It’s
great when you can change actors without losing the character. If you have a shape shifter, they just look
different next week. Altered Carbon sort
of has that in that characters can swap bodies.
The rich can afford clones of themselves, so the character can die
without being recast. But for the poorer
people, it might mean using someone else’s body.
Takeshi
Kovacs is back for the second season of Altered Carbon. This time, he’s played by Anthony Mackie,
whereas the character was played by Joel Kinnaman last season. To make matters a little more confusing, he
was also played by Will Yun Lee in both seasons. (Will Yun Lee plays the body that Kovacs was
born into.)
This
time, he’s looking for Quellcrist Falconer.
It would seem that she’s killing those rich, immortal people. Falconer is known for not liking the
technology that allows for immortality, but murder is out of character for
her. The hope is to find her and get an
explanation before the authorities do.
The
second season does have a more subdued tone to it. There wasn’t as much of a sense of wanting to
see the next episode, as I did with the first season. This isn’t to say that I didn’t want to watch
it. It’s more that I didn’t mind
watching an episode before dinner. There
wasn’t that need to watch the next hour right away.
I
think part of it is that most of the actors are new. Even most of the characters are new. In fact, I think Kovacs, Falconer and Poe are
the only three characters to return.
Poe’s presence was a little strange.
For
those that didn’t see the first season, he was the AI that ran the hotel Kovacs
was operating out of. At the end of the
season, he was attacked. Now, he’s
glitchy and hesitant to reboot. He might
lose his memories, which would be bad.
It would have been easy enough to write this a little differently. Instead, it’s used to hinder Kovacs here and
there.
My
main complaint with serialized stories is that each episode is rather slow and
usually ends with a hyped-up cliffhanger.
At least we didn’t get the latter here.
It was also a little more evenly paced, but I felt it was slow at times.
Some
of the series was spent looking for Konrad Harlan. I wasn’t exactly sure where that was even
going. Poe was sent in to the VR world
to look for him. Once it was discovered
that he wasn’t there, Poe and Kovacs all but gave up on it. It seemed like a lot of screen time just to
show what kind of person his daughter was.
Much
of the season was like that. It was so
slow that I usually felt like I was missing something. It’s like someone is telling you a story and
constantly leaving out important details.
I felt like there should have been more going on.
I’m
curious to see how the third season will turn out, if it is actually
announced. The series has a way of
letting characters come back to life and were left with a pretty nice setup at
the end of the final episode. We’re
teased with a big question of what exactly Poe and another AI character found. The question is whether or not we’ll get our
answer
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