I’ll start by saying I love cyberpunk and film noir, so I am a little shocked and disappointed that I didn’t give this show a chance sooner. I remember seeing advertisements along Santa Monica Blvd that looked like real people encased on the sides of bus stops, but other than that, I wasn’t really sure what it was about.
I watched the first episode a few weeks ago, and I instantly thought it was a lesser version of Dollhouse, and I was incredibly mistaken. I don’t know if one is better than the other, as I love both for different reasons. I do wonder what Dollhouse could have been had it been a Netflix show rather than Fox, but that’s a different topic for a different blog.
The first episode confused me a bit. There was a lot of information to take in, but something I learned from being a Whedon fan (though this is not a Whedon show) is sometimes you have to let a show warm up a little bit, and I found myself hooked by the third episode.
I’m going to try not to spoil anything and just go into the things I really loved about the show. One, I love, love, LOVE Dichen Lachman. I first discovered her in Dollhouse and for some reason, I expected her to just have a side role (don’t ask me why I thought that), but she was pretty integral and I loved her character. I thought the acting, in general, was done really well. I felt I cared for all the characters, be they good, bad or in-between, though aside from Rei (Dichen’s character), my favorite character is Poe, an AI inspired by Edgar Allen Poe with a fascination with humanity.
One of the things that drew me to Dollhouse was the theme of what makes one human, and Altered Carbon also asks this question, though I fell the two shows went about it in different ways. Altered Carbon is definitely more violent and sexual than Dollhouse was (and even if Whedon had made Dollhouse on Netflix, I don’t see a lot of violence and sex being his thing.) In Dollhouse, it is a secret from the world that there are dolls. Dolls are blank slates of people, people who willingly, most of the time, signed away a set amount of time to live as dolls. Who they are is wiped from their body and stored away and they are imprinted with personalities for engagements, which are usually sexual. After the engagement, they are wiped and go back to the infantile doll state. Dollhouse is all about exposing the Dollhouse exists, led by Agent Paul Ballard, played by Tahmoh Penikett, who is also in Altered Carbon. (Sidenote, learning Dichen and Tahmoh were in Altered Carbon is what made me decide to start watching.) Dollhouse is also about the client favorite, Echo, played by Eliza Dushku, starting to remember engagements even after being wiped.
Altered Carbon is more like the Epitaph episodes of Dollhouse. The technology is out there already and widely used and the world has changed. We start with Takeshi Kovacs being killed, and then he wakes up 250 (I believe) years later. Everyone has a slack, which is essentially what makes them who they are, and they can be implanted into sleeves (bodies). So long as the slack remains intact, the person can just go from sleeve to sleeve.
The concept is so fascinating to me because it really questions what makes you, well, you. Is it your body or is it something more. You inevitably get to the question of the soul. Would I still be the exact same person if I were in a different body, and what if that body had originally belonged to someone else? How would that alter my interactions with people? As the show progresses, you learn that Takeshi’s new sleeve is no accident and it does affect how he is treated.
Something else I found fascinating, and both Dollhouse and Altered Carbon touch on this, but I’m hoping maybe Altered Carbon will get a chance to explore it further, is the concept of love in the world full of dolls/sleeves. One example from Altered Carbon, as it is fresher in my mind, is a mom is resleeved, but in a man’s body. She has a husband, and when they reunite, Poe says something about love transcending all, and they do continue their relationship, despite her being cross-sleeved. In Dollhouse, a male doll in imprinted with a female personality (I can’t remember the why at this moment), but in the Dollhouse universe, multiple dolls can be imprinted with the same personality (one of my favorites was episode 4 of season 1, called Gray Hour. Echo and Sierra, Dichen’s character, are imprinted with a personality that reminded me a lot of Faith, my favorite Buffy character.) In Dollhouse it seemed more for comedic effect though. It really makes you, or at least me, think, if you love someone and they come back in a different body or their body alters in some way, would you still love them? (And I would really like to see someone reference that part of the show in an argument for the LGBT community in a paper or something.)
There are two criticisms the show had that I would like to address before I move forward. One was whitewashing and the other was violence, particularly against women. When I first watched the first episode, it did bother me that a man named Takeshi was being played by a white man. I thought if it is all about sleeves not mattering, why not make the sleeve another Asian man? From my understanding, as I did not read the book, and just learned it is based on a book, this is done intentionally, as part of his conflict and coming to terms with being an Asian man in a white man’s body. Also, aside from that, the cast on this show is quite diverse.
As for the violence, there is quite a bit of violence, and quite a bit of it done against women, and lots of naked women (though there were bits of full front naked men, which is quite surprising for an American production.) I don’t want to say it didn’t bother me because violence against women always bothers me, but I felt it was done intentionally as well. There are a lot of sex workers in this world, and they tend to get mistreated, even killed, as so long as their slack is intact, they can be given a new sleeve and continue on. For me, it made the final episode that much more rewarding to see those in power pay for what they had done (again, can’t give too much without spoilers.)
I felt both shows did an interesting job of discussing gender and class. In Dollhouse, though there are male dolls, a majority of the dolls you see are female. In Altered Carbon, though everyone has slacks, the sex workers are mainly female. You don’t see a male one until the final scenes of the finale (I hope it is just the season one finale, and not the end of the series.) In Dollhouse, as it is a secret organization, one must have a lot of money to be a client. In Altered Carbon, it is more about, even though everyone is essentially immortal, there is still a way to divide the haves from the have-nots. The Meths (I don’t know if that was short for something) are wealthy, they live in the sky, above the poor people. It made me think a bit about The Time Machine. They have more wealth than can be imagined, have the best sleeves and even clones of themselves. The show is really about how that wealth mixed with immortality causes them to lose their humanity.
There is also a relationship that felt a bit incestuous to me, but it is hard to explain it without spoilers. I will just say, there is a particular relationship that reminded me of Flowers in the Attic. I saw the film but didn’t read the book. In the film, a group of siblings, two boys, and two girls, are locked in an attic by their mom and become a family unit of sorts. As such, the oldest two, a boy and girl, become the mom and dad to the youngest two. In the book, I believe it leads to an actual romantic and sexual relationship between the two. Anyway, there is a brother-sister relationship, and I felt the sister’s love for her brother was more than just, well, brotherly. She was extremely jealous of any woman he showed interested in, and at one point she is in the sleeve of one of these women. It made her character all the more interesting, and I wonder if it had to do with them being abused and orphaned as children, and as such, having to be the mom and dad, much like the older kids in Flowers in the Attic, but that may be me just reading too much into it.
All in all, I’m glad I watched it, and I’m glad I gave it a second chance, as after watching the first episode the first time, I didn’t think I would watch it again. From what I hear, there is going to be a second season, though Joel Kinnaman may not be in it, despite playing Takeshi Kovacs, the lead character. However, in a show about people being slacks, not the sleeves they inhabit, the entire cast could change if they really wanted to do so.
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