Altered Carbon mixes sex and horror with shocking ease.
This is not a show for the squeamish. For every naked nipple and full-frontal there is another scene of relentlessly brutality. The main image above isn’t even torture, it’s a rebirth moment and sets the tone for how much everyone constantly suffers.
Nowhere more so than in Episode 4, which centres on a very prolonged interrogation scene where Takeshi Kovacs is endlessly tortured to death in virtual reality and then revived before it starts all over again.
Everything imaginable is done to him, so how could it possibly have been worse? Read the sample from the book below and you will see why it was impossible to show on the screen.
In the show Takeshi has his legs chopped off, blow torches applied and revolting wriggly alien insents inserted into his wounds.
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The book changes the scene in one crucial and unbearable way. Kovacs is put into a menstruating woman’s body for the torture and dreadful things are done to him/her.
The show’s creator Laeta Kalogridis explained: “The whole point of that [scene] in the book is, I believe the quote is: ‘Women are the race.’ Men are just f***ing fighting machines. We have more nerves per square inch, we have heightened pain tolerance, we last longer. And the point of torturing a woman is that she feels more and she endures longer.”
“You can’t get that across [on television], there’s just no way. It’s going to turn into some torture porn thing, and I wasn’t comfortable with that… That isn’t something I wanted to make. And if I PC’d myself, I seriously do not care.”
Read the following small extract from the scene in Richard K Morgan’s 2002 novel and you will see why.
WARNING GRAPHIC CONTENT
ALTERED CARBON ORIGINAL SCENE EXTRACT:
“There’s no kind of conditioning in the known universe that can prepare you for having your feet burnt off. Or your nails torn out.
“Cigarettes stubbed out on your breasts. A heated iron inserted into your vagina. The pain. The humiliation. The damage.”
It seems even the Netflix series has its limits, after all.
ALTERED CARBON IS AVAILABLE NOW ON NETFLIX