Altered Carbon

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Takeshi Kovacs (Joel Kinnamen) in "Altered Carbon"
"Altered Carbon" is a 2018 Netflix science fiction series. There are 10 episodes in season one.

Like so many other shows about the future (e.g. "Blade Runner"), it portrays a human society with highly advanced technology but vast gaps between rich and poor, and plenty of brutality and corruption. There are a lot of creeps in this future world!

The setting is the year 2384 and the key premise of the show is that it is possible to store a human's consciousness in a device called a "stack" that can be inserted into another body. The wealthy have disposable bodies called "sleeves" ready to accept their consciousness whenever their current body needs replacing. Effectively they can live forever unless their stack is destroyed with no backup, referred to as "real death". Given their enormous wealth and longevity these people have great power, and even the police follow their wishes. The main plot is the investigation of the attempted murder of one of the wealthiest men, which involves the reviving and hiring of a mercenary who lived 250 years earlier to find the killer.

The show has plenty of nudity and violence. Probably most disturbing are the scenes where the protagonist is being tortured in a virtual world where one feels all the pain and suffering but nothing physical is happening to one's actual body. So the victim can be tortured to death then "revived" and the torture continued all over again indefinitely. Fortunately there are not too many scenes like this. There is a lot of artificial intelligence and virtual worlds involved, some of it quite cleverly done. And because anyone's consciousness can inhabit a "sleeve", you can't really tell who someone is by looking at them or who you can trust.

The show is well done and engaged my attention, despite some of the gruesome parts (which you can safely fast forward through if too disturbing). You can read more about the show at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Carbon_(TV_series)

Other recent movies or TV series I've watched can be found here.

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