Altered Carbon Season 2 Trailer Brings Anthony Mackie Into the Fold

Netflix has unveiled the first full Altered Carbon season 2 trailer alongside a foreboding new poster. In the world of this inventive sci-fi series, consciousness can be swapped and uploaded to different bodies (called sleeves), which can be used to disappear, find a new life, or even cheat death.

That last one is an exclusive privilege of the mega-rich, who can even live forever in the same series of designer sleeves. The ability to change sleeves is also a boon for the show as well and is being utilized to hand series lead duties over to Anthony Mackie.

The first season followed a recently awakened Takeshi Kovacs, played by Joel Kinnaman, who had spent the last 250 years imprisoned without a body. He is bought by the incredibly wealthy Laurens Bancroft (James Purefoy), who needs Kovacs to solve his own murder, a plot thread that quickly entangles with Kovacs' own history as a revolutionary.

Kovacs confronts the unequal world he fought to prevent alongside allies like Detective Kristin Ortega (Martha Higareda), who has a connection to the former occupant of Kovacs' Kinnaman-sleeve, and the AI operator of a hotel, Poe (Chris Conner). The first season featured three different sleeves for Kovacs and Altered Carbon season 2 will continue to add to that total.

The new Altered Carbon season 2 trailer throws Mackie's Takeshi Kovacs right into the action and into a mystery surrounding Kovacs' long-lost love, the presumed dead Quellcrist Falconer (Renee Elise Goldsberry). The official synopsis released alongside the trailer reads: "When a job brings Takeshi Kovacs back to Harlan's World in a new sleeve, he finds the planet at war - and his long-lost love lurking in the shadows."

Whatever season 2 has in store for Kovacs, he'll be doing it with a few upgrades as the trailer highlights this new Mackie-sleeve comes specially designed with features like rapid healing and advanced reaction time. He'll also be doing it alongside the return of Poe despite being far away from the AI's base of operations.

This season will present a whole host of new challenges, the biggest perhaps is teased towards the end of the trailer when Kovacs' original sleeve (Will Yun Lee) is seen pursuing him, marking the first time that sleeve has appeared in the show outside of a flashback. These new challenges are given some added weight with the new poster Netflix tweeted that features a crumbling Mackie and the tagline: "Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust." Check out the poster above.

The first season of Altered Carbon was a mind-bending and entertaining charge that mixed the dystopia of Bladerunner with big-budget action thrills and a Black Mirror-like vision of the horrific complications advanced technology can bring. This next chapter looks like it will be kicking all those elements up to an 11 with the new super-sleeve and long-dead revolutionaries coming back into the fold.

Netflix has shown a commitment to expanding the Altered Carbon franchise so it's exciting to see where they'll go with it next. The wait to see how the new mystery unfolds won't be long since the Altered Carbon season 2 release date is set for later this month.

February 12, 2020