I’ve watched the first seven episodes. It us kind of okay. Nothing more than that. Story comes to a grinding halt when it cuts to scenes of Cop And Family. It has been long enough since I’ve read the books that I can remember when a plot point from the first novel happens, but don’t really notice where it deviates much (though I did notice that the stacks are far larger and fancier than in the books.) I’ve cued up all three books for a reread after I finish the series today.
I just last week started watching The Expanse. So far I like that adaptation much more than this one. (For reference, I ate up the Altered Carbon trilogy like candy, but was so “meh” about The Expanse that I stopped reading a couple of chapters into the second book.)
Meanwhile, I’m 20 percent into my rereading of Altered Carbon (after maybe 13, 14 years) and I’m seeing that the series strayed massively from the book.
Fucking with the timeline and conflating Virginia & Quel, and how that meant the Envoys were not Protectorate forces but instead somehow trained by a rebel in the forest (yes, that TIRED old trope) was just the last straw for me. His sister’s presence was dumb enough, but screwing with the entire mythos like that was just too much.
Watched the second episode today. Didn’t get any better. That’s it for me, i think. I already have enough trouble finding time for the good stuff, without adding something mediocre to the rotation.
I’m assuming spoilers are okay based on this comment and others in the thread. With that caveat aside:
In the book are the Envoys protectorate soldiers who end up going rogue or something?
Also, you mention his sister’s presence being dumb. Was she not a present-day characters in the books? If not, then as you stopped mid episode 7, I have to say. I think you’d be glad you did. Super spoiler ahead, for the series:
His sister ends up being the main villain of the series.
Yes, some of them. There’s a whole huge backstory that takes 3 novels to even be a picture, let alone an actual narrative. But Quelcrist Falconer is not a part of that at all; she’s an ideologue/messiah/rebel leader on Harlan’s World, but from before Takeshi was born. Like, from hundreds of years before Takeshi was born.
No she was not and I guessed the spoiler. Yeah, for me that would not have been a worthwhile payoff for my time.
I don’t know the proper trope term for it or whatever, but I always think it’s a copout when a writer makes these huge conflicts into family/sibling rivalries or childhood friends or something like that. I call it shakespearing because that jackass’s plays are all about that sort of thing, but I’d imagine someone has come up with a better term by now.
I have been watching it (on Ep 4) and really enjoying it. The visuals really drew me in (I just got a new 4k OLED, so watching it on Dolby Vision has been utterly incredible), and kept me watching after a pretty confusing first episode, but I’m glad I did. It’s gotten better with every episode (and more info falls into place). Made me interested in reading the books, of which I had never heard of before.
The Envoys are the elite special forces of the protectorate. Think something at a level between Seal Team 6 and Jedi Master.
In the books she wasn’t even a character at all. Here is a passage early in the novel where Takishi is thinking to himself:
That’s it. No drama in his joining the military. As I’ve mentioned before, I have poor recall of fine details of the books because it has been more than a decade since I read them, but I just did a key-word search for “sister” in the remaining two books, and in book two he mentions having a mother and two sisters, and in the third book there is no instance of the word “sister” at all.
on episode 5 now and at this point i’m sticking around *just *for the visuals (which really are awesome on OLED!) because the dialogue is pretty bad and a lot of the acting is SyFy-level quality.
It’s actually pretty good. Books are an entirely different medium than TV series, which are an entirely different medium from movies. There are reasons things are changed. Sometime to clean things up that needed cleaning since the original writing, and sometimes for more prosaic reasons, like budget and contracts, etc. So, sure, a point-by-point comparison with the books is going to turn up flaws. But the feel of the series reminds me of the feel of reading the book years ago…
It’s been mentioned upthread that the Envoys are the most elite UN forces, but it’s also mentioned that ex-Envoys are responsible for a disproportionate amount of the violent crime in the setting. This has always struck me as something of a weakness in the books, in that you can’t realistically expect these people to serve forever, and they’re also forbidden from having high-level legitimate corporate or government jobs, so basically “life of crime” is their best option once they decide to retire from active service. I’m okay with the change in allegiance for the Envoy Corps to make Kovacs the last of his kind, although there was sort of a cool subplot in the third book involving a five or six person Envoy special operation that can’t happen now.
