Altered Carbon to take the form of Anthony Mackie for season 2

Altered Carbon—the very messy but highly watchable Netflix series about the plight of a plucky steampunk hotel owner and the wacky back-from-the-dead soldier who makes running a business so damn hard—has been renewed for a second season of whodunit mystery and nude clone fights.

Not only that, but this time around actor and sometimes-flying Avenger Anthony Mackie will assume the form of the series’ troubled protagonist, Takeshi Kovacs. Better still, the episode count will drop from 10 to eight, meaning showrunner Laeta Kalogridis (along with new co-showrunner and former Scandal exec-producer Alison Schapker) is fitting form to function instead of the other way around. Presumably, the second season will continue on to follow the second book of the trilogy by Richard Morgan, much as the original hewed to the first.

If so, that means this story will pick up roughly 30 years after the events of last season, when Kovacs is serving in a mercenary group known as Carrera’s Wedge. He gets recruited to recover a Martian artifact that opens a portal to a distant Martian starship, and according to the ad copy, “All that stands between them and the ancient alien spacecraft they mean to salvage are a massacred city bathed in deadly radiation, unleashed nanotechnology with a million ways to kill, and whatever surprises the highly advanced Martian race may have in store.” That actually does sound like it might be simplifying its convoluted storylines, and perhaps there will be fewer opportunities for hilarious nigh-pornographic sex scenes, though we kinda doubt it. Netflix has yet to say when season two will premiere, but hopefully before we’re all engulfed by the cataclysmic interplanetary war that led to such a dystopian future in the first place.