“The Wrong Man”: A Tragedy of Eternal Capitalism
The recently reproduced Netflix series Altered Carbon of Richard Morgan’s novel with the same name situates itself in the distant future; in this future, the titans of wealth live forever in lofty luxury, their consciousness being put into new bodies after the previous one has expired, and the rest live among each other in lives much like our own. In the fifth episode of this series, one of these ultra-wealthy “Meths”, Bancroft, decides to take a trip to the slums, a region in which its dwellers were the victims of a biological weapon that causes death in mere minutes, for some charity work. In this scene, Bancroft and the main character, Kovacs, trade remarks with Kovacs insulting Bancroft and Bancroft defending himself using allusions to deities of the ancient pagan world, Oden, Jupiter, Zeus, Colossos. During this interaction the dialogue and cin...