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Overall an enjoyable if sometimes clumsy adaptation, but oooh boy was the last episode a steaming pile of poo poo. That loving katana duel, Lizzie ex Machina, BCPD riding to the rescue, that x-tra cheesy sequel hook, the entirety of tv-Rei and Quell really... All the good stuff, bits of charaterization or entire scenes, are lifted straight from the novel. Every time the tv team decided to stretch its writing muscles it ends up sabotaging the rest of the show. OK, I'll give you Abuela über alles. Still, it doesn't fill me with great confidence regarding eventual adaptations of the other two books if they keep departing from the base material.
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Feb 6, 2018 23:38
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One thing the series does have all over the books (and I love all three books) is humor. I struggle to recall even one single funny moment in the entire ~1500 page Kovacs saga.
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Feb 7, 2018 00:36
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BobMorane posted:Overall an enjoyable if sometimes clumsy adaptation, but oooh boy was the last episode a steaming pile of poo poo. That loving katana duel, Lizzie ex Machina, BCPD riding to the rescue, that x-tra cheesy sequel hook, the entirety of tv-Rei and Quell really... it does pretty much run of the steam at the end but I still enjoyed the bleak setting & atmosphere of the show.
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Feb 7, 2018 00:58
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Kegslayer posted:No I'm pretty sure she gets it. If you wanted to undermine one of the basic premises of the story, sure. The whole point of it being an asian guy in a white guy's body is to underline just how far off-base someone can go and that ethnicity fundamentally means nothing anymore. At every point in the story the reader/viewer is made to deal with the protagonist himself is someone in a body that's foreign in every respect.
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Feb 7, 2018 01:53
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Jeopardy had an Altered Carbon clue tonight.
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Feb 7, 2018 02:23
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Neddy Seagoon posted:If you wanted to undermine one of the basic premises of the story, sure. The whole point of it being an asian guy in a white guy's body is to underline just how far off-base someone can go and that ethnicity fundamentally means nothing anymore. At every point in the story the reader/viewer is made to deal with the protagonist himself is someone in a body that's foreign in every respect. Being in another body is a well established science fiction trope and a whole bunch of movies and television series have been able to portray the same idea in different ways. But yes the whole point of the story is that ethnicity fundamentally means nothing anymore which is why he cannot be played by an Asian guy and must be played by a white guy. 
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Feb 7, 2018 02:39
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Kegslayer posted:Being in another body is a well established science fiction trope and a whole bunch of movies and television series have been able to portray the same idea in different ways. lol
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Feb 7, 2018 02:42
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Kegslayer posted:But yes the whole point of the story is that ethnicity fundamentally means nothing anymore which is why he cannot be played by an Asian guy and must be played by a white guy. this sort of conflict is p much unwinnable regarding adaptations because the massive sociological problems and issues that tv and film have to deal (and often fail to do so) when doing stuff like casting is pretty much a whole different universe of consideration that an author has with their book, like, I doubt the creator of Altered Carbon ever stopped to think that "hmm when this goes to tv my point of having a polish-japanese ethnic character in the far future having his consciousness in different bodies that do not represent his original self at all and in large separate intervals of time might be problematic to translate" (and, imo, far different problem than Ghost in the Shell because I think the characterization and the narrative context there is far worse to justify having Scarlett Johansson as the officer) incidentally (imho as well) this is also one of the reasons why it is so drat hard to do cyberpunk right for tv/films
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Feb 7, 2018 03:55
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Elendil004 posted:Ending question Isn't the OG Takeshi sleeve from the fight still around? I mean, enough DNA for a clone to be grown? It’s mentioned in the show. That sleeve is “military stock” (they mention a company name but I can’t remember it), meaning the company that created it probably has a whole warehouse full of them somewhere.
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Feb 7, 2018 04:18
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Should have made him neither white nor asian! Get like Zahn McClarnon up in here
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Feb 7, 2018 04:18
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pendulous thread posted:It’s mentioned in the show. That sleeve is “military stock” (they mention a company name but I can’t remember it), meaning the company that created it probably has a whole warehouse full of them somewhere. Huh? When they go back to Harlan's world his C/O asks him how it feels to be back in his original body.
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Feb 7, 2018 04:23
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I really liked this show, flaws and all. I just have a few nagging problems: 1.Why aren't all the meths/soldiers/etc in synth bodies? Superstrong, can change appearance on the fly, crazy Ghost in the Shell poo poo, so why stick with meticulously assembled clones? 2.Why don't the Meths have backups for their backups, like a yearly recode on multiple satellites in orbit around Jupiter or something? That seems short-sighted for dudes who live potentially forever. 3.When the Rawlings Virus begins affecting the cortical stack, why is it also affecting the sleeve? Wouldn't it be non-symptomatic? I thought the stacks were just data backups, not CPUs for otherwise biologically normal humans. 4.Cult Assassin Dude seemed kinda bland. I'd figure there would be more flavor mileage for the show to have something like mini cults popping up around worshipping the Meths, not just one slimy dude.
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Feb 7, 2018 04:25
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Teal posted:Honestly I'm not completely clear on this; maybe I'm just a confused idiot but that whole deal about why are the whores actually dying was a bit confusing to me. I thought the previous levels just were in VR, or with synths, and the point of Iridium was that it was a real person in a sleeve and if you RD'd in Iridium they'd cover your rear end but it wasn't an intended feature. If they were trying to market real death every time, they could just use whores with a backup, couldn't they? I thought that the reason why they didn't actually respin the whores even when they didn't get RD'd was that it was simply cheaper to do it that way than to actually buy the new sleeves all the time when you could instead hire a whore, let her get offed, and never pay any of them. Here's what's going on: Head in the Clouds has a whole level devoted to letting the rich and powerful murderrape their way through prostitutes, who are all willing because gently caress, it's just a sleeve. The thing is, even by the standards of the Altered Carbon world that's considered really depraved, and Head in the Clouds is all about being Discerning and Discrete. So Rei has figured out a way to recode the prostitutes so that they're in the system as Neo Catholic, which prevents them from being spun up or resleeved, thus keeping the Iridium-level clientele's identities a secret. Which is tied into Proposal 653, which was designed to allow murder victims to be spun back up regardless of religious coding. They weren't marketing Real Death to the Iridium-level clients. Even they thought it was just a sleeve and that the hookers would be brought back. Remember, Bancroft was an Iridium-level client and while he got off on killing hookers he always made sure to buy them an upgraded sleeve if it happened and when he finds out he accidentally hosed a hooker so hard her stack shattered he actually feels legitimately horrible.
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Feb 7, 2018 04:41
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Kegslayer posted:Being in another body is a well established science fiction trope and a whole bunch of movies and television series have been able to portray the same idea in different ways. Did you miss that the body he's in is actually pertinent to the story beyond generic white guy?
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Feb 7, 2018 04:48
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Kulkasha posted:I really liked this show, flaws and all. I just have a few nagging problems: 1 - It’s only through using an actual bona-fide clone that you can be effectively immortal. As far as soldiers, I imagine there’s a drawback of some kind. I can’t remember if it’s explained in the book or not (it’s next up in re-read queue for me). 2 - No loving idea. Obviously RK Morgan isn’t a paranoid IT type. 3 - In the case of the Rebel Forest Base, I think RV was delivered by a biological vector that caused a violent psychosis. But apparently RV alone is a cognitive(?) virus since they were able to corrupt Rei’s backup by piggy backing it onto her stack backup’s needlecast. This is probably another thing that will be more clear on a re-read. 4 - Agreed.
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Feb 7, 2018 04:54
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Kulkasha posted:I really liked this show, flaws and all. I just have a few nagging problems: Proteus Jones posted:1 - It’s only through using an actual bona-fide clone that you can be effectively immortal. As far as soldiers, I imagine there’s a drawback of some kind. I can’t remember if it’s explained in the book or not (it’s next up in re-read queue for me). 1.Obviously the solution is to get a clone body THEN get super cybernetic upgrades like Ortega had. 2. agreed
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Feb 7, 2018 05:02
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Proteus Jones posted:
Regarding 1; The books have none of the drawbacks the series tries to imply occur from re-sleeving. The only exception is if someone is re-sleeved repeatedly in a short amount of time, and it creates a nasty case of literal identity issues (you can't tell your hands are your own, that kind of thing). Even then that only really happens in places like active warzones where they're re-sleeving fallen soldiers, and it's still an exceptionally rare thing. Regarding 2; I haven't gotten through the entire series yet to see if they changed it, but the Rawlings virus screws the pooch on Rei's entire backup system. Military-grade computer viruses (even century-old ones) are much scarier and smarter things in Altered Carbon, because it wasn't just passively sitting in her backup file with a red flag, it was eating the entire backup system. All you can do once that starts is weld it shut and wipe everything.
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Feb 7, 2018 05:04
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Is any of the alien stuff ever covered? Like how stacks were developed for human use or anything like that? Edit: In the books I mean.
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Feb 7, 2018 05:12
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Rhyno posted:Huh? When they go back to Harlan's world his C/O asks him how it feels to be back in his original body. That’s a different sleeve. The one from the flashbacks with the Envoys is his original body (Will Yun Lee). The one from the fight (I assumed he meant the fight at Fightdrome with Ortega) was military stock that we saw in the flashback in the first episode (Byron Mann).
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Feb 7, 2018 05:31
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Richard Morgan (book author) blogged a bit about the production: https://www.richardkmorgan.com/2018/01/fragments-of-a-jet-lagged-dream/ It sounds like he was involved in some of the writing for the show as well, at least to the extent of being on set, talking to the actors and production team, and giving feedback.
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Feb 7, 2018 05:32
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Neddy Seagoon posted:Did you miss that the body he's in is actually pertinent to the story beyond generic white guy? You see, as a hardcore science fiction fan, there was literally no other way to show or tell this and furthermore Solkanar512 posted:Is any of the alien stuff ever covered? Like how stacks were developed for human use or anything like that? Yes. The show doesn't really cover it but the alien stuff plays a pretty big part in the story and in how and why things are the way they are. The last two books of the trilogy is basically all alien stuff but I don't know if the show will stick with it since they've changed so much already.
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Feb 7, 2018 05:34
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Kegslayer posted:You see, as a hardcore science fiction fan, there was literally no other way to show or tell this and furthermore Soooo the best way to show the divorce of body and identity is with an asian guy in an asian body?  Solkanar512 posted:Is any of the alien stuff ever covered? Like how stacks were developed for human use or anything like that? The short answer is the "Elder Race" are called Martians in the books. It's not quite the "correct" name, but it's the colloquial one because explorers originally found functional ruins on Mars. They found starcharts to other Martian worlds, and all the Protectorate Worlds are Martian worlds they sent the colony barges off to centuries ago. Most have Martian ruins of their own, some are even functional, but the Martians themselves are just gone with no discernible cause. There are corpses, but no living ones. Stacks are an entirely human technology, incidentally.
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Feb 7, 2018 05:45
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does "religious programming" mean that the DHF would never pass on to another sleeve? so is a person whose done some of that religous programming to their stack, do they real death when they die?
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Feb 7, 2018 06:15
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Neddy Seagoon posted:The big fat disks as Stacks is needlessly dumb; The book version is a small featureless cylinder about the size of the tip of your pinkie-finger, and the whole point is how simple and mundane functional immortality is made by such a tiny simple thing. Injected at birth at the base of the skull, nigh-indestructible unless you point a gun right at the thing, there's your life backed up. Try not to die. i think the stacks in the show are far better than the book alternative you describe. a small cylinder would resemble every other boring sci-fi prop design, boring and minimalistically designed. the stacks on the show befit the actual orgin of the tech, since it looks like something with an inherently alien design, nothing like how a human designed sci-fi thingmajig would be. has the look of a powerful alien computer / storage device.
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Feb 7, 2018 06:23
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Neddy Seagoon posted:Soooo the best way to show the divorce of body and identity is with an asian guy in an asian body? Yeah because all Asians don't actually look the same but going back to the original Times article, having an Asian actor play the original Kovacs wouldn't have affected the story in any meaningful way. You could either have an actor playing either as original Kovacs himself or as Ryker's sleeve and the audience would still be able to follow the story and be aware that Kovacs looks completely different to what he did originally. If other media from childrens shows like Doctor Who to critically acclaimed Jack Black 2001 comedy Shallow Hal can do it then I don't think it's going to be a problem even for TVIV goons. He could have just as easily been any nationality or sex and the show would have still worked great. It's still funny watch people demand that Kovacs has to be white though. I mean, what is this, the local?
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Feb 7, 2018 06:23
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Fututor Magnus posted:does "religious programming" mean that the DHF would never pass on to another sleeve? so is a person whose done some of that religous programming to their stack, do they real death when they die? Well it’s not religious programming, it’s like a flag set in the meta-data of the stack. It identifies that person as basically opting in to Real Death, and that they are not to be spun up into VR or another sleeve under any circumstances. Prop 653 is what all the riots are about and the impetus behind Rei doping Bancroft with the Stallion drug so she can get blackmail material form him to influence the Prop not passing. It basically carves out an exemption for cases of fatal organic damage, allowing the cops to spin up victims. The Neo Catholics are freaking out about it since they believe their souls are damned if that happens.
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Feb 7, 2018 06:24
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Fututor Magnus posted:does "religious programming" mean that the DHF would never pass on to another sleeve? so is a person whose done some of that religous programming to their stack, do they real death when they die? IIRC it is like a DNR: you can request to not be resleeved or spun up in VR in the event of your death.
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Feb 7, 2018 06:24
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pendulous thread posted:That’s a different sleeve. The one from the flashbacks with the Envoys is his original body (Will Yun Lee). The one from the fight (I assumed he meant the fight at Fightdrome with Ortega) was military stock that we saw in the flashback in the first episode (Byron Mann). Also the part in the flashback happens 250 years earlier, presumably his clones become military stock at some point after he died and got put on ice.
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Feb 7, 2018 06:28
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Solkanar512 posted:Is any of the alien stuff ever covered? Like how stacks were developed for human use or anything like that? The second book especially goes into it, most of the book's focus is on a discovered alien artifact.
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Feb 7, 2018 06:29
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Kegslayer posted:Yeah because all Asians don't actually look the same but going back to the original Times article, having an Asian actor play the original Kovacs wouldn't have affected the story in any meaningful way. You're still completely missing the point in sleeving and personal identity in Altered Carbon. Each one is not a temporary thing overlaying the original, it is the new you gor the lifespan. The series even gets that right with Kovacs looking at his reflection and having it change to his new body; it's self-realization and acceptance. Meths with clones is an extreme outlier. The person you see on Harlan's World, sorry "STRONG HOLD", is just who he used to be. There's a dozen more faces listed any time you see his ID data get flashed on a screen. Neddy Seagoon fucked around with this message at 06:36 on Feb 7, 2018 |
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Feb 7, 2018 06:33
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Rei dying n-teen times failing to down Ortega was like really dumb of her. I guess it was arrogance, but you'd think she'd learn after the first couple of failures.
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Feb 7, 2018 06:52
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A few questions I have for book readers. How portable is Needlecast tech? I get an implication that at least receiving DHF data and downloading it into sleeves takes a decently sized facility, even if you can pretty easily upload DHF data. Are there any downsides to synth bodies? Given the nature of the setting, a more Ghost in the Shell type of situation where biological sleeves would be more of an anachronistic tendency among those in Riker and Kovac's lines of work seems more plausible. Given how apparently easy from a technological standpoint it is to make printed clones, is the barrier to accessing clone sleeves, and even the concept of sleeve scarcity an artificial one? Is the concept of synth stacks or AIs trying to ride sleeves ever explored in the books? It seems like a pretty logical progression of the implications of a world with stacks, synth bodies and AIs.
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Feb 7, 2018 07:04
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Rinkles posted:Rei dying n-teen times failing to down Ortega was like really dumb of her. I guess it was arrogance, but you'd think she'd learn after the first couple of failures. I really feel like she should have been using an assortment sleeves for that.
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Feb 7, 2018 07:08
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Was the 50 years w/o a guest comment from Poe an exaggeration? How'd he pay the rent or upkeep? Wouldn't he get evicted (even if he is the hotel)?
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Feb 7, 2018 07:12
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Rinkles posted:Was the 50 years w/o a guest comment from Poe an exaggeration? How'd he pay the rent or upkeep? Wouldn't he get evicted (even if he is the hotel)? The AI Hotels own themselves outright, they're not just attendants.
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Feb 7, 2018 07:15
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Neddy Seagoon posted:The AI Hotels own themselves outright, they're not just attendants. So he subsisted on what wealth he had? (utilities like electricity presumably aren't free) I didn't quite catch why people avoided ai hotels. Because they were too clingy? Or was that just Poe?
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Feb 7, 2018 07:25
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One more thing: they barely went into what being an Envoy entailed or really meant besides the (occasional) NEO-vision and good intuition. Just spending time with Quell gave him minor super powers? Was this omitted to leave something for the sequel or something the writers weren't certain how to adapt from the book (which I haven't read). I'm pooping a bit on this show, but I liked it. Very watchable. Not enough tv cyberpunk out there.
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Feb 7, 2018 07:37
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Rinkles posted:One more thing: they barely went into what being an Envoy entailed or really meant besides the (occasional) NEO-vision and good intuition. Just spending time with Quell gave him minor super powers? Was this omitted to leave something for the sequel or something the writers weren't certain how to adapt from the book (which I haven't read). I didn't catch until the 8th episode or so that the X-ray vision wasn't a special power, but something his wristband could do. So, it's just some equipment he had that could project images of things behind walls.
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Feb 7, 2018 08:02
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Young Freud posted:I didn't catch until the 8th episode or so that the X-ray vision wasn't a special power, but something his wristband could do. So, it's just some equipment he had that could project images of things behind walls. Oh, I guess I missed that.
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Feb 7, 2018 08:03
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Rinkles posted:Oh, I guess I missed that. Yeah, I'll pinpoint it exactly when I found out when he's hiding out in the jetcar's trunk, he turns his black wristband on, there's a light coming out of it that when viewed from his POV, renders the two Head In The Clouds goons as they approach on the inside of the trunk wall. I too thought it was special powers or just how his intuition worked, but nope, just some fancy gear. I swear the wristband came up at another point I think when he got knocked out by Dimi at Jack It Off, he takes off the band, which I guess allowed for Vernon to find him later.
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Feb 7, 2018 08:09
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