Watch Altered Carbon Season 1 full episodes online here. Science fiction based on the book by Richard K. Morgan debuts on the Netflix platform. There are ten episodes to meet Takeshi Kovacs and imagine the world 300 years from now.
"The first thing you learn is that nothing is what it seems." This is how Altered Carbon starts, the new science fiction series that is available on Netflix. And this "nothing is what it seems" is to be interpreted in a literal way, since in this dystopian future it may happen that a person has the face (and body) that once belonged to another person.
Altered Carbon is, first and foremost, a book by Richard K. Morgan, a British sci-fi author. Originally published in 2002, this is the first novel in which appears the mercenary Takeshi Kovacs, who will also be protagonist in the books Broken Angels (2003) and Woken Furies (2005).
Altered Carbon was voted one of the books of the year for The New York Times and was also the winner of the Philip K. Dick Award in 2003. Taking advantage of the series premiere, this month will arrive at the bookstores the Portuguese edition of Emergency Exit, with the title Carbon Altered.
The project is the responsibility of Laeta Kalogridis who, 15 years ago, bought the rights to the book with the intention of making a film. However, only now, it manages to debut this series of 10 episodes. Cyberpunk fiction and action to pass in the XXV century, Altered Carbon is, according to Netflix, the most expensive series ever produced by this service, much because of all the special effects, digital or not, that were used. To create the future, then.
In this future, people have chips applied to the spine, where their memories and all their personality data are stored. Even if the body dies, if the chip is not damaged it can be placed in another body. However, although rebirth is possible at all, not everyone can choose the bodies in which they will be reborn and end up with bodies already older and marked.
Only the richest, the Meths, have the money to buy the best bodies and thus live indefinitely (the name is a reference to Methuselah, an Old Testament figure, known to have lived 969 years). And they can also back up the chip and have copies, which they update regularly, stored in secure locations. This is the case of Laurens Bancroft (interpretation of James Purefoy) - a millionaire who does not know how he died, once his chip was damaged and did not keep the memories of the last 48 hours of life. Police believe he committed suicide, but he is convinced he was murdered. It just does not know how or by whom.
Chips can also be stored for centuries - that's the way for a criminal to serve a sentence. This is what happened to Takeshi Kovacs (played by Joel Kinneman). He was an Envoy. That is, an element of a special military unit formed to fight in the interstellar war. Envoys develop special abilities and have the five senses far more accurate than all other people. Kovacs, killed early in the series, for treason to the Protectorate, which is the government of the Earth, is imprisoned (frozen) for 250 years in the Alcatraz prison. And he gets out of prison, on parole, in a new body, thanks to the intervention of Bancroft who wants to hire him to find out everything about his death.
In the first episode, besides discovering all these details, we will still have the opportunity to know a little more about Kovacs past, his fears and his abilities. And we also get to know some of the characters that will accompany us throughout the series: Quellcrist Falconer (Renee Elise Goldsberry), mentor of Kovacs, was the leader of a movement of rebellion against the Protectorate; Miriam Bancroft (Kristin Lehman), the millionaire's wife; Poe (Chris Conner) an Artificial Intelligence individual who is the manager of the luxury hotel The Raven and becomes a partner of Kovacs (yes, it is a tribute to Edgar Allen Poe and his work The Crow); Kristin Ortega (interpretation of Martha Higareda), a police officer, with whom Kovacs will maintain a relation of attraction and rivalry; and Reileen Kawahara (Dichen Lachman), When seeing Altered Carbon it is impossible not to think about the Matrix - because the existence of an individual can be separated from his body - but also we can think of films of the series Mad Max or even Blade Runner . Here too, the future is a mixture of super advanced technology and a junkyard universe, which even seems to us obsolete, let alone the twenty-first century. So much we can be in a very sophisticated flying transport as in a decadent alley of any city that, for that matter, is Bay City, futuristic version of San Francisco, USA. All with a generous dose of violence and morsels of meat jumping all around whenever there are shootings.
And like all good science fiction stories, it is also deeply existentialist. Here are issues that have to do with social differences between rich and poor or religious issues, but above all they have to do with what makes us human and what makes us immortal. They warn us, "Do not expect anything, only then will you be prepared for everything." However, there is something we can expect and (already confirmed) we will have: a second season of Altered Carbon.
Watch Altered Carbon Season 1 full episodes online here.
"The first thing you learn is that nothing is what it seems." This is how Altered Carbon starts, the new science fiction series that is available on Netflix. And this "nothing is what it seems" is to be interpreted in a literal way, since in this dystopian future it may happen that a person has the face (and body) that once belonged to another person.
Altered Carbon is, first and foremost, a book by Richard K. Morgan, a British sci-fi author. Originally published in 2002, this is the first novel in which appears the mercenary Takeshi Kovacs, who will also be protagonist in the books Broken Angels (2003) and Woken Furies (2005).
Altered Carbon was voted one of the books of the year for The New York Times and was also the winner of the Philip K. Dick Award in 2003. Taking advantage of the series premiere, this month will arrive at the bookstores the Portuguese edition of Emergency Exit, with the title Carbon Altered.
The project is the responsibility of Laeta Kalogridis who, 15 years ago, bought the rights to the book with the intention of making a film. However, only now, it manages to debut this series of 10 episodes. Cyberpunk fiction and action to pass in the XXV century, Altered Carbon is, according to Netflix, the most expensive series ever produced by this service, much because of all the special effects, digital or not, that were used. To create the future, then.
In this future, people have chips applied to the spine, where their memories and all their personality data are stored. Even if the body dies, if the chip is not damaged it can be placed in another body. However, although rebirth is possible at all, not everyone can choose the bodies in which they will be reborn and end up with bodies already older and marked.
Only the richest, the Meths, have the money to buy the best bodies and thus live indefinitely (the name is a reference to Methuselah, an Old Testament figure, known to have lived 969 years). And they can also back up the chip and have copies, which they update regularly, stored in secure locations. This is the case of Laurens Bancroft (interpretation of James Purefoy) - a millionaire who does not know how he died, once his chip was damaged and did not keep the memories of the last 48 hours of life. Police believe he committed suicide, but he is convinced he was murdered. It just does not know how or by whom.
Chips can also be stored for centuries - that's the way for a criminal to serve a sentence. This is what happened to Takeshi Kovacs (played by Joel Kinneman). He was an Envoy. That is, an element of a special military unit formed to fight in the interstellar war. Envoys develop special abilities and have the five senses far more accurate than all other people. Kovacs, killed early in the series, for treason to the Protectorate, which is the government of the Earth, is imprisoned (frozen) for 250 years in the Alcatraz prison. And he gets out of prison, on parole, in a new body, thanks to the intervention of Bancroft who wants to hire him to find out everything about his death.
In the first episode, besides discovering all these details, we will still have the opportunity to know a little more about Kovacs past, his fears and his abilities. And we also get to know some of the characters that will accompany us throughout the series: Quellcrist Falconer (Renee Elise Goldsberry), mentor of Kovacs, was the leader of a movement of rebellion against the Protectorate; Miriam Bancroft (Kristin Lehman), the millionaire's wife; Poe (Chris Conner) an Artificial Intelligence individual who is the manager of the luxury hotel The Raven and becomes a partner of Kovacs (yes, it is a tribute to Edgar Allen Poe and his work The Crow); Kristin Ortega (interpretation of Martha Higareda), a police officer, with whom Kovacs will maintain a relation of attraction and rivalry; and Reileen Kawahara (Dichen Lachman), When seeing Altered Carbon it is impossible not to think about the Matrix - because the existence of an individual can be separated from his body - but also we can think of films of the series Mad Max or even Blade Runner . Here too, the future is a mixture of super advanced technology and a junkyard universe, which even seems to us obsolete, let alone the twenty-first century. So much we can be in a very sophisticated flying transport as in a decadent alley of any city that, for that matter, is Bay City, futuristic version of San Francisco, USA. All with a generous dose of violence and morsels of meat jumping all around whenever there are shootings.
And like all good science fiction stories, it is also deeply existentialist. Here are issues that have to do with social differences between rich and poor or religious issues, but above all they have to do with what makes us human and what makes us immortal. They warn us, "Do not expect anything, only then will you be prepared for everything." However, there is something we can expect and (already confirmed) we will have: a second season of Altered Carbon.
Watch Altered Carbon Season 1 full episodes online here.