In Altered Carbon‘s second season, Poe’s arc becomes even more poignant as it is pushed to the background: suffering from a terminal disease passed to him at the end of season one, Poe finds himself contending with his own mortality, in a way that neatly parallels the use/discard/forget relationship society currently has with its technology. Though Altered Carbon certainly put Kovacs story forward as the primary narrative, Poe’s realization that sentient AI and humans both seek similar ends (meaningful connections) gave him a deep humanity most of its flesh-and-blood characters sorely lacked, in their never-ending quest to thrust and stab their way through centuries of endless, superficially explored conflict.
Mixed metaphors aside, Poe’s journey through season one – becoming a digital therapist to a traumatized young woman, and finding meaning in the value of friendship, even with objectively shitty people – was more rewarding than Kovac’s nonsensical trip through his 300-year old past. After all, all coding deteriorates over time – with fresh body sleeves awaiting them and their workers for centuries on end, who has a need to dream of electric sheep anymore? When we first meet Poe, he is a forgotten relic of old times, a time before stacks meant the end of death for the ultra-rich, rendering the fantastical nature of AI capabilities utterly pointless.
ALTERED CARBON REVIEW SERIES
The plight of Edgar Poe, from the pilot to “Broken Angels,” the second season finale, is undeniably the most emotionally rewarding, ambitious arc of the series – and with Chris Conner, also the show’s most affecting, moving performance. I found myself desperately wishing for Altered Carbon to leave its world of endless lives, satellite back ups, and shapeless political revolutions behind, to focus more on the most interesting element of its world: the AIs who thought themselves the force of the future, only to be discarded by humanity as yet another resource to be wasted and forgotten. To find the true genius and beauty of Altered Carbon, one has to look in between all of that nonsense, abandoning every unlovable meat sack at the heart of the series to revel in the heartbreaking story of technology left behind, in the form of the beleaguered, terminally ill AI known as Edgar Poe. However, to find it, one must look beyond nearly every foregrounded aspect of the series, past the forgettable tale of Meths and Envoys, the incoherent mythology of stacks and sleeves and DHF backups, and the underwhelming presence of protagonist Takeshi Kovacs – which, unfortunately, Altered Carbon‘s second season becomes more and more infatuated with, even as its central narrative undercuts its dramatic stakes time and time again. Deep within Altered Carbonlies the true heir to the neo-noir cyberpunk genre American television’s spent the last generation of science fiction desperately searching for.
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