these unprecedented times of the coronavirus, but turns out that it was canceled way back in April – so its fate was certainly not tied to the pandemic.
Deadline stated “the streamer’s standard viewership vs cost renewal review process” as the reason behind Altered Carbon’s cancellation. But nonetheless, it’s still an amazing series that is worth the hype. So why not treat yourself with what’s already there? Hop on to our links and start binging!
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