Altered Carbon

ronne said:

This is the major failing of the show to me. I have no idea what they gained by making the Envoys in to Quellist supersoldiers? It just muddles up the story and undermines the entire theme of the rebellion.

The Envoys were the jackboot of the Protectorate, used to put down rebellions like Quells, and were capable of projecting military force across distances previously thought not possible. That made Kovachs defecting a really big fuckin deal, but instead we're stuck with CTAC just being generic stormtroopers?

They also basically gloss over the concept of sleeve sickness in a big way, or just ignore it entirely when convenient so the impact of Envoys is greatly reduced.

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Yeah that and the addition of the sister were pants on head. Takeshi being a Quellist was his dark secret and what made him eventually abandon being an Envoy. That and being tired of having to always kill the evil Space Muslims.

IIRC his Arc was poor street kid gangbanger finds Religion in Quell, decides the philosophy is faggots except the Sun Tzu parts, joins military to GFTO of shithole becomes Spec War then Delta Force, disenchanted by government finds Religion in Quell again, runs into the old zealots says yeah fuck that just as bad, unfucks his origins planet for his own reasons and nopes out.

a_skeleton_03 said:

Some huge departures from the book but not terrible.

The entire first part scavenging was removed and I think coils girl was channeling Quelcrist and not her own sleeve. Then there was the whole part with his old unit and the swamp panthers.

I really hope that I am not mixing up book 2 and 3 though.

Entirely unsure where they go from here though.

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I havent watched S2, but the things you are describing are book 3. Book 2 was mercenary for corps mining martian loot in the middle of a civil war.

j00t said:

i never read the books... i never even heard of them until season 1 came out. i liked it for what it was, but hearing you guys talk about it... it's almost like the show and the book are bizarro version of each other. what you guys talk about an enjoy is vs what the show says an enjoy is... they don't actually seem related at all. the show makes envoys out to basically just be trained super soldiers.

there was an old x-men comic, before ice-man was known to be an omega level mutant... emma frost had to mind control him for some reason and use his powers for him and she was WAY better at using his powers than he was.

that's what the show makes envoys feel like.

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Envoys in the books are super soldiers, highly trained in combat but also diplomacy, politics and psychology, but what makes them 'super human' is they have hyper acute perception and pick up a lot of subliminal cues / body language / unconscious reflexes. it helps them out maneuver in combat but also in deciphering people , finding their motivations and swaying / manipulating them. They arent always 100% consciously aware of all the info they are picking up, it manifest as 'intuition' & 'empathy', like mildly psychic 'spider sense'. In the books Kovacs has epiphanies where all the things that happened go click, lock together and he sees 'the big picture' and then knows how to move forward to the next step.

Folks are afraid of Envoys because the hype is 'they can read minds' that and know 100 ways to kill you. In the books Envoys are not allowed to hold any authority positions outside of the military after service, especially in Politics for fear they would become a Galactic Hitler. The Envoy Corp was shut down hundreds of years before Kovacs was woken up in book 1, and there werent very many of them when it was active, 1 or 2 were sent out at a time on a mission. IIRC biggest group they ever sent out were 5-6 and that was in the middle of a full planetary war to tilts the scale and decide who would win.

The books have a LOT of layers going on in the story. The TV doesnt have anyway to really translate all of it, it would be endless exposition.

Jozu said:

Zapata, could you go into Harlans World, the orbital system and how Konrad was able to bypass the no fly zone?

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In the books the size of aircraft determined whether the alien defense orbitals would fire on them. little 2-3 person choppers were the only things that could fly without setting them off, and even they would occasionally get smoked randomly. There were bald spots on the coverage of the defense web, there is a space port on Harlan's.

I have not watched S2 yet.

Backstory was Harlan's was founded by the Harlan family who descendants still run it from their ivory tower in the sky, they brought in Russians / Japanese to work it . Kovacs home planet. Its a shithole water world with very little resources / industry and a buncha poors ruled over by the first family. Quellchrist Falconer's whole manifesto was about rising up to take down the Harlan's of the galaxy.

a_skeleton_03 said:

From what I remember of book 3 there were a few more envoys on Harlan’s world that he dug up to storm the house where Danica was at the end. They couldn’t fly up to it so had to scale an insane cliff.

Jozu the books just said he found a hole in the defenses and Milsport is under that with a spaceport active only there. You can lift off into orbit but you can’t traverse the planet flying. A very small chopper can do some stuff like Zapatta said but it’s beyond risky. It doesn’t explain how he found it, I think we might be made to believe that the elders allowed him into the planet at first but then he killed them. It’s a bit hazy for me I just know it wasn’t super detailed or all that important.

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In the books Kovacs searches out a local legend (now part of a cult that only lives in VR) who long ago free climbed the Harlan spire in protest and he tells him the path he used to summit El Capitan.

a_skeleton_03 said:

Yeah that’s right, they kind of mixed up the Harlan search with that in this season.

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Did Kovacs get the 'Gecko' sleeve in the show?

edit- I guess not if they left out the Decomm teams and the climb.

wamphyr said:

One stupid question that keeps bugging me...
How is the hotel AI able to interact with the physical things like shotgun, glass, bottles, etc... ?

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Doesnt in the book, also in the book the Hotel Poe isnt Edgar Allan. It's Jimi Hendrix.

a_skeleton_03 said:

Wolf one only, wedge protectorate tech.

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Isnt that the Book 2 sleeve? when the rest of his team was wearing Maoris because of Radiation resistance and he didnt want to swap out of the top tier combat sleeve? Also the Wedge sleeve in book 2 gave him command authority on that planet vs. most of the local military forces. So he didnt want to 'drop the rank'