I've got a review somewhere on here of the Takeshi Kovacs trilogy; it's really one of my all time favorites. That's not to say that the series isn't without issues. The first novel in the trilogy, Altered Carbon, is basically a straight-up SF retelling of a noir pulp detective story, very Chandler-esque. And that's fine with me, as I love that stuff. But that does mean that it inherits some of the more problematic themes from that genre as well as its strengths. Nonetheless, when I heard that it had been optioned to Netflix, I was super excited to see what they did. Then, I heard some details and watched the trailer, and was prepared to be underwhelmed. When I actually watched it, it exceeded my expectations. I started to write down my thoughts about it, but then just sorta did finish it. But the second season is about to come out, so this seems like a good time to revisit this show. It could be that it'll crash and burn in the future, but at least it'll have the chance to do so on its own terms.
If you want to go on, I suggest that you be familiar with both the book and the series. I want to talk about details of the adaptation, and that means all plot points are fair game. More specifically, I'd like to discuss specific areas of the adaptation, what I thought worked well, what didn't, and what was just interesting.
First, let's just cut right to the chase. Are you up for a series where a man, instead of opening a door, blows up the whole wall in a fiery explosion, and then walks through the smoke while carrying a severed head? If your response to that is "yes", then strap in, because this show is for you. If your response is "no", then I don't know what to tell you besides to stay far, far away. If your response is "why didn't he just open the door, since that's going to draw a lot of attention to him, especially since his next action is to murder yet another man out in the middle of the street and all those people looking to see what the explosion was about will be watching him do it", then surely there's a meeting of Nitpickers Anonymous you can go check out, because you're going to be bugged as hell.
Okay, so you've read the book (or you don't care what the book says) and you think this sounds like your thing. Remember that the big shtick here is that your brain gets backed to a
little device in your skull, so getting killed isn't necessarily that
big of a deal. It also it means that mental training is more important than mere physical ability, since if you need a giant muscleman body
then you can just put your brain-chip into one and take it for a spin. In the source material, the Envoys are shock troopers for the status
quo, the elitist of the elite of the UN government troops. They've
undergone extreme mental training and conditioning so that they are able
to seamlessly adjust to conditions on any world, in any culture. They've lost most of their dominance-hierarchy submission instincts and
almost all of their aversion to doing violence to other people. Just
the whisper of an Envoy deployment will shove most rogue governments
back into compliance. Kovacs used to be one, but after a botched
deployment at some planet called Innenin, he quit. In the show, he's still an Envoy, but instead of being government troops, the Envoys were Quellists.
Quellcrist Falconer was the nom de guerre of a poet/philosopher/activist on Kovacs' home planet of Harlan's World, and in the books she led a major rebellion known as the Unsettlement some centuries before Kovacs' own birth. Although this was in fact a high-intensity conflict and many were killed during it, based on evidence from the novels, Falconer's forces were outmatched from the beginning and handily lost. Nonetheless, clean-up from the conflict is still ongoing on Harlan's World some centuries later. Needless to say, making the Envoys her soldiers rather than government soldiers changes a lot of things about both the setting and motivations for Kovacs. I was hesitant about how this would be portrayed and ready for it to be extremely disappointing, but aside from a few hiccups I actually think it's an improvement, for the most part.
In the novels, Quell has a liberal-arts background and is primarily known as an author and poet. We do get to see some of her thoughts on power and the aggregation thereof, but aside from a few pithy and quotable lines the majority of the work of hers we see is sort of freshman year bullshit session Marxism. As of the end of Woken Furies she's ready to take the fight back to the oppressive UN government but it's not entirely clear what she's going to set up on its ashes if she prevails. In the show as in the book her real name is Nadia Makita, but while in the book this is generally known, in the show it's one of her most guarded secrets. Here she's a scientist and did more than anyone else to develop the cortical stack technology that forms the core of the SF assumptions of the show. She's become concerned that the use of this technology will cause unstoppable stratification in society and accordingly needs a technical fix to limit any one person's lifespan to 100 years. This isn't something that she is absolutely certain that she is correct about, but she's willing to put her life on the line for it.
Quell's objective here runs with some of the elements from the novels that didn't get introduced until later in the series or which weren't really fleshed out that well. The books were quite clear that one of the downsides of immortality is that the rich and powerful get to keep accumulating wealth and power, and in the show they get to live in a beautiful sky city separated from all the grounded slum-dwelling proles below them. You know, in case you didn't get the metaphor. And they're portrayed as arguably somewhat insane by their cocoons of great wealth and privilege. It's a little on the nose, but as a visual, I like it. In the book, Kovacs' erstwhile patron Bancroft wasn't really that bad as super wealthy nigh-immortal business dudes go, and I think that the show's portrayal of him as actually that bad is probably both TV adaptation schlock and more faithful to the ultimate themes of the trilogy. If anything, the original book downplayed how destructive it would be to eliminate death but not eliminate ongoing concentration of wealth. It's simply not possible for Bancroft or those like him to lose their money or their positions, ever, and keeping that level of power means putting the boot on a lot of other people - also forever.
Likewise, I thought it would be disastrous to have major villain Reileen Kawahara be Kovacs' sister, but the change works surprisingly well. In the book, Kawahara sort of comes in from nowhere in Act 3; Kovacs worked for her once but the details are not gone into, he hates her because of her cruel barbarism, she thinks he's a weenie and that ethics are for suckers. It's an all right dynamic, but it's confusing then when Kawahara doesn't just kill him when she has the chance, and torture him later in VR if she's so inclined. By giving them more of a shared history and an actual connection, this actually provides a plausible reason for Kawahara's actions - she doesn't kill Kovacs because she doesn't really want to. She's still just as awful as she is in the books, though. Possibly more so. One of your better SF villains, in my opinion.
The actors are all having a good time, and the fact that you can swap bodies means that the same "character" can be shared between multiple actors, as they're resleeved in flashbacks, possibly trying to disguise themselves, or so forth. Because the show is a visual medium, this is a lot more striking than it is on the page, and the show also has a lot of fun with elements of it. That giant, tattooed biker looking guy may just well be inhabited by a Mexican grandmother - referencing a throwaway line in the books about awkward family reunions where old relatives come out of storage for the day and then go back. Only here it turns out that if you're not resleeved in a clone of your original body, you eventually go crazy unless you have undergone extremely strenuous mental conditioning like government troopers or Envoys do. And this clears up why maybe you'd stop going to those reunions, as only the very rich can afford to have racks of cloned bodies as Bancroft does.
The underlying mystery is pretty much the same - Bancroft was killed, his backup copy doesn't believe that he would have killed himself, and he hires the most badass private detective he can think of to try and sort this out for him. Admittedly, this makes less sense in the show, since Kovacs is the last of a bunch of dangerous revolutionaries and has been on stack for 250 years. I don't really see that the UN government would be willing to let him out again ever, much less give him a pardon for his past actions. In the book, he was just one of a number of ex-Envoys running around, most of whom were involved in shady or criminal actions, more of a nuisance rather than an existential threat. I guess they also couldn't get rights to use Jimi Hendrix, so the AI hotel is now called the Raven and run by Edgar Allen Poe (who does a bang up job of being earnest, weird, and earnest and weird.)
By incorporating flashbacks of much of the worldbuilding from the following two books, the show diverges substantially from the source material by the end of this one while remaining more or less faithful to the plot of the first book overall. They're clearly going to be taking it in a vastly different direction for the second season, and I for one am up for it.
