‘Altered Carbon’: What We Want to See in Season 2

Altered Carbon brings the world of Richard Morgan’s novel to life onscreen in a truly awesome way. Mixing film Noir detective tropes with futuristic sci-fi, and adding a healthy dash of anime influence to create a unique blockbuster movie experience in the long-form format of a Netflix original series.

Season One of the show is a pretty cut and dry mystery investigation, but Morgan created a trilogy of novels about his “Envoy” detective hero Takeshi Kovacs, which means there’s plenty more story to be told. Taking details of the sequel novel, “Broken Angels” and combining them with our own wish-list, we have some good ideas of how the Netflix series should continue.

Here’s what we want to see in Altered Carbon Season Two.

Time Jump

Time has nowhere near the limitations in the world of Altered Carbon that it does in the real world; Takeshi Kovacs had been dead for over 200 years when the first storyline took place. Broken Angels jumps to events thirty years after Altered Carbon, and the show has the unique opportunity to be both semi-serialized with its story and characters, and at the same time, somewhat like an anthology. New time period, new rules, new sets of characters for the most part, and a new mystery to solve. Sounds good to us. 

Going Cosmic

The plot of Broken Angels starts on a distant space colony, and moves from there to Mars, and through a portal to a remote location in outer space aboard an adrift Martian warship. That’s a whole lot more world expansion than we got in the first season of the show, and a necessary progression for a sophomore season. Since a lot of the locations would still be represented by interior sets, it wouldn’t be a huge cost increase — just a few more CGI establishing shots. 

The Soul Market

One early scene of Broken Angels takes Takeshi and his new corporate sponsor, Matthias Hand of the Mandrake Corporation, go to a place that sells the stacks of dead people called “The Soul Market,” to buy themselves an elite team of soldiers. A lot of things can change when a book is adapted to the screen, but this is one scene we hope doesn’t get lost in translation.

The New Team

As stated, Takeshi goes looking for an elite team of soldiers for his latest mission, and he ends up finding them. Throughout the course of the harrowing mission to cross a dimensional portal and secure the Martian warship, Takeshi forms a tight bond with the new army he’s leading. Altered Carbon Season One had a plethora of memorable supporting allies for Takeshi, and we’d like to see that trend continue. 

More Ortega

Like we said: Takeshi gets a new crew of characters to aid him, and a new possible love interest in the form an archaeologist who found the Martian portal and ship; however, this being the TV series version, some character continuity between Season One and Two is expected, and Altered Carbon fans definitely want to see more of Martha Higareda’s Detective Ortega. Whether she’s with Kovacs in this version of the story, or leading her own separate storyline on Earth, Ortega needs to return. 

Bigger Action

Altered Carbon Season One had some awesome, violent, and memorably disturbing action sequence moments, but the scale of Broken Angels is much grander, and so the live-action adaptation should follow suit. Altered Carbon set such a blockbuster movie standard for this sci-fi series that it has to top itself with Season Two. 

Quellcrist Falconer

Altered Carbon Season One ended with the reveal that Takeshi’s original love interest and mentor, Envoy leader Quellcrist Falconer, is still “alive,” so to speak… Thinking that his sister Reileen murdered Quellcrist for good in the tragic battle of Stronghold, Takeshi learns in the climax of Season One that Quellcrist has been “backed up,” and Reileen has hidden it away somewhere in the cosmos. Takeshi’s search for Quellcrist needs to be a major subplot of Season Two, one that pays off with the rebel leader’s return, in some form. That would create a major love triangle for Takeshi, Ortega, and Quellcrist, and set Season Three for a major storyline in which Quellcrist (aka stack creator Nadia Makita) tries to bring down the system she created, once and for all. 

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What do you want to see in Altered Carbon Season Two? 

Altered Carbon Season One is now streaming on Netflix.

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