The Application of Descartes Dualism in the Real World
This Altered Carbon is Netflix’s first big move this year, and its goal is HBO’s Western World and GOT. The play is adapted from Richard Morgan's 2002 hardcore cyberpunk novel of the same name. This play is a bit like Blade Runner plus Ghost in the Shell.
The story takes place in the world after hundreds of years. Human consciousness can be digitally stored and transferred to other bodies. The protagonist is a mercenary and rebel with full military value. After being imprisoned for 250 years, he was released on bail to investigate the murder of the richest man on the planet. Since it is an R-rated drama of the Western World and GOT, the degree of the yellow storm can't be low. The headshots and missing shots in the drama are flying around. It is estimated that on average, tens of liters of fake plasma will be used in each episode.
Due to the huge background of the story, the explanations of various concepts are also passed along. Interested audiences here have prepared some backgrounds and explanations of the words in the play, hoping to be helpful to watching the play, but it is a mild spoiler .
Stack : Stack is a device implanted in the head and neck when most people are one year old. Its function is to store a person's memory, consciousness and personality. If a person dies physically, the stack can save the person indefinitely. But if it receives a strong external force or is hit in the head by an energy weapon, the stack will also be destroyed, which is called true death. There are strict legal regulations on stack, including reading, implanting and making. For example, illegally copying stack will face the fate of complete deletion. One of the main backgrounds in the play is that new Catholic believers cannot be legally resurrected due to their beliefs. This has caused many murders against this group. Even if others are killed, they can be resurrected to prove the murderer.
Sleeve : Sleeve is the core concept of this drama. In this world, the human body becomes a skin in the real sense, which can be replaced at will. Most people can choose to replace the sleeve at the end of their lifespan, but most people do not have the money to upgrade their body and must go through the aging process. Therefore, most people do not choose to replace the sleeve multiple times. After all, the pain still exists as the body ages. Only the rich can continue to use the new Sleep, upgrade their bodies, delay aging and so on. For example, the richest man on earth in the play has multiple cloned bodies stored all over the world. A good sleeve is very rare, and cloning is the most ideal, but cloning is not only slow and expensive, so there are limited sources of sleeves, of which the criminal is the main source. The body of the criminal during the sentence will be sold as a sleeve, and the protagonist will be sold. The framed police officer Ryker's body.
Needlecasting : Although humans in the play have colonized multiple planets, they have not developed a way to travel faster than light. The only way to achieve faster than light speed is subspace communication. Needlecasting is the use of a person’s consciousness and memory through subspace data. The center downloads Sleep technology to different locations including other planets.
Meth : Meth here is not the virus in Breaking Bad. It refers to the elites of the society in the play. These people rely on huge wealth and Sleeps to maintain youth and health. Meth here is Methuselah, a character borrowed from the Bible. According to legend, he lived to be 969 years old.
Envoy : Envoy is a group of elite fighters who should be trained for military needs. When ordinary soldiers needlecasting to fight on other planets, they need to adapt to the local climate and unfamiliar bodies for a long time. Envoy pays more attention to spiritual training and psychological training. In the words of martial arts, it only exercises the mind. They are highly sensitive to surrounding things and details. Through the training of Envoy and the enhanced Sleep, they can achieve superhuman physical fitness and environmental awareness, and they can also make correct judgments on human behavior, so that many people mistakenly believe that Envoy can. Read the mind. The protagonist Xiaowu is the only surviving Envoy, and everyone else was washed out in a rebellion.
Poe : He is the manager of the AI hotel where the protagonist lives, and he is also an artificial intelligence. Its prototype is the famous American painting Edgar Alan Poe, and the hotel's name also comes from a poem by Poe, Raven Raven. The actor's image is also somewhat similar to Poe. No one will live in the AI Hotel in the future. The reason is that the hotel’s AI will behave like a crazy predecessor, constantly tracking and harassing customers, because their core code is to protect and retain guests.
The plot of the first season is very compact, the story is constantly unfolding, and several sub-lines outside the main line are also very well designed. Each sub-line is connected to the main line plot in a seemingly unrelated situation. In addition, the best thing about Netflix's drama is that it updates a season every time and does not need to wait for episodes. It also looks more enjoyable.
Altered Carbon is the first work in Richard Morgan's series, followed by two books, Broken Angels and Woken Furies. If nothing goes wrong, it should be no problem for this drama to appear in two or three seasons. The quality of Netflix's dramas is relatively guaranteed, and it is highly recommended to viewers who like this type.
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