Started watching this, through the second episode. Then I come here and see that there is not much love for how it goes.
I’ll keep watching until it turns me off, seems decent enough so far.
I did make the comment when he was in the store talking to the kid, “That’s why you don’t let your kids talk to strangers, not because they are going to be kidnapped or anything, just traumatized by someone who knows he won’t have to deal with the backlash.”
Just finished the series and I really enjoyed it. I thought the change in direction in the last half of the season was pretty fantastic and it said a lot more about class than I thought it would. Interesting to see where it goes from here.
I haven’t read the books, but that whole thing still felt off to me: so he’s this legendary near-unstoppable fighter with mysterious intuition powers or whatever, and he got that way… because some chick in the forest told him to look at the details? Like, really look look?
I’d love to learn more about Elder civilization, though. That sort of stuff always draws me in, but I liked that it was really just a backdrop in this.
Their artifacts (some of which are a bit less dead than would be convenient) feature in the 2nd and 3rd books in the series (and are mentioned in the first.)
I’ve watched several episodes and am really having a hard time getting into it. Joel Kinnaman is nearly catatonic as an actor, even worse than in “The Killing”. The idea behind the series, of being able to be re-skinned into another body, is entertaining, and the world construct is interesting. I’ll try it again after I finish “Chance”, which is excellent.
At first I thought some of the nudity was a bit gratuitous but then I realized that in a world where the physical body you are in is more or less disposable, nudity probably has much less of a taboo around it.
BTW, if you are interesting in seeing a sampling of changes between the series and the first novel, these articles list some of them.
We made it thru episode 2, then gave up. Every time we got a little interested, another contrived, dumb fight scene would start, which would last way too long. I started hoping that Kovacs would get taken out by a sniper, then re-sleeved into the body of Colombo.
Also, I find the actor that plays Kovacs to be distracting. I can’t focus on anything except his tiny head. It’s probably a normal sized head, but it looks tiny on his large frame.
I’m about half way through, and I’m enjoying it. I’d never heard of the books so that’s not putting me off at all. I quite enjoy the world-building, the whole stack & sleeve thing is full of possibilities.
I do have a couple of questions, which I’m happy to be spoilt on material from the books if necessary.
Where do the ‘spare’ sleeves come from? Sure if you’re Uber-rich you can make a clone, but people still seem to have children the ordinary way, and get assigned ‘spare’ sleeves. They visited a HQ where they were advertising ‘top of the line’ sleeves, but from what I can tell they can’t actually just manufacture bodies, right?
I can’t think of where any considerably large numbers of spares would come from?
People are put in prison, just by having their stack stuck in a draw somewhere? If they are unaware of passing time, how this a punishment, beyond the loss of your sleeve?
Spare bodies come from convicted criminals who have gone into storage–there is no cryogenic preservation of the bodies or anything, so they continue to age normally and can’t be “saved” for long-term prisoners.
Yes, bodies can be manufactured. Cheap, low-end ones are obviously fake to people seeing them and to people living in them. High-end, obscenely expensive ones have enhancements far beyond baseline humans.
People aren’t put in storage by having their stack removed and put in a drawer–the copy of their personalities stored on the stack is uploaded to a computer and the body is kept unconscious until the original personality is reloaded or the personality of someone else (which goes back to the “spare stacks.”) In the books, the “stack” is an object around the size of a cigarette butt embedded in the top of the spine at birth, not a gigantic blue glowing thing. I always visualized it as being about like a uranium pellet from a nuclear control rod. But trying to think of a more familiar visual just now, I came up with those little firework “snake” pellets, stacked 3 or 4 high.
Why sentences hurt–losing your body, losing time with family, culture shock of the changed world.
Also, people get resleeved when they are rich enough to pay for it or have a good insurance policy (or are the victim of murder.) Eventually, most people end up just being a stack stored away somewhere because they can’t afford to come back. Which is why only a few are “Methesulas.”
(In a scene from one of the later books on a different planet, there are millions of stacks just lying around in piles, sold in bulk to anyone ready and able to resleeve them as slave labor.)
This was sort of a weak point in the books as well. You would think that it might be worthwhile to run prisoners in a virtual simulation of some sort of prison that’s extra super boring. As it is, a guy like Kovacs who doesn’t have any family or friends to speak of just wakes up from his sentence and resumes his criminal ways.
The series ended up being a lot stronger than I thought it would be; there was some sort of hokey TV stuff but it did clear up some of the issues that the book had in my opinion. I didn’t think I’d like the big change to the main villain but they ended up really explaining why she didn’t just shoot Kovacs when she had him incapacitated - she actually didn’t want to kill him. I sincerely hope that it gets a second season.
Finally watching, have seen four episodes.
Uh…this is great. Does the quality stay this high?
I just watched the “Kovacs gets tortured for an hour” episode and it was great. The core mystery is interesting, the world-building is fantastic…I’m kind of surprised I like it this much.
Are they making a second season?
How are these books?
Finished it and really liked it. The story was cheesy and contrived, but somehow that didn’t bother me. Maybe it’s good I didn’t read the books.
The ick factor at the end was a little much, but not enough to turn me off completely.
I rather liked it; haven’t read the books, so I had no prior expectations going in.
Pretty good. The season is based only on the first book. The differences between the first book and first season are large.
In order (without much spoilage):
Altered Carbon is a good book; this is mostly a detective story.
Broken Angels is very good and is better on re-read. This is a quasi-military/corporate positioning/alien archaeology story.
Woken Furies is excellent and also improves on re-reads, IMO. This is multiple inter-related caper & revenge stories that also involve a failed revolution (and revolutionary) from hundreds of years ago.
I’ll go ahead and cover his whole novel output (I’m a fan; aye). Note that only the 3 Takeshi Kovacs books involved re-sleeving, stacks, needle casts, etc.:
Market Forces is a sophomoric social SF novel. It involved cars and stock brokers and is a boring mess. IMO it reads like something he wrote his 2nd year of college so he could say “I wrote a whole novel” and then later submitted to his publisher in order to more easily fulfill his contractual obligation.
Thirteen (Black Man in the UK) is excellent. Story is about the search for a brutally violent convict who somehow escaped from Mars and returned to Earth. The protagonists are a detective and her “partner” for this, a genetically engineered “superhuman” who’s type has since been banned from production because of how brutally violent they can be.
The Land Fit for Heros trilogy (The Steel Remains, The Cold Commands and The Dark Defiles) is excellent. A gay berserker war hero with a magic sword, a gay woman who is the last member of an entire race that can practice actual magic, sentient AIs, time- and dimension-traveling murderous gay vampires, a shaman berserker lord and shitloads of freaky situations, all taking place on an ancient planet that is clearly not our own but is somehow definitely linked to ours.
I haven’t read any of the graphic novels he’s written; I just don’t care enough about the form.
I’m enjoying it so far (just finished the end-of-Envoys-flashback episode), I like the acting and the way it works as sci fi (take one tech thing - the stack -and extrapolate some of the effects)
Just watched 8th episode. Yikes, that was intense.