Altered Carbon and Avenue 5

Avenue 5 is a luxurious passenger ship owned by eccentric oligarch (and passenger) Herman Judd (played by Josh Gad) and it’s at the end of its pleasure cruise, heading back to Earth. A malfunction on the ship causes it to go off course, meaning it will now take three years to get home to earth. The Captain, Ryan Clark (Hugh Laurie) tries to figure out a way to manage the situation BUT he was originally hired solely for optics -  to reassure passengers and provide a pleasant sense of security -  not to captain a ship, a fact he initially hides from Judd, engineer Billie McEvoy (Lenora Crichlow), and associate owner Iris Kimura (Suzy Nakamura). While this ship wide meltdown unspools, passenger service employee Matt Spencer ( Zach Woods – aka Jared from Silicon Valley) attempts to calm the passengers and deploy meaningless HR techniques to find some way to manage a crisis that cannot be controlled or contained.

Altered Carbon’s second season will arrive on Netflix next week. The sci-fi series is based on Richard K. Morgan’s novel of the same name and is set in 2384. It depicts a humanity that has transitioned to a new state of being through the use of a revolutionary technology: uploading consciousness. Human bodies are hot-swappable – and therefore death has no permanence. So it’s a big shift in how humans see themselves and their perception of existence itself. Human consciousness is data – and can be stored on what is known as a ‘stack’ – like a molded plastic vertebrae -  and can be inserted into newly created, customised synthetic bodies known as ‘sleeves’. All this is available to the rich, the connected. If you’re poor or in prison…then you’re shit out of luck. So a new class evolves and into this milieu comes our protagonist: mercenary and gun-for-hire Takeshi Kovacs, played by Joel Kinnamon in Season One and in Season Two, Anthony Mackie.