Greetings earthlings!
Welcome to the Madqueen Show!
I am your host the MadQueen
On today's menu, we have a pajama rant that's been largely requested, the review of the
Netflix series Altered Carbon
This video is going to have two parts, I'm going to start without spoilers and at some
point, I will warn you very clearly that the spoilers will start for you to stop watching
in case you didn't watch the series
This also goes for the comments, if you're leaving a comment with spoilers please label
the spoilers appropriately and hide the spoiler, so everybody can discuss this without being spoiled
And get comfortable, because this is going to be long
Altered Carbon is the new Cyberpunk Series by Netflix and, in case you're not a usual
suspect in my channel, because if you are you hear about Cyberpunk every week, so you
know what Cyberpunk is
Cyberpunk is a subgenre of Science Fiction that was popularized in
the 80s by the writers Wiliam Gibson, author of the Sprawl Trilogy, and Mike Pondsmith,
author of the roleplaying game Cyberpunk
This genre talks about dystopic futures that are dark and grimy, and explores the relation
that humanity has with such an advanced technology and with their own humanity, and how the definition
of being human changed with this advanced technology
All this set in a background filled with incredibly
powerful structures of power, usually Megacorporations, that rule the world
As a cyberpunk work, these are also the core themes of Altered Carbon, you can't be cyberpunk
only with the aesthetics, and the series explain the story of a distant future, where humanity
found the way to transfer human conscience to a small device called stack, in a way that
the body is no longer considered an essential part of the self anymore, as if you have enough
money to afford it you can switch bodies, that in this universe are called sleeves,
and live forever
Not everybody in this future society is happy that this possibility exists, there are two
groups of people described in this universe that are against it, the religious people
and the envoys
The people of faith are against this practice and they don't want to be resleeved when
they die or being brought back in a virtual reality environment for whatever reason, so
they pushed a law, the law 653, that works according to the beliefs of their religions:
you have one life and one life only, and once you die that's it, you are left alone
if that's what you want, so baptism in here has a new meaning: if you're are registered
as a religious person this law applies to you but if you're not then you can be brought
back over and over
And the second group that is against this practice are the envoys, that are neither
happy with the existence of the soul transfer, but in their case, they don't have enough
with laws and have more illegal ways of doing things
This second group of people is the one that the main protagonist, Takeshi Kovacs belongs
to, he's the last of the envoys as all were wiped out a centuries ago, and even sharing
the vision of the envoys Kovacs sees himself resleeved in a future where he's summoned
to solve a murder
So, Angela Lansbury had a kid with Mike Pondsmith
And we find in this series all the typical cyberpunk archetypes: we have the solo, the
cop, the netrunner, the corporate, the nomad, and by far my favourite character Edgar Allan
Poe, named and characterized after the 19th century writer who was obsessed with this
illness which name I can't remember where you seemed dead but you weren't
It's very relevant that a character like this is in this story, as Poe the writer was
an author whose core themes were death and the impermanence and uncertainty of life,
and in general had a philosophy that was the opposite to the values of the future society
that these series depict and to what the character Poe is but it's close to what he wants to achieve
Poe, the character inside the series, is an AI that wants to be human in a universe where
there's not an exact definition of what being human is anymore
As he's not restrained by reality or his own body as he's a virtual being, he's
immortal like the rulers of this society, the Meths, but while Meths' immortality
is seen as something miraculous, Poe's immortality is taken for granted
Under a storytelling point of view, one of the things I liked about this series is how
they manage to explain a future society that is so different to ours without falling into
the typical thing of making all explanations too obvious an unnatural
Even the little introduction in the first episode, that explains how the stack work,
sounds natural, I was afraid of that before I started watching it, I though they were
going to use the typical and topical literary device of having the main character that comes
from a universe that is very different to the one where the story is set, so this character
needs to be constantly explained about this universe, like they did in Futurama, for instance,
where Fry is an element from a distant past and the constant explanations about how this
universe work are natural, because it's normal to explain everything to a newcomer,
I thought that because in the trailer you see Kovacs being born in his new sleeve, but
fortunately the universe where the old Kovacs comes from works the same way as the universe
where the action takes place
and I was happy about that
Also because as they don't spend the whole series giving you spoon after spoon like a
baby for you to understand the universe there are some things that are not fully explained
and are kinda open to interpretation like the mysticism of the Envoys and where the
action does really take place
And here comes the part with spoilers, so SPOILER ALERT
WATNING!
if you didn't watch the series please come after you watch it
The exploration of the meaning of life and death, what is humanity and the relation between
this humanity with spiritual thoughts are core Cyberpunk themes that in here are very well explained
The general mysticism is something that is not excessively explained, again, spoon by
spoon is not appreciated, thank you
so in one hand we have the most obvious mysticism
in the shape of the religious characters of the series, Ortega's mother who is a Christian
for instance, is one side of this obvious mysticism and the Phantom would be on the
other, both believe in deities but for Christians the deity is their god and for the Phantom
the deities are the people who are rich enough to be constantly resleeving themselves so
they can live forever, but they don't have any kind of superpower like the Christian
god does, the only miracle that they can do is living forever
But differently to "regular gods", the Meths can communicate and give answers to
prayers, I don't know with what or how can they give answers to such prayers, because
as I said they don't have superpowers and can't grant miracles to anybody
But we'll come back to that later
Then there are two more subtle mysticisms, in one hand we have the envoys, who have "mystic
superpowers" like the envoy intuition or incredibly high reflexes that would be closer
to more philosophical religions like the Buddhism, where you need training to achieve this superior self
And this series gives a very clear message of what do they consider
to be the "good" mysticism, as it's explained in a scene in the last episode that I loved
It's beautiful, Miriam
Stunning
I can't believe that I am looking at the fossil of an actual Elder
It makes you wonder if memories of Elder civilization are what gave us the idea for angels
And I saw that like "Uh?" it really made me want to read the book that this series
is based on to see if this is developed in the book, because it's really interesting
because when they mentioned Elder Civilization before
what I thought they meant was what humans were before the stack was invented,
but obviously this fossil is not human at all, so either they see the Elder civilization
as a whole, or we're talking about an extra terrestrial civilization, in both cases the
meaning still works: this fossil is framed between symbols of mysticism, in one hand
it's hanging from a cross, symbol of Christianity and in the other, when we see the reverse
angle, the floor has a zodiac decoration, the western Mesopotamian zodiac which, by
the way, as a religion were the archenemies of Christians and Hebrews, and that gives
a plus to this angle-reverse angle moment
In this scene Miriam says that the memories of past civilization, looking at this animal,
may be what later evolved as a notion of Angels, symbolizing this way the first systems of
religion in humanity where people worshipped powerful elements of nature like the sun,
or powerful animals, like we see for instance in Ancient Egipt or in the Aztec religion
In this universe, the universe of Altered Carbon
the powerful elements of nature are the Meths, the immortals, so they
are very comfortable with their condition of "gods" to be worshipped, until police
breaks in to say all aloud something that the series has been telling you all along:
I'm sorry, but you're no gods, you're just another version of fascism, you think
of yourselves as the chosen ones, but you're not
And, by the way, you're under arrest, as the mere humans you are
There's a different thing regarding this transhumanist approach that shocked me a lot
and made me realize at what point we're at regarding the evolution of the Cyberpunk
genre, because this is a genre of the 80s and in one hand we can take for granted that
the new Cyberpunk works are going to show a more evolved version of technology, that's
pretty obvious, but not only that, also another evolved vision of transhumanism
See, the original cyberpunk was written more than a decade before the internet was popularized
and everybody was connected, this technology at the 80 was newborn and, as everything that
is in the future and not in the past, was full of possibilities, and there were lots
and lots of speculation of what this net would mean for humanity
The cyberpunk approach expected humanity to transcend their physical body, because you
would have, in one hand, your physical self and in the other your virtual self, that would be more importantand
and your virtual self would be totally detached from physical peculiarities such as race and gender,
because in the Cyberpunk universes race and gender is more obsolete than fax machines
And that's literal
But we're two years away from Cyberpunk 2020 and in the point we're at, race and
gender are so important that even discussing it is considered controversial, the digital
utopia of the 80s is dead, this internet full of possibilities where we would be allowed
to travel places and to be united as a whole turned to be a battlefield where people are
so tied to the physical attributes that they think of them as a part of what defines them
as a person, which is contrary to the original Cyberpunk philosophy, and before I go on,
I just want to make clear that this is not a judgmental perspective, I am not judging
if it's bad or good to be tied to your physical attributes and consider them part of your
identity, I'm just comparing it to the vision that Cyberpunk authors had about that in the 80s
But, as I said, we're living the Cyberpunk future, the original Blade Runner is set in
2019, and the future of Back to the Future was in 2015, so we're living in an alleged
sci-fi universe with no flying cars, I'm so disappointed about that
So, we're already living in this future and humanity is still so attached to their
physical features, and their identity and thus their digital self are so attached to them
This is something that is discussed under a Cyberpunk point of view in, for instance,
the original Ghost in the Shell, under a Cyberpunk but also under a very critical point of view
In the near future - corporate networks reach out to the stars, electrons and light flow though the universe
The advance of computerisation, however, has not yet wiped out nations and ethnic groups
but here in Altered Carbon is something that is depicted totally
unbiased, it has a more neutral point of view
In one hand we have that people is very attached to the sleeve they were born into, and people
who's not, people who want to keep their gender identity and people who really doesn't
give a shit about that
People who build clones of themselves to always look exactly the same and people who are happy
to put their stack in the first body they can lay their hands on as long as it's healthy
In the case of Takeshi Kovacs, he's Japanese, but this is not part of his identity, he doesn't
feel uncomfortable being reesleved in a western body, while her sister, who is also Japanese,
the first thing that she wants to do is putting his brother in a "less gaijin body"
So this new Cyberpunk assumes that humanity didn't totally transcend their physical
attributes as they still consider them part of their identity, in opposition to what Cyberpunk
was in the 80s, even if they have the possibility to constantly switch bodies and to be whatever
they want, there's still an attachment to their original body that prevents them to
embrace the constant physical changes that this new society allows
So, in here, there's a part of mankind that is completely OK with evolving to this and
some other that are still reluctant, and what these series depict is that the ones that
are reluctant seem to be the majority
So, in general, I liked Altered Carbon a lot with regards of structural themes, but not
that much when we go to the development of such
For instance, I found really annoying that writers were constantly forgetting that Ortega
had a cyberenhanced arm, or she was a lot of times making facepalming decisions that
were totally contrary to how they described the character, but this series talk about
a lot more things that what the plot describes and I liked that a lot, I'm not going to
put a number to this "like" because I just don't believe in ratings, but in general
terms I liked it a lot and I'm also glad to see that Cyberpunk, that is a genre that
I adore is now on trend, we have this, we have Electric Dreams based on Philip K. Dick
stories, and we have another series which name I can't remember now that I was told
about shortly ago
I can't remember, but at one point I will, and if it's Cyberpunk we'll talk about it
Well, folks, thanks for watching, don't forget to leave a comment and let me know
your thoughts about Altered Carbon, we also created a new channel in our discord server
called "Altered carbon – Spoilers" to discuss this series in a more agile way than
YouTube comments, you're going to find the link to this server in the description
And we can meet there
See you in next videos and Stay Being Amazing
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