Last night, The Culture Tsar finally finished watching the final episodes of the Netflix series Altered Carbon. After providing a few first impressions last week, it seemed only proper to render a final verdict on the show.
The last few episodes are pretty jam packed, with a ton of stuff happening in rapid succession. Although it all comes together in the end, it’s easy to get lost if you’re not paying close attention. The final act features a lot of action and reversals of fortune that provide big spectacle without overwhelming the characters too much. Some of the twists and turns are a little too convenient, but it’s nothing outside the bounds we’re used to seeing in movies and television. All of the major questions and conflicts are resolved, and the (surviving) characters get satisfying send-offs. While the show does enough to lay the groundwork for another season, it wraps up the story tightly enough for this season to stand on its own.
But enough of this measured, objective criticism. You want to know whether the show’s worth the ten-hour investment. The Culture Tsar didn’t see anything in the last three episodes to fundamentally alter his initial impressions. Altered Carbon is good, but not great. Strip away the top tier production values and you’re left with a fairly boilerplate sci-fi story that tapdances around some compelling ideas, but is ultimately more interested in the sort of violent action and despicable villainy we’ve seen for decades in various works of film noir.
Something about the show just doesn’t add up. All the ingredients are there, but it feels like there’s something amiss with the recipe. After watching the entire season, The Culture Tsar felt strangely unsatisfied. While the show leans a little too hard on the shock value of violence and sex, its excesses didn’t rise above the level of mild annoyance. The answer had to be something deeper, something more fundamental to the show’s character.
After thinking this over for a while, The Culture Tsar might be getting closer to an answer.
The central theme of the show is the interplay between immortality and morality. Time and time again we’re shown examples of how the wealthiest and longest lived members of this society have lost touch with their essential humanity. They subject those weaker than themselves to myriad physical, sexual, and psychological abuses. Freed from the threat of death (“the great equalizer” as one character calls it), these immortals fashion themselves as demigods, even attracting worshippers willing to do their bidding. The show clearly wants us to conclude that living forever is a bad idea, that it robs us of something that makes us human.
What’s fascinating is that no one suggests at any time that the real problem here is not immortality, but wealth.
Altered Carbon is hardly the first work of fiction to draw the connection between living forever and the decline of human empathy. But the fact remains that Altered Carbon’s story would still work even if none of the villainous characters were immortal. They abuse people without fear of consequences because they’re rich and powerful. Immortality is simply the mechanism by which they accumulate that wealth and power. To its credit, the show does make mention of this at several points, but it doesn’t posit any alternative outcomes. Immortality is bad, it seems, because it allows the rich and powerful to become more rich and powerful. Based on this logic, the ideal outcome would be to eliminate immortality so that the wealthy can only abuse and exploit the masses for a single lifetime.
In the end, immortality is just another market investment that keeps paying out dividends. There’s no exploration of what it might be possible for humans to achieve if they had multiple lifetimes to develop and reach those goals. In a society where people can live forever, you would expect a variety of new ideas to develop in order to deal with this reality. What does immortality do to spirituality? To philosophy? The show deals with this a bit, but only in the very narrow context of a Catholic Church movement that ultimately serves the demands of the plot.
The show does conclude that immortality diminishes the satisfaction derived from wealth, but it posits that the natural response to this is to pursue sexual depravity and the primal thrill of violence. There’s never any question that, perhaps, the accumulation of wealth and power is spiritually unsatisfying. The show doesn’t present any alternatives, such as immortals who might cast aside the vapid materialism that drives endless capitalist consumption in favor of a quiet life of contemplation or altruism. Instead, it gives us a world in which humanity has overcome its greatest challenge and then decided to spend the rest of eternity on a drunken bender at the local mall because people are fundamentally hedonistic consumers forever locked in a Social Darwinian status struggle. This, the show seems to argue, is why we can’t have nice things.
Maybe that’s the point. Maybe that’s the reason Altered Carbon’s present day is almost identical to the world the main character left behind 250 years earlier. There’s an easy case to be made that immortality leads to entrenched power structures committed to stifling social, artistic, and technological development unless they can profit from it. But the show doesn’t seem to make that argument. It instead takes for granted our present day capitalist mode of consumption and assumes that without death to level the playing field, the future will just be a more extreme version of what we have now. Altered Carbon might have been more interesting had it explored the ways in which immortality could upend our assumptions about social competition, wealth, and capitalism rather than simply reinforce them.
But at the end of the day, this show wasn’t really interested in big ideas. Immortality was a plot device that facilitated the story, not the basis of a philosophical thought experiment. If anything, the show is a bit retrograde in its thinking. It concludes that immortality is a bad thing to be either tolerated or done away with rather than exploring how it could reshape human existence. Had the show taken a bite out of some of these questions, it might have found the legs to help it endure as classic piece of sci-fi storytelling.
As it stands, Altered Carbon is a good show that you’ll probably enjoy.
And then you’ll probably forget about it…