In the distant future, human consciousness can be digitized and downloaded into different bodies. The story follows specially trained 'Envoy' soldier Takeshi Kovacs, who is downloaded from an off-world prison and into the body of a disgraced cop at the behest of Laurens Bancroft, a highly influential aristocrat.
The sheer amount of imagining, both borrowed and original, accumulates into a vast, dirty world and gives Altered Carbon the feel of a proper cyberpunk novel: big, baggy, ambitious, trashy, funny, gruesome, clever, cheesy, and hyperactive.
Every twist of the convoluted and ultimately unsatisfying plot puts Kovacs, and his combative police officer partner Kristin Ortega, into gruesome situations that edge into torture porn.
It doesn't matter if Altered Carbon is a homage of a rip-off. The only thing that matters is that regardless of what it wants to be perceived as, it fails at the two key things: Being thought provoking and entertaining.
If you can get past that violence, or even through it, there's much to savor. Morgan's novel has been turned into a phantasmagoria of sights, sounds and details.
Big issues of body, mind, identity and technology shuffle around the "Altered Carbon" universe, but the show often drags its feet in order to fill its individual episodes' running times.
