Altered Carbon: 10 Best Sleeves In The Show, Ranked

Netflix’s cyber punk sci-fi thriller show Altered Carbon is spun around a world where death is an old-school concept for wealthy people. They live in clouds and consider themselves no less than God. Reincarnation is made possible through an alien technology called a cortical stack, which is implanted under the skull, behind the neck.

A person’s consciousness can be effectively transferred to another body, called a “sleeve,” through the stack. Harlan’s World is rife with millions of sleeves – synthetic and organic, some of which are heavily engineered. Today we are going to share with you ten best sleeves of this series.

10 Kristen Ortega’s Sleeve

Ortega is a ruthless and highly skilled cop in the Bay City Police Department. She was originally a neo Catholic, but she renounced it later on. She takes the last place in this list because she has the least number of enhancements done in her sleeve. She has largely been an organic sleeve, but she does have an engineered cyber eye, that is connected with her devices. In a fight with Mister Leung, her arm gets severely damaged, then Kovacs pays for a Jager Schuster model 16 full mechanical arm, equipped with neurachem and guised in real human skin.

9 Leonardo Nam’s YA Kovacs

Leonardo Nam played Kovacs in the first season when Jaegar onboards a child Takeshi into the CTAC program. When Kovacs killed his father, he and his sister, both were arrested. Jaeger recognizes the skills and killer instinct present in both the siblings, and onboards both of them in separate programs. While Reileen moves from one foster home to another, a young Kovacs gets the sleeve of adult Leonardo Nam. He has great presence of mind, killer moves and a distinct drive.

8 Kovacs Prime

Carrera reveals later on, in the second season, that he had not only cloned Takeshi, but also double sleeved him, so that even if he is killed at any point of time, the old version of him could be resurrected and sent to the front line in his place.

Kovacs Prime is that clone. He retains all his old combat skills, fighting techniques and more, and at the same time, has learnt some new ones after popping out of the limbo.

7 Jaeger’s Latest Sleeve Carrera

Leader of the CTAC program, elite military team and inter planet security forces, Jaeger slash Ivan Carrera is the best fighter and trainer so far. He becomes far more dangerous when he resleeves himself in a military graded special sleeve, designed to be the alpha of his pack of fighters, who were also given similar (but inferior) sleeves. These military sleeves are designed to follow his orders implicitly. They can not override this functionality even if they want to.

6 Miriam Bancroft’s Sleeve

The femme fatale Miriam Bancroft is the wife of the main antagonist of the first season of Altered Carbon, Laurens Bancroft. She is beautiful, too attractive for her age and quite ambitious. She loves to spice her nights up with young men. This is the only reason why she wears a genetically enhanced sleeve, specifically designed for her. The sleeve has a pheromone in it’s clit, sweat and even it’s saliva. The effect of this pheromone is so strong that Kovacs in spite of trying not to, sleeps with her ultimately.

5 Lizzie Elliot’s Finale Sleeve

In the final episode of the season 1 of the show, Mister Leung and his men destroy the Raven Hotel and with it, Poe. Moments before dying, Poe releases Lizzie back to the real world by transporting her cortical stack to a ready to wear sleeve, sitting in the Head In The Clouds. Lizzie’s sleeve is almost magical. It has amazing combat skills, extraordinary awareness towards surroundings and a supernatural ability to shift it’s physical form or appearance, without doing much of anything.

4 Trepp

Trepp is a bounty hunter. She is universally famous, for she can hunt anyone down, regardless of what sleeve or which place the person is hiding in. She has a distinct cybernetic device implanted in her skull, which allows her to connect her online with anyone, anywhere without any physical presence required.

It also lets her hack in most of the systems of the world, which she uses to the fullest in her work. She calls these implants her coils.

3 Joel Kinnaman’s Kovacs

Hands down, Joel Kinnaman has been the best Takeshi Kovacs so far. His arrogant demeanor, blank eyes, way of walking, body language, almost everything exudes Kovacs. He portrays the authenticity of a man who is several centuries old, to whom nothing matters anymore and who longs for the love of his life more than anything.

After he is hired, he is re-sleeved in an ex-cop’s body which came equipped with military grade neurachem and combat muscle memory. The action sequences performed by this sleeve are some of the most amazing scenes throughout both the seasons.

2 Reileen Kwahara’s Sleeve

Previously, Reileen had ditched her brother and the other Envoys by destroying the whole army and finishing Quellcrist off. She was rewarded abundantly in return. In addition to that money, she started her own black businesses and made insane amount of money. With that, she bought umpteen number of sleeves and hid them in her special closets. The sleeve in which she performed the sword fight with Ortega, or the one she used to save Kinnaman’s Kovacs from the underground fighting arena(in the cage fight) is specifically remarkable. It is extremely flexible, has enormous strength and amazing presence of mind.

1 Anthony Mackie’s Kovacs

In the second season, Takeshi Kovacs is roaming about, on different planets, in cheap sleeves, to hide his identity and find his long lost love Quellcrist Falconer. A wealthy man Horace Axley hires him to do his bidding and gifts him a brand new sleeve in addition to a fat salary. This sleeve is a special ops military graded suit, built for advanced security purposes; and it has numerous super abilities like a decision making ability of its own to ensure safety of the wearer, telekinetic powers, superfast reactivity, ability to heal itself, super strong ninja fighting skills and many more. It is extremely deadly and no doubt, is the best sleeve so far!

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