The Noir Fiction genre, in its own right, is born of anxiety and self-destruction. I know a lot of you haven't watched Black Sails (simply because not a lot of people watched Black Sails in general), but what Altered Carbon did was similar - just on a smaller, seasonal scale. That's when everything started syncing up as one full, connected saga. Side quest: Black Sails is one of my favorite shows of this decade, but it didn't start getting "great" until Season 2 when it chose to fill in the main character's backstory. The final three chapters are very different from the rest, but also immensely satisfying. It took a risk by waiting until the seventh episode, "Nora Inu," and an even bigger risk by having that episode change, essentially, what the entire story had been up until that point. The show could have given us Kovacs' story right up front. I won't go into full spoilers here, but I will write a little about structure. Everything that you've been watching so far that seems unconnected. You caught a glimpse of it in the fourth episode, "Force of Evil," when he was being tortured over and over again in virtual and had to remember his training from Quellcrist Falconer (Renée Elise Goldsberry), but in the final four episodes of the show, Kovacs' history - *slight spoilers* - is revealed to be the key to everything. But here, the bulk of what makes Altered Carbon's back half so much better is that it contains Kovacs' backstory. Now, it's easy enough to figure "Well, of course, a mystery show will get better toward the end because that's when you'll start getting the answers." And that's definitely true. The second half of Altered Carbon was great (I say as someone who didn't read the book and is not aware of what may have been "altered" here). Everyone we met was kind of a nihilist a-hole, but there was still enough to keep me pushing forward. Also, the series was beautiful, bloody, and had a murder mystery at the heart of it. So what kept me going? Well, I love the Blade Runner aesthetic (and yes, Altered Carbon borrows from it as well as a lot of other sci-fi) and I dig future noir. Bizarre names, hinky corporations, tech-y terminology, muddled history - it was all either being explained to Joel Kinnaman's buff, glowering Takeshi Kovacs or being casually spoken about by those in the know (meaning I had to decipher via context). It wasn't like Inception - which is a movie I love but also one where 80% of the dialogue is explaining rules - but there was still a lot to mentally manage if you weren't absorbing it all at once, in a binge, and were just checking in every so often.
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