The wealthy have also found ways to live forever. In the world of Altered Carbon, scientific progress has enabled human souls to be coded and stored on small disks called cortical stacks, which are embedded into the spine of every infant. If you die, your stack can be removed and placed into a different body, known as a “sleeve.” But the cost is considerable, which means immortality is mostly for the very wealthy. “Meths,” or Methuselahs, even have multiple copies of their bodies placed in storage, while their minds are set to sync automatically to the cloud every few hours. Not everyone wants to be reborn. Catholics, who believe souls go to heaven after death, can change their coding to reject being spun into new bodies.

All this is apparently why when the half-Slavic, half-Japanese character of Takeshi Kovacs wakes up in a new body, 250 years after his death, he’s in the unmistakably Scandinavian form of the actor Joel Kinnaman. Altered Carbon cuts between Kinnaman-as-Takeshi in the story’s present and Takeshi’s birth form, played by Will Yun Lee. Before he died and was essentially placed in cold-storage for a quarter-millennium for acting against the state, Takeshi was an Envoy, a soldier trained to deal with the physical and emotional discombobulation of being constantly “resleeved” into different bodies (the show is vaguer about this than the book). He’s revived by a Meth, Laurens Bancroft (James Purefoy), who offers Takeshi a small fortune and a full pardon for investigating who—temporarily—blew Bancroft’s brains out.

There’s so much happening that the first episode is a whirlwind of worldbuilding, exposition, and saturation in the show’s gloomy, dreamlike aesthetic. Viewers are plunged headlong into the strangeness alongside Takeshi, who stalks through the dystopian world (kind of an unholy mashup of RoboCop, Amsterdam’s red-light district, and Oliver Twist), trying to get oriented. He’s watched closely by a cop, Kristin Ortega (Martha Higareda), and pursued by Bancroft’s wife, Miriam (Kristin Lehman). Takeshi eventually checks into a hotel, the Raven, run by an artificial intelligence named Poe (Chris Conner), the show’s most engaging and multi-dimensional character.

Takeshi also has repeated flashbacks to his former life, when he was initiated into a kind of resistance effort led by Quellcrist Falconer (Hamilton’s Renée Elise Goldsberry). Whatever objections there used to be to stacks seem to have dispelled, even though the world of Bay City is a grim one. Enabled by their immortality, Meths have a callous disdain for human life, watching fights to the death between poorer humans for entertainment (the winner gets an upgraded sleeve). Altered Carbon shares some of its Netflix-mate Black Mirror’s anxiety about the potential atrocities embedded in digitizing souls—a convicted killer is imprisoned in the body of a snake, and a 7-year-old girl is revived in the body of an elderly woman after a hit-and-run because it’s all her parents can afford.