Although I didn’t like the first season of ‘ Altered Carbon ‘, I must admit that I was very curious to see how the second one would develop , which Netflix has released today . A new batch of episodes whose main novelty was the incorporation of Anthonie Mackie as the new “cover” of Takeshi Kovacs.
Fortunately, this change of protagonist has not been the only improvement of the series . Stripping that Sherlockhomesian mystery and downgrading eight episodes instead of ten also serve to better compact this whole story of revolutionaries, dystopian governments, people who want Kovacs dead and touches cyberpunks .
Laeta Kalogridis returns to the front of the season telling us the return of Kovacs. The current scenario is a Harlan quite changed since the last time he saw it (about thirty years, he says), a key world for the Protectorate and for the revolution that Quellcrist Falconer (Renée Elise Goldsberry) raised at the time.
The season of change
A change of location that brings with it an aesthetic transformation and, why not say it, a feeling at all times that there are no open spaces and that they have saved the most when building sets. Considering that this series premiered as an ambitious science fiction blockbuster , it seems a step back.
But not only in this sense but also seen in the fight scenes (which are several in its first episodes), which shows the tricks . The new cover of Kovacs is a modified elite soldier and this already leads to the melee fight being more important and looking for spectacularity, but I do not finish convincing each scene of this type.
The most interesting thing about season 2 of ‘Altered Carbon’ is that we find another story very different from the previous one . So much that if it were not because there are things of the past to be resolved (and not only that love epic in search of Falconer) it could be seen perfectly independently.
So much so that I am tempted not to compare Mackie and Kinnaman as the Takeshi Kovacs of these seasons. I think I will only say that Anthonie Mackie is quite good, although I think that, especially at the beginning, she should not be too comfortable in this series with all the intensity required to get into the skin of a centenary character.
A better planned ‘Altered Carbon’
It is not that I have hit, at least for me, a great leap in quality between seasons but it is that Laeta Kalogridis has changed the planning of these new episodes correctly. Despite not displaying the interesting ideas exposed two years ago (or thanks to it, as you look at it), the story manages to breathe and ask us something that is, directly, more entertaining.
I think that, in general, this rebirth of ‘Altered Carbon’ seams are noticed more in this second season than in the previous one. These new episodes are still far from the perfection we would have liked to see in their time, but the series embraces its imperfections and that makes it more enjoyable.