Considering how many “sleeves” Takeshi Kovacs has been through, he’s a slippery character to keep track of but is he still alive after Altered Carbon season 2? Netflix series Altered Carbon is based on the 2002 cyberpunk novel by British writer Richard K. Morgan and is set in a dystopian future some three hundred years from now. The world of Altered Carbon has all but achieved immortality via “stacks” – a hard-drive of sorts that stores a person’s consciousness and can be inserted into new bodies (known as “sleeves”) when their old body dies.
The protagonist of Altered Carbon is Takeshi Kovacs, a former soldier-turned-rebel whose stack is retrieved from prison and inserted into a new sleeve (played by Joel Kinnaman) and his consciousness revived so he can solve the murder of Laurens Bancroft (James Purefoy) – a “meth”, which refers to incredibly wealthy people able to backup their stacks and purchase unlimited new sleeves. By the time Altered Carbon season 2 (which was set 30 years later) rolled around, Kovacs’ stack had been inserted into a brand-new top-of-the-line sleeve developed by the military and played by Anthony Mackie.
In Altered Carbon season 2, Mackie’s Kovacs came face-to-face with the original Takeshi Kovacs – or at least a cloned sleeve of his original form, played by Will Yun Lee and known as “Kovacs Prime.” Although Kovacs and Kovacs Prime were pitted against each other at first by their nefarious former boss Jaeger (Torben Liebrecht), they eventually teamed up to stop a vengeful alien Elder that had infiltrated Jaeger’s stack and was hellbent on destroying everyone on Kovacs’ home planet Harlan’s World. In the Altered Carbon season 2 finale, Mackie’s Kovacs sacrificed himself by absorbing the Elder and directing a powerful beam of energy known as Angelfire upon himself which obliterated his sleeve and stack to dust.
That would imply that Kovacs (or at least the version played by Anthony Mackie) is dead, but in the world of Altered Carbon nothing is as simple as that. Not only was Will Yun Lee’s Kovacs Prime alive and kicking, but it was also implied at the end of the season 2 finale that a copy of the other Kovacs’ stack had been created by his A.I. pal Poe (Chris Conner) before his old stack was destroyed. That ending suggested Kovacs would’ve almost certainly been brought back for Altered Carbon season 3.
Unfortunately, we’ll never know for sure if Kovacs would’ve returned as Netflix decided against renewing the show for a third season. However, with a spinoff/prequel anime (Altered Carbon: Resleeved), two more Altered Carbon books and a budding Dynamite Entertainment graphic novel series (which includes the titles Blues and One Life, One Death), fans of the show can always dive back into the world of Takeshi Kovacs in other ways.