Netflix's Altered Carbon is fascinated with the idea of bodies -- we see them as weapons, as commodities and, ultimately, as disposable. This is encapsulated in Takeshi Kovacs, a former military operative turned rebel, who wakes up 250 years after his “death” in a body that isn’t his own in order to solve the murder of one of the world’s richest men, Laurens Bancroft. The twist here -- well, one of them -- is that Takeshi, who was born an Asian man, is put into a white body. In the new Netflix series, this new body -- called a “sleeve” -- is played by Swedish actor Joel Kinnaman.

He enters a world full of debauchery, where the rich -- called “Meths” -- can live forever and spend the centuries engaging in violent, sadistic and often fatal sex acts. They make their money through the torture industry, and there's a brothel in the clouds that allows them to live out their sickest fantasies, most of which include killing sex workers, because their sleeves are believed to be as replaceable as condoms.

Without context, these are all questionable choices. To literally whitewash a story and include various scenes of sexual assault, gratuitous nudity, and violence towards women and people of color seems immediately tone deaf, given our current cultural conversation.

However, these are all key points in the source material, written by Richard K. Morgan and published in 2002. They’re addressed to varying degrees, some successfully and some not, but all are included in the text as part of the world Morgan is building, which renders accusations of whitewashing invalid. So the question becomes whether the Netflix production should’ve done away with some of the story’s more problematic elements, since the series was obviously given license to take liberties, or whether Morgan’s choices are so integral to the plot as to be untouchable.

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A lot of the first Altered Carbon novel is uncomfortable to read now. What was probably crafted with a pulp intent often comes off as cheesy and exploitive due to how little Morgan seems to care about bodies that aren’t our main character’s.

He writes women as if he’s internally ranking each one by sexual attractiveness. People of color are reduced to minor characters or unnamed victims. Any points the book might want to make about the state of the body in a postmodern age are lessened by Morgan's tendency towards objectification. Early on, when Tak meets Laurens’ wife Miriam Bancroft, he mentions her breasts three times in the space of three pages. In other conversations with Laurens, the lives of others are also relegated to bodily excretions and other physical attributes.

Morgan might be attempting to make a point about the way this civilization views women, but it doesn't stop him from falling into sexist cliches. The identity of Takeshi’s new sleeve is actually one of the many mysteries that he must solve in the cyberpunk neo-noir. It also forms a part of his internal struggle, as he is constantly put into bodies that don’t belong to him. This is simplified in the Netflix show, but there are multiple points in the book where Takeshi -- or Tak as he is called -- is put purposefully into “weaker” bodies.

In an extensive torture scene in the book, Tak’s consciousness is transferred into the body of a young woman of color that not only seeks to discombobulate him, but to make him more defenseless. Even worse are the things that a torturer can and will do to a woman, such as inserting a heated iron into her vagina or stubbing out cigarettes on her breasts. In the show, Tak remains in Kinnaman’s “sleeve,” thereby sparing viewers from a gratuitous scene of a woman being violated -- one of the most responsible changes the series makes.

The series goes to some lengths to give its female characters and people of color more agency than the source material, but stops short of truly grappling with the ways in which race and gender shape our experiences.

Our main entry point to these plot threads are scenes in which we explore Kovacs’ life through flashback, and therefore in his original body, played by Will Yun Lee. When we first meet Tak, he’s in a sleeve played by Byron Mann, who makes several memorable appearances, but it's Yun Lee's portrayal that really gives us a sense of who Tak is, and why his heritage and family are so important to him. In episode 7, Kinnaman barely appears, allowing us to focus on Tak's backstory, including the fact that he hails from a planet that was colonized by Slavic and Japanese settlers, giving him a very specific childhood experience.

Morgan purposefully chose to specify that his hero of Japanese-Slavic descent is put into the body of a Caucasian man in the first book, so you have to wonder how much it would have changed the story if Kinnaman's role had gone to a black, Asian or Latino actor instead.

Showrunner Laeta Kalogridis said that she felt it was important to maintain the author’s vision while also giving more screen time to the non-white actors.

“I did not want to violate that paradigm [from the book], because that is what the book is and it does actually matter,” Kalogridis told io9. “But one of the things I had the best time doing is—because he’s had multiple sleeves before then—I did something that I’m almost 100 percent sure nobody has ever done before. You see this character in three different bodies: Two of them are Asian.”

But show Tak has few, if any, internal struggles regarding his body or identity, which renders a lot of the race-switching toothless. The closest we get to self-examination is a brief moment in the first episode when he looks at his new reflection in the back of a medical tray and lets out a blood-curdling scream. But the fact that he’s in a vastly different body than his own is mostly ignored, since his new sleeve is also a capable fighter and physically intimidating. For a series that wanted to put the spotlight on diverse perspectives, it seems to forget its own main character.

Despite this shortcoming, Kinnaman’s Tak is surrounded by people of color, and Kalogridis purposefully gives more screen time to previously throwaway characters from the books, specifically Vernon Elliott (Ato Essandoh) and his daughter Lizzie (Hayley Law). Both barely make a mark in the book’s plot, but become integral to the show's arc, and serve as a treatise about violence begetting violence. Lizzie's journey is also one of reclaiming her agency, as she slowly grows into a woman who wants to revenge on the men who basically killed her. Morgan doesn't specify the characters’ ethnicity in the novel, but given that casting decisions usually default to white actors, it’s refreshing that Kalogridis chose to cast the roles with black stars instead.

All of the important women in Tak's life are played by actresses of color, too: Tak's begrudging partner and eventual love interest Kristin Ortega (Martha Higareda) is a proud Latina struggling with her religion. Then there’s Tak’s former Envoy leader and mentor Quellcrist Falconer (Renee Elise Goldsberry) and his sister Reileen (Dichen Lachman), whose roles were significantly expanded from Morgan's original story: in the novels, Quellcrist is a combination of two characters, while Reileen is just a mob boss from Tak’s past, not a relative. There’s no shortage of representation in the series, which means Kalogridis isn’t simply paying lip service to inclusivity.

Altered Carbon: Season 1 Photos 20 IMAGES

However, there are still troubling politics on display throughout the series. Altered Carbon supposedly takes place in a post-racial future, where the existence of sleeves dilutes the importance of the original body, but a huge contingent of the elite are noticeably light-skinned. Laurens and Miriam Bancroft, the two white Meths that hire Tak, are supposed to have perfect bodies. Miriam specifically inhabits a blonde and blue-eyed sleeve that is literally a sex object (she emits spores that make men horny, and in the book, she’s mostly identified by how much Tak loves her breasts). There is a woman of color in their employ -- Oumou Prescott (Tamara Taylor) -- but she is constantly striving to reach their level, while they consider her to be “the help.”

Beyond racial politics, the story also hinges on a seemingly inherent need to inflict violence on women. While the series includes several narratives where a female character is able to fight back against her oppressors, it still revels in women’s bodies in ways that glorify gore and titillation. When Tak goes to a brothel and meets up with a sex worker named Anemone, she’s mostly breasts and jewels. When he goes back and finds she’s been brutally murdered, she’s still only that, and her body is displayed in a way that invites you to admire her, even after she’s dead.

This establishes a world where, even 250 years in the future, women are still victims of powerful men, which could’ve been a timely allegory if the trope was explored with any depth, especially in a noir-inspired work. To argue that violence shouldn’t exist in fiction at all is ridiculous, but it works best when it’s driven by character decisions, instead of being used as eye candy or to shock the audience.

There’s a scene where Kristin is fighting off multiple naked, female clones in an extended sword battle, which adds nothing to the scene or the ongoing narrative beyond giving viewers a chance to ogle the actress (and wonder how difficult the scene was to shoot). It’s gratuitous and distracting at best, and exploitative at worst, undercutting Kalogridis' apparent desire to give her female characters more agency. Was it important to turn Miriam into a sex object that tempts Tak to a ridiculous fantasy sex island, or would it have been more subversive to explore her deep-rooted insecurities and feelings of powerlessness as a female Meth, since the story is ostensibly about the ways in which women are seen as disposable in this culture regardless of their wealth?

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Kalogridis does acknowledge that there are issues with the book, such as with the aforementioned torture scene, and explains why she tried to create more roles for people of color in various interviews.

“We actually expanded Kovacs' background from what’s in the book so I could cast three other Asian actors, and they’re playing parts that are very well fleshed out,” she tells Entertainment Weekly, when discussing the accusations of whitewashing the show has (wrongly) faced. “I’m very sensitive to whitewashing as a concern, and very much in support of the movement that’s trying to course-correct the whitewashing problem in Hollywood.”

In this way, the show does a lot to differentiate itself from its source material and even ventures to “fix” some of the more outdated elements from the book, but some of those changes are only skin deep, rather than actively interrogating and dismantling the tropes of the genre.

Did Kalogridis have to keep Tak’s sleeve white when his cognitive dissonance is never really explored? Was it really necessary to display female bodies in such overtly sexualized ways, rather than the matter-of-fact way the male characters were filmed? Adaptations have a lot of leeway to change the source material to fit the new medium and the time in which they’re produced, so it would’ve been nice to see this carbon altered just a little further.

For more on Altered Carbon, check out our Season 1 review , and for an alternative perspective, read our op-ed on why the series is worth your patience