Over the course of its first 10-episode season, Altered Carbon was, or attempted to be, a great many things. It was an eye-popping science fiction series and a hard-boiled detective story rolled into one. It was also a series that tried very hard at times (and not nearly hard enough at others) to be about class and power and the middle class-eroding disparity of income that has left the majority of the world's wealth in the hands of the few. It was also a series with some very passionate, very 12-year-old-boy-like feelings about the awesomeness of swords and throwing stars, hackers and cops with cybernetic limbs.Altered Carbon was filled with limitless potential thanks to a seemingly limitless budget, apparently little oversight. But unfortunately, it also had little interest in elevating the future shock of its over-spun class warfare narrative beyond the visual grandeur of a barely altered carbon copy of Blade Runner. Despite a handful of enthusiastic performances from Joel Kinnaman, Martha Higareda, Kristin Lehman, Chris Conner, and Dichen Lachman, as well as an abundance of thought-provoking questions seeded in almost every hour, Altered Carbon struggled to see those performances and inquiries germinate into something as compelling as the story's scope implied.Related: Altered Carbon Review: Epic Sci-Fi Eye Candy That's Lacking FinesseThe first season was fun and frustrating in equal measure. But that doesn't help it stand out amidst the throng of genre content floating around out there, much less everything else being offered by the various networks and streaming services at the moment. As mixed bags go, that's not awful; it's pretty much par for the course in this age of so much good-but-not-great TV we're currently in. But it's also worth exploring why season 1 was such a mixed bag, what worked and what didn't, and to try and understand where, in the end, that leaves the series.

What Worked:

Immortality Belongs to the One Percent

Kristen Lehman in Altered Carbon

The most interesting idea presented in Altered Carbon is also the one that is most germane to the present: that the majority of the world's wealth is in the hands of the few. Immortality is essentially an option for everyone, but only the ultra rich can afford to truly live forever. The best everyone else can hope for is to be re-sleeved into an unfamiliar body, sometimes after a great deal of time has passed since their first (or latest) death.

But it's not just the idea that the ultra-rich are moving from cloned sleeve to cloned sleeve in their towers high above the filth of the city. The more compelling angle is what an immortal one percent means for everyone else. It means social stasis, a culture that won't grow, can't evolve, and potentially will never change for the better of the working class. We see a decadent society in decline that's also stuck in its free fall.

It's a fascinating concept that's the logical byproduct of the series' key science fiction element. And while Altered Carbon isn't as driven to explore that idea as perhaps it should be, choosing instead to primarily illustrate the cultural division from a razor-thin theological angle, ostensibly turning religious objection to re-sleeving into a plot point on which the season's murder mystery turns, the idea of an immortal one percent is still present enough to be of interest.

Joel Kinnaman as Takeshi in Altered Carbon Season 1 Netflix

Made One Genuine Attempt To Find Its Humanity

One of the biggest problems Altered Carbon is the lack of depth in its characters. There is little or no sense of interiority in anyone outside of Takeshi Kovacs or Kristin Ortega, and even then it's pretty sketchy. Proponents may argue that's the point the series is trying to make in asking the question œWhat makes us human?, but even when the line between human and, well¦ something else is so deliberately insubstantial, thinly drawn characters do not an answer make.

Still, the series does make one genuine attempt to connect with the humanness of it all, exploring what it means to wear another person's body, and to do so as casually as one might pull on a vintage T-shirt bought at Goodwill.

The moment comes halfway through the first season, in episode 5, The Wrong Man', when Takeshi is finally told the truth about his new sleeve. He winds up confronted with the polarity between his inner and outer self. In true Altered Carbon fashion, Takeshi's enlightenment is partially the result of a roll in the hay with Ortega, but for the first time in the series, the explicit sexual content produces the most human moment of the season: Takeshi learning about his new body from a woman with intimate knowledge of it.

Altered Carbon makes a modest effort at telling the audience who Elias Ryker is and what led to his sleeve falling into the hands of Laurens Bancroft. Like most everything else in the series it's really just a bit of narrative spackling paste, a reason to explain why, in a world where bodies are the ultimate accessories, Takeshi would want to keep the one he's currently wearing from being destroyed, but even then, the moment gives the audience a welcome hint of emotionality and nuance.

Hard-boiled Duo: Joel Kinnaman & Martha Higareda

Joel Kinnaman in Altered Carbon Netflix

The science fiction half of Altered Carbon is primarily there to explain narrative complications away. The series is perhaps better suited to being a hard-boiled murder mystery (that's not to say the mystery is any good necessarily, but more on that later), or at least delivering the fun, superficial elements of a noir storyline. One of the best examples is the tough, cynical exteriors of Kinnaman's version of Kovacs (also more on that later) and Higareda's Detective Ortega.

Ortega is the first significant character Kovacs meets after 250 years œon ice, and it doesn't take long for the two to be at odds with one another. Though it takes a few episodes, the two actors develop a necessary chemistry that's lacking just about everywhere else in the series. Some of that chemistry is the result of the work that went into an episode like The Wrong Man,' but mostly it comes down to Kinnaman and Higareda's performances, particularly when they share a scene.

Kinnaman's devil-may-care vibe gels with Higareda's relentless intensity and makes for an enjoyable onscreen duo. Though Kovacs spends much of the season essentially collecting partners, like Poe (Conner) and Vernon (Ato Essandoh), they are mostly there to aid in his quest. Ortega, on the other hand, has enough of a personal narrative that she becomes something more than a tool for Kovcas to further his objective. That, along with Higareda's performance, creates a twosome that's as close to genuine fun as this series gets.

Ambitions of the Production Design

Kristen Lehman in Altered Carbon Season 1

Altered Carbon is eye candy; whatever you think of the story, we can all probably agree on that. The show is proud of its world building and wants to show it off with rain-soaked CGI cityscapes filled with flying cars and spiraling towers high above the clouds. On the streets there is a barrage of holographic ads selling presumably everything (but mostly just sex). Imagine a world where walking to work or going shopping was like trying to read an article (this one included, probably) on the internet. That's pretty much the world of Altered Carbon. Sure, it's also the world of Blade Runner, Minority Report, Back to the Future, and more, but the series still deserves credit for the ambition of its production design.

Joel Kinnaman and James Purefoy in Altered Carbon Season 1

What Didn't Work: The Murder Mystery Is Dull

The murder of Laurens Bancroft is the series' central mystery and the reason Takeshi Kovacs is back 250 years after his death. It's also about as dull as ditchwater. The Bancroft family dynamic was like Dynasty meets Battlestar Galactica, but the intrigue quickly wore off as Takeshi's relationship with Ortega, his flashbacks of being an Envoy, and eventually Reileen's appearance, pushed him out of the Bancroft's orbit. By the time it was necessary to wrap things up and solve Laurens' murder, the biggest question wasn't: œWho did it?, but rather œDoes anyone still care?

Much of that has to do with the fact that outside of some mishandling of familial clones, the Bancrofts aren't that interesting. Laurens' desire to martyr himself among the city's virulent poor is gross for more than the obvious reasons, while Miriam repeatedly makes for a classic femme fatale, but beyond that, the family isn't compelling enough to justify that much of the season's storyline, and neither is the question of who killed Laurens and why.

Real Death Should Have Been the Real Story

Joel Kinnaman as Takeshi Kovacs in Altered Carbon

The series could have made Nadia Makita's (Renée Elise Goldsberry) regret over creating stacks and opening the door for immortality into something akin to Robert Oppenheimer's quoting of Bhagavad-Gita, but instead it settled for the contrite shrug of the guy who invented K-Cups. Sure, Makita turned herself into the freedom fighter/terrorist Quellcrist Falconer (which, my god, maybe workshop your pen name a little first?), but Altered Carbon only pays lip service to what she and her Envoys are trying to accomplish by bringing back œReal Death and the implications of what her

Stacks removed the burden of death; they made it a choice. That choice has since been exploited by the ultra-rich, creating an astonishing disparity between the haves and the have nots, but the choice is still there. We see it when Ortega brings her grandmother back to spend a day with her family who disapproves of granma's daylong resurrection on religious grounds. Sure, the sleeve is not an ideal one ” it's about as far from grandmotherly as you can imagine ” but it doesn't matter, it means something to Ortega. It also underlines the most interesting yet largely unexplored facet of this story: identity does not come from your physical self.

As such, Altered Carbon has an interesting conflict in its own narrative, in that the revolution being fought for isn't necessarily one that everyone would want, and the revolutionary at its core is actually taking something away instead of giving to those she's claiming to fight for. Real Death is an appropriately terrifying concept, one with real implications that is nonetheless given short shrift here in favor of ideas with far less at stake. It also doesn't help that Quellcrist (or Nadia) is a nothing character whose motivations are never expressed in a convincing manner, and who functions more like a longwinded training program from The Matrix.

Two Takeshis Should Have Been Fun. It Wasn't.

Joel Kinnman and Will Yun Lee

One of the biggest problems with Altered Carbon is that the two Takeshi's don't match up. They don't remotely seem like the same person. Will Yun Lee is playing Kyle Reese from The Terminator, while Kinnaman is trying to be the audience's proxy, by way of Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. It's not the fault the actors, either. From the look of it, Lee and Kinnaman were likely never on set with one another, and who knows how much direct contact they had. Someone, whether an episode's director or, more likely, the series showrunner, needed to check the continuity of the two performances. Whoever's job that was didn't just come up short, they seemingly encouraged the disparity.

What's worse, two Takeshis should have been the series' excuse to have a little fun, to give Altered Carbon that character who looks at everything that's going on and says, œThis is really f***ed up. Kinnaman does his best to raise an eyebrow at the madness of the world and its inhabitants. It's a choice, one that the series desperately needs someone to make, but at the same time it winds up disconnecting present day Takeshi from Takeshi of two and a half centuries ago.

A Good Concept Couldn't Overcome Muddled Ideas and Execution

Joel Kinnaman in Altered Carbon

The series' shortcomings mostly come down to execution. The concept of Altered Carbon is great; it promised world building on par with the very best television has to offer. It also teased complex ideas about humanity, morality, evolution, and more. But in the execution of the story those ideas became muddled, mainly due to stilted dialogue, unnecessary exposition, and thinly drawn characters.

Problems with the execution go beyond the storytelling. This may seem contradictory, but for a show that's so expensive, sometimes it looked disconcertingly second-rate. The sets were impressive in their scale and detail, but the manner in which they were filmed was largely uninspired and weirdly homogenized. The result is an immense world full of stuff with no atmosphere, where the ambiance of a scene in Ortega's subterranean apartment is no different from the Bancrofts' luxury mansion in the sky. There is no sense of place in any of Altered Carbon's many places. Would you have known it is set in San Francisco had it not repeatedly shown a shot of that city's most iconic ” albeit altered ” structure?

Moreover, there's a huge contradiction when it comes to the idea of space. Its luscious CGI cityscapes present a San Francisco that is so cramped the ultra-rich are literally ascending into the heavens, yet The Raven maintains how many rooms despite having zero guests. Ortega's apartment may be below ground but that's a small price to pay for the immense square footage at her disposal. The same goes for her family's apartment. Is space at a premium or isn't it? These are the kinds of things that build worlds audiences remember. Take Deckard's apartment from Blade Runner or K's apartment from Blade Runner 2049. Both give the viewer a sense of what it means to have a solitary space in such an overcrowded world. A quick shot of the bodies lingering outside K's place is enough to convey the importance of what lies on the other side of the door. There's nothing like that here. There's no atmosphere. It's all just places to put people while they explain the plot to one another.

In the end, Altered Carbon season 1 is an ambitious spectacle that plays like a carbon copy of sci-fi's greatest hits. It offers plenty of nice things to look at, but has very little going on inside.

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Altered Carbon season 1 is available to stream on Netflix.