6. Simone Missick
Yep. Here I go again, contradicting myself straight away, but, in the absence of a “Heroes for Hire” series starring Simone Missick’s Misty Knight and Jessica Henwick’s Colleen Wing (basically just this scene every episode), I’ll make do with Missick’s hacker Trepp returning. Even though she’s playing a hacker/bounty hunter without any obvious combat skills, it’s a testament to the power of Miss Missick that no one bats an eyelid when she goes into battle with Kovacs in his military spec’d sleeve and holds her own.
Put her in all the things!
7. Respect Your Elders
In the three Altered Carbon books, the presumed extinct ancient aliens known as Elders (or Martians as they are incorrectly called there), provide some background to the technological leaps that lead humanity to create the cortical stacks and colonise the stars. Some of their tech also act as Macguffins to drive the plot. The Netflix show has already burned through the Angelfire Orbitals plot of Woken Furies but skipped past the lost Elder spacecraft of Broken Angels. If they choose to follow that plot, and the hint that The Elders were fighting someone before they died out, the show needs to decide if this plot-line should be relegated to the background or take center stage. With only so many episodes each season it would be better to concentrate on the Elders plot for a season, before expanding to new horizons.
8. A.I. and Other Tech
One of the most interesting elements from the books that the show has expanded upon is the role of A.I. in this future. While the series had to change “The Hendrix” hotel from to the Edgar Allan Poe themed hotel in the show, it’s a change for the better thanks to the delightful performance of Chris Conner. Kovacs keeps Poe around for Season 2, but most of the A.I. we meet seems to have either been discarded by humanity and left to rot, or barely involve themselves in human affairs.
At the end of Altered Carbon Season 2, the door is left open for Poe to return but he could just as easily be left by the wayside in future seasons. Either way, I’d like to see why the rest of the A.I.’s are so dismissive of humans, and humans as dismissive of them. Why did humanity turn it’s back on such fascinating tech, and does Kovacs have any affinity for them other than as predictable allies?
9. Let the Sunshine In
In Season 1 it seemed like the only time we got to see the sun was in the flashbacks to Kovacs’ time with the Falconer Rebellion. The present felt draped in everlasting night. In Season 2, when the action moves outside Harlan’s city on Harlan’s World and into the day time, it feels like a blast of fresh air!
As nice as that long, cyberpunk street set is (is it the same set redressed for Seasons 1 and 2?), just seeing the sunshine, or a forest, injects a whole new life into the series. Cyberpunk may be set at midnight most of the time, and doing so sure solves a lot of production headaches, but it would be refreshing to see old cyberpunk tropes in fresh new, daytime, settings.
10. Time Is on My Side, Yes It Is
By the end of Season 2, the showrunners have plundered most, if not all of the material from the books, even moving elements around between them. They’ve inserted Trepp (Simone Missick) from the first book, into the story-line from the third, and re-purposed Carrera’s Wedge entirely. With author Richard Morgan hinting that the show could go for 5 seasons on Netflix, the floor is now wide open for all new story lines.
I really hope the showrunners don’t downgrade it to just another sci-fi action show. Big time-jumps between resleeving gives the writers endless possibilities, to separate him from everything he knows, and provide him with new futures to explore. Give him a new sci-fi/cyberpunk world with new tools and threats to bend to his will every season. Get some more hard sci-fi writers in and come up with new technologies that he could deal with.
The set up presents a fantastic opportunity to contrast Kovacs, skipping through time every couple of hundred years, with lives of the “Meths” (named after Methuselah from the bible) – the wealthy elite who live for 300 years or more in a single lifetime. He reviles them for their arrogance, privilege, and hubris, but how will that change as he experiences more and more time himself?
Kovacs could become a witness to light and dark ages, as humanity ebbs and flows around him. Will humanity stagnate thanks to the unnaturally long lives provided by the cortical stack technology or blossom into something new?
Kovacs and and Quellcrist Falconer are like ghosts of humanity, frequent reminders that things can be better as humanity stumbles its way through the centuries. It’s one direction the show could take but there are plenty of others.
Altered Carbon the TV show has a pretty strong base. Now it just needs to build on that base and spread its wings.
Altered Carbon
Netflix, 2 Seasons, 10 Episodes (Season 1), 8 Episodes (Season 2)
Showrunner: Laeta Kalogridis
Writers: Laeta Kalogridis, Steve Blackman, Brian Nelson, Russel Friend, Garrett Lerner, Nevin Densham, Casey Fisher, Sarah Nicole Jones, Michael R. Perry, Sang Kyu Kim, Cortney Norris, Adam Lash, Cori Uchida, Alison Schapker, Elizabeth Padden, and Richard Morgan
Cast: Anthony Mackie, Chris Conner, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Simone Missick, and Will Yun Lee
