This Is The Best Sleeve Augment In Altered Carbon
Netflix's Altered Carbon explored a nightmarish cyberpunk future in which humanity had spread across the galaxy and brought with it war, depravity, and murder in every new colony added to the Settled Worlds. But surely there has to be some upside to living in a grimy dystopia filled with futuristic technology? Well, with the invention of stacks (devices which store a copy of a person's consciousness), a strange form of immortality has been achieved because stacks can be installed in different bodies — called sleeves. Neat, right? Well, aside from the inevitable psychological trauma stemming from the loss of self, of course.
Yet, these sleeves don't have to be just typical human beings, they're often cybernetically enhanced to give the user extra abilities or to make them more durable in battle. And as part of his latest job in Altered Carbon season 2, Takeshi Kovacs is given a military-grade sleeve to get him through his assignment of protecting a man named Horace Axley. It's safe to say that his new body (which just so happens to look a lot like Anthony Mackie) gives Kovacs the edge he needs.
The sleeve has its own survival instincts
It was disappointing that Joel Kinnaman's ex-cop sleeve didn't return for the second season, but when Takeshi Kovacs discovered all the abilities that came with his new body, it was easy to see why he was happy with the upgrade. The sleeve's enhanced healing factor alone makes it a must-have for any soldier, especially since it comes with combat muscle memory and its own set of biometric-locked weapons. Also, its augmented survival instincts keep Kovacs alive even when he's at his most vulnerable.
The second season's fifth episode forces Takeshi to fight an earlier version of himself, affectionately dubbed "Kovacs Prime," and the rebel hero is thrown off a cliff by his original sleeve. It's not until midway through the following episode that audiences realize just how capable the Kovacs' military sleeve really is. He's shown waking up dangling from the side of the cliff-face hours after the fight, his hand locked onto a small groove to stop himself from falling to his doom.
He was unconscious for quite some time, with the sleeve keeping Kovacs suspended in the air until Trepp found him. These survival instincts arguably make the military sleeve the best in the series, since it works subconsciously and without Takeshi directly doing something. It goes hand-in-hand with the sleeve's enhanced reaction time, and there's no way the soldier would've survived without it. It's just a shame we won't see more from the formidable soldier since Netflix canceled the series in 2020.