While I like detective mysteries, my first love was science fiction. Altered Carbon, an American cyberpunk television series based on a 2002 novel by English author Richard K. Morgan, brings them both together. Joel Kinnaman plays Takeshi Kovacs, a rebel soldier brought back to life in a “sleeve” (a borrowed body) to solve the murder of the man hiring him. Kinnaman is another of the Swedish actors able to do English language TV as if he was a native speaker. He is also one of my favorites, first seen in the American version of an originally Swedish detective series The Killing (also starring the excellent Mireille Enos). He stars too in the first (and best) season of the Prime version of Hanna and more recently in the Apple TV For All Mankind. I’ll watch most anything Kinnaman is in, though maybe not enough to rejoin Netflix, where I watched this a few years ago (before quitting Netflix when it raised its price).
Before going further, let me warn that while I do highly recommend the first season of Altered Carbon, it is not my usual fare. It is violent and bloody and set in a dark world similar to Blade Runner. Kovacs is the last surviver of an elite force – the Protectorate Envoys – bent on overthrowing a society controlled by an oligarchy monopolizing a technology offering lengthened life span. They use it to control the population while prolonging their own lives. (Today’s mega-rich are indeed looking for such technologies. And of all people, Neil deGrasse Tyson narrates The History of Immortality clip on the series preview page that explains the technology.)
Kovacs is brought out of a virtual Alcatraz where his “stack” – the container of his consciousness and memory – was kept since his capture and arrest in 2134. He is awakened into a new “sleeve” in 2384 by a 300 year old oligarch to investigate his own murder. As he was killed shortly after his consciousness was backed up, he has no memory of the crime, although he was brought back to life in a new cloned body.
The ten episodes of the series move back and forth via flashbacks to Kovacs early life and the incidents of the rebellion (when he was in his original body). In 2384, Kovacs teams up, kinda, with a detective, a former Protectorate marine and an AI based on Edgar Allen Poe. Kovacs faces various threats and is attacked and abducted along the way but does arrive at complicated revelations by the end. A second series with him in a new “sleeve” follows but I have not seen that one.
In unraveling a series of lies, Kovacs some to an understanding relevant perhaps to our own times: “When you believe a lie for too long, the truth doesn’t set you free, it tears you apart.” If your taste runs to cyberpunk, worth catching.