Review: Altered Carbon comes back strong with twisty, fast-paced S2

Anti-hero Takeshi Kovacs awakens in a new sleeve (Anthony Mackie). [credit: Netflix ]

The first season of Altered Carbon, the Netflix adaptation of Richard K. Morgan's 2002 cyberpunk novel of the same name, earned critical praise for its existential themes and visually stunning world-building, plus a few dings for uneven storytelling and excessive violence. The much-anticipated second season has all the same strengths and almost none of S1's weaknesses, delivering an engrossing storyline that delves deeper into the underlying mythology and history of the planet known as Harlan's World. Fans of the first season won't be disappointed.

(Spoilers for S1 below; some spoilers for S2, but no major plot twist reveals.)

Like the novel (the first of a trilogy), the series is set in a world more than 360 years in the future, where a person's memories and consciousness can be uploaded into a device—based on alien technology—known as a cortical stack. The stack can be implanted at the back of the neck of any human body (known as a "sleeve"), whether natural or synthetic, so an individual consciousness can be transferred between bodies. Income inequality still exists, however, so only the very rich can afford true immortality, storing their consciousness in remote backups and maintaining a steady supply of clones. Those people are called "Meths" (a reference to the biblical Methuselah, who supposedly lived for 969 years).

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