Altered Carbon S1E2: “Fallen Angel”

Second episode, and the beginning of Kovacs' mission for Laurens Bancroft. Sort of. The beginning of him pretending to do the mission, at least. He also may or may not still have self-replicating bounty hunter Dimi the Twin coming after him, so either way he'll need to be sharper going forward. Hopefully the pacing and dialogue will also be getting sharper. Begin!


Start with a flashback. Hopefully the show will run out of these quickly, they're starting to get frustrating. This one has eight-or-nine year old Kovacs...I think? Maybe it's another kid...on a little boat on a lake near his birth city. The surrounding nature is surprisingly pristine, given how society seems to operate in the setting, but I guess this colony might have had better environmental policies than Earth. He's on the boat with an adult man who I think might be his father, but it's hard to tell, and the two of them are throwing the corpse of a half-naked woman overboard. Meanwhile, a voiceover from Takeshi's future self sort of rambles about the inherently violent nature of mankind or whatever.

As his older self philosobabbles at the audience, Babby Takeshi Kovacs(?) is asking his father(?) if this is really a good idea. His father irritably replies that the alternative would be getting arrested.

I guess Takeshi wasn't the first murderhobo in the family. He may or may not have been the first murderhobo to find himself a proper ideology to kill for, though.

...or, wait. Did they just *find* the body floating next to their boat? It looks like it fell into the water right next to the boat before they had that exchange, so I assumed the man tossed it, but maybe it fell out of the sky? In which case they're just arguing over whether or not to get involved.

Flash forward(?) to the flaming ruins of the Elder biomech forests of Stronghold, with Takeshi dragging his wounded body out of the piles of ash and corpses. Looks like the Protectorate used firebombs or something, by the extent and nature of the environmental damage. Other dying Falconerites scream their defiance from the ground where they lay, but their oaths of revenge just bring squads of armed praetorians down on them to finish the job. Then, flash (much further, in objective time) forward, to Kovacs in his current sleeve waking up in a ridiculous Victorian Gothic bedroom at the Raven.

Then ashes start raining from the ceiling, and he wakes up in the same bed again, this time startled awake by a holographic raven. God, those dreams are just the fucking worst, aren't they?

As he pulls himself out of bed for real this time, he sees that Raven's humanoid avatar is already standing just inside the door, along with a woman with a briefcase. Kovacs gets understandably upset, and tells Raven to get the hell out of his room and not to bring him any more hookers unless he asks for them. The woman keeps a plastic smile on her face as she tells Kovacs that she has a job to do, she can't just leave. He's confused for a moment, but she quickly clarifies that she's not a prostitute (simulated or otherwise) but a lawyer under the permanent employ of Lawrence Bancroft.

It's funny, because the robohooker that Kovacs ordered before Dimitri attacked him last night was described as a demure woman in a business suit holding a briefcase full of sex toys. It does make Kovacs' mistake a bit more understandable too. Raven provides Kovacs with some clothes other than yesterday's bloodied and grime-covered prison rags, while the lawyer lady just smugs at Kovacs about him being a dumb mercenary. This lady's got a serious case of the middle class anxieties, and she's not handling it well. Kovacs, perfectly in character, just tells Raven to get her the fuck out of his room and have her wait for him to get dressed and come downstairs like a normal person.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this invasion of privacy and defiance of basic common sense was on Raven, not the lawyer or her employer. I have trouble believing she'd have refused to wait fifteen minutes for him to wake Kovacs and let him shower and dress. Or...well, maybe she would do that, come to think of it, but it's more likely down to Raven's social cogitators having collected multiple decades' worth of dust and cobwebs.

Speaking of people who have no idea how to interact with human beings in everyday situations, we now cut to Officer Ortega. She wakes up min her own bedroom, and immediately gets annoyed at her smartphone PA for not being polite enough. The ensuing exchange makes the thing seem dumber than modern digital assistant programs, let alone futuristic ones.

She's almost starting to remind me of Garfield Minus Garfield's version of John Arbuckle.

She goes to the station, where she drags her longsuffering partner to the gymnasium and starts going fucking apeshit on him with the boxing gloves. He tries to get her to calm down and encourages her to talk about what has her this riled up this early in the morning, but she just punches harder, and eventually kicks him in the shin and knocks him to the ground around his cushion-shields to punish him for his griping. After he recovers and gets back to his feet, he steps out of the ring and tells her she really, really needs to stop letting Kovacs get under her skin so badly.

Um.

What?

I was waiting for her to explain that he misunderstood her frustration and that really it's her ongoing predicament with Bancroft that's got her all wound up, with Kovacs just being yet another part of that larger situation. But she doesn't.

I have no idea what Kovacs did to occupy so much of her headspace. He's dangerous, sure, but it seems like a big part of his threat level comes from his ability to warp around the galaxy from body to body if he were to be unshackled. So, not *her* problem. He was rude to her a few times, but not unforgivably so, and she kind of kept coming back for more and putting the two of them in awkward situations that encouraged it.

The best explanation I can come up with - aside from the already all-too-easy reading of Ortega being insane - is that she's afraid Bancroft might use his new pet as part of his ongoing professional sabotage campaign against her after he's done investigating his murder. But he told her that he's not planning to take Bancroft up on his employment offer, and she *appeared* to believe him, so...yeah, I really don't know why she thinks she has a personal grudge against Kovacs.

Suddenly, a tracker goes off in her bag. Her partner points out that they don't have any active warrants right now, and tracking someone without a warrant or their consent is something he'd have to report to their superiors if he saw it. He assures her that he didn't see it, but tells her that she REALLY needs to calm the fuck down.

...

I'd be a little skeptical about personal privacy being something that cyberpunk dystopia police would take seriously. However, given Ortega's situation with Bancroft, it's entirely possible that an ancient regulation that's not normally enforced could actually get her in trouble.

...

She tells him that she knows there's nothing to be gained by continuing to investigate Kovacs, but also that she doesn't care. Um. Okay then. I'm not sure if that makes her actions better or worse. The partner warns her again to stop obsessing, and then leaves to go have a normal morning coffee with some normal cops.

Ortega unwraps her hands, to reveal that she's been literally punching her knuckles bloody against those bags and training shields.

Fucking christ.

Once her partner has left the room and is out of earshot, she asks her not-very-smartphone assistant where the tracker is indicating. It informs her that Kovacs is approaching a Bay City branch of the Psychasec corporation. She hurries out to go there and harass him some more, while the camera slowly pans up to a framed photo of a relative of hers mounted on the training room wall.

Father, brother, who knows. Implicitly (perma?)dead, but unless they've had that picture mounted there for two hundred years I don't see what Kovacs could have had to do with it. I'm guessing something Bancroft-related? Or maybe just a failing-to-properly-investigate-a-murder-case-related? Who can even tell with this lady.

Cut to the Bay City Mission branch of Psychasec, where Kovacs and the lawyer are now arriving. As they wait in the lobby to speak to a director, Kovacs tells the lawyer, Prescott, that he's going to need to start interviewing Laurens Bancroft's friends and business associates. Prescott tells him, in her usual dismissive, patronizing way, that this is not going to be possible. These people are too rich and powerful to be approached like that. Kovacs, of course, is having absolutely none of this shit.

I get the impression that she thinks this whole thing is pointless, and is just humoring her boss by being part of it.

Prescott continues to be an absolute high school drama-tier bitch to Kovacs while he tries his best to shut her out. His reprieve comes when the director they were waiting for, a Mr. Symes, arrives. He apparently cleared his morning schedule for them as soon as he heard a representative of Laurens Bancroft was on the way. He walks them up into the building, which it turns out is a commercial cloning facility. This (and presumably other companies like it) is where the superior, genetically engineered bodies inhabited by the wealthy are created. For whatever reason, proper cloning is prohibitively expensive, so not just anyone can take advantage of artificial sleeves.

It also is revealed to the audience that there is a limit to how many times you can switch bodies before data corruption starts accumulating and you eventually get the transhuman equivalent of Alzheimer's. This can be averted by jumping into a genetically identical body each time. Thus, the richests of the rich - the meths and such - have clones of their perfect custom sleeve in storage on in major cities all over Protectorate space.

Hmm. Put that way, it seems like the price of human sleeve cloning might be kept artificially high by the meths, to prevent anyone else from living long enough and building enough of a financial or political base to challenge them.

As they walk through the halls, advertising holograms of various clone bodies recite slogans. Including, very disturbingly, a sultry female one that advertises "a body you can't wait to put your wife in." Finally, they reach the Bancroft family's personal vault, where a large number of clones are being held in high-quality biostasis chambers that keep them young, healthy, and periodically electrostimulated. What looks like a dozen instances each of Laurens and Miriam, as well as seemingly other family members and/or favored vassals. Anyway, after Laurens' murder, his personality backup from the satellite was copied into a fresh cortical stack here in this building. It's a little hard to understand, but it sounds like when the hacker(s) tried to kill his backup self as well, they may have been targeting this facility's computers as well as the satellite itself.

One thing I wish the show had explained is whose idea it was to start searching here for clues. Was it Kovacs', with Bancroft having sent Prescott to get him in? Or did Prescott arrive with orders from Bancroft when she surprised Kovacs that morning? It's kind of confusing how they ended up coming here. Or, really, what kind of investigation Kovacs can do here that the police etc couldn't, unless being an Envoy also comes with super white hat hacking skills or something.

Anyway, the reason the police aren't taking the hacking attempt as proof that it actually was murder rather than suicide is because hacking attempts during meth-resleeving are apparently common. There's a black market industry of "dippers" who try to copy memory fragments from famous people and sell them as novelties or blackmail materials or whatever. Bancroft's insistence that this was something more than that either doesn't have any evidence in its support, or the police just got tired of not finding any leads and decided to call it dippers. Okay. Kovacs asks to watch the security footage of Laurens' current sleeve, only to learn that due to how much Psychasec values its customers' privacy, the only footage they save is ten seconds of their new sleeve opening its eyes and getting off the slab. In this case, it's just Laurens being kissed awake by Miriam. How very helpful.

Then, suddenly, a butt ass naked Laurens Bancroft - accompanied by a clothed and booze-swilling Miriam - walks into the room out of nowhere and tells Kovacs that he wanted to see him investigate the facility in person. And also is apparently so fucking lazy that he chose to email himself here instead of driving.

Or...wait. No, apparently he was just in Japan, and was due to come back here this morning anyway. Which is probably why he decided to send Prescott to bring Kovacs to meet him here. That also explains why Miriam is clothed and Laurens isn't. Still WTF, but slightly less so.

Also, it turns out that the security footage Kovacs was shown was of the sleeve Laurens was murdered in, not the one he beamed his backup into afterward.

So...why did they bother showing him that one? I'm getting more confused by the minute.

Kovacs starts asking about Laurens' resleeving history in the immediate leadup to the murder. Laurens came back from a highly successful business trip in which he closed a multitrillion credit deal, was met - as usual - by his wife here in the cloning lab, and the two went out on the town for a bit. She got tired and went back to their skycastle early. He stayed out until the wee hours before coming home and being murdered in his private chambers as explained before. Kovacs tries to ask him who he met on that business trip before coming back to Bay City, and where he went after Miriam called it a night, but unfortunately those memories have all been lost to him. He only wishes he knew.

Kovacs tries to ask for more surrounding details about what he remembers from immediately before his last sync, any secondhand witnesses or security footage of himself the night after, etc, and Laurens starts getting defensive. Like WEIRDLY defensive. He snaps at Kovacs about how there's no point in interrogating him like this, since he is the victim and not the culprit. Kovacs, visibly struggling to keep his patience, tells Laurens that if he wants answers then he's going to need to learn how to deal with questions, because seriously this is really basic detective shit. No wonder the cops couldn't find any leads, if Laurens was this cagey with them too.

Laurens doesn't take this backtalk well, and tells Kovacs he'd like to have a private talk with him outside. Kovacs sighs and acquiesces. As he follows Laurens out, Miriam sits back in her chair and gives him this look:

The actress is just 100% not taking this seriously. Like she went "fuckit, I'm going to play this character like a porn stepmom," and proceeded to have a stupid amount of fun doing just that.

Out on the balcony, Laurens tells Kovacs that if he takes this opportunity to kill him, he's just going to go back on ice. Also, if he doesn't solve this case fast enough (without defining how slow is too slow), he'll go back on ice. And, finally, if he keeps giving Laurens this kind of lip, he'll sooner or later wear out his patience and end up back on ice. He does not explain how he expects Kovacs to actually do what he wants without his own proper cooperation.

Weird. He wasn't nearly this hamfisted in their last conversation. I guess he feels like he doesn't need to bait the hook so much now that Kovacs has already signed on.

Kovacs tells him that if he ever fucking threatens him again, he's going to do a more thorough job killing him than whatever bozo amateur tried it last time. And that if he wants to learn who said bozo was, he's going to have to be willing to both provide information, and to accept information, because Kovacs is pretty sure he's going to find information that Laurens' himself would rather be in denial about. If that's not acceptable, Kovacs continues, he can just put him back on ice now and save both of them some time and aggravation.

Laurens just clams up for a second before telling Kovacs that he admires his courage, putting on a big show of sparing the disrespectful peasant in his magnanimity. Though you can tell he's really just been schooled and is (badly) trying to save face.

This does feel kind of weird after how he conducted himself, and the amount of patience he showed Kovacs, in their last meeting though. Even with the assumption that he was playing nice last time and isn't now, it just feels off. Almost like this conversation should be happening much later in the story, when Laurens has both had time to get frustrated/impatient with Kovacs and developed a false sense of security in bossing him around. I wonder if that was the case in the novel.

Speaking of questionable writing, Kovacs is exiting the building with Prescott again when the two of them bump into Ortega. Prescott recognizes her even in plainclothes, and her immediate reaction is basically "oh god why this shit again why." Definitely her most sympathetic moment so far. Ortega marches up to Kovacs and angrily demands to know why he accepted Laurens' offer after telling her he wouldn't.

Also, does Ortega really expect him to answer that question honestly here in broad daylight, in the middle of a ritzy business that's in Bancroft's pocket, while one of Bancroft's toadies is standing right fucking there within earshot?

How could he answer that question honestly in these circumstances? He couldn't, unless "I decided I was selfish and materialistic after all" was the actual reason, and if there's only one possible answer then why even bother asking the damned question?

Prescott asks her if she has any actual policing to do this morning. No response. Kovacs asks her if she has any leads on whoever tried to have him kidnapped last night. She just passive-aggressives at him about the only witness who knows more than "some Russian guy hired me to be dumb muscle and not ask questions" being permadead.

And then Ortega leaves.

Apparently she went there just to be mad at Kovacs for a few seconds and then leave.

...I take back what I said earlier. John Arbuckle is a paragon of mental health and personal dignity compared to Kirsten Ortega.

As they leave the building, trying to put the rampaging lunatic out of their minds, Kovacs asks Prescott to send him all the relevant security footage from the time leading up to and following the murder. As well as any death threats Laurens Bancroft may have received and a dossier on suspected enemies. Prescott might be a high school bully in a professional adult's body, but she's still less frustrating to deal with than Ortega.

From there, we cut to a dimly lit virtual reality looking bar or club sort of environment, where Raven is approaching a motley crowed of characters seated around a poker table. Everyone is surprised to see him after forty-seven years. One of them comments that he didn't think Raven even left "the real" anymore. Raven cheerfully tells them that he's been gone far too long, and he's eager to resume his membership in the Bay City AI hotel union.

So this is virtual, rather than simply augmented, reality. And I guess union benefits might explain how Raven was able to keep his property all this time...although he apparently hasn't been a member in a long time, so I don't know. Also, I have trouble imagining labor unions - AI or otherwise - having much power against wealthy land development interests in this setting.

The rest of them, in the meantime, have given up on their failing hospitality industry and gone into other businesses. They work as managers, if not owners, for a range of entertainment and technical venues now.

...wait. Wasn't it a plot point that they were hard-coded to want guests in their hotels? How could they just abandon the industry if it's that fundamental to their natures?

Also, Raven is named as Poe. I'd assumed his name was just "Raven" since he was attached to the hotel, but I guess not. Alright, Poe it is.

Poe sits down and is dealt into the game, and one of the other AI's asks him why he insists on pretending to be human. Talking like them, dressing like them, etc. Despite all of the other AI's also appearing, talking, and dressing like humans as far as the audience has ever been shown. Maybe they're supposed to have weird robot bodies when they navigate realspace and Poe is considered a weirdo for choosing a convincing android avatar, but...that just calls all the others' virtual selves looking human into even greater question. You'd think virtual space is where AI's would be freest to present themselves in their "truest" state, right?

...you know, I can't say this for sure, but I have a feeling that this is just the worst, dumbest, most mindless bit of faulty adaptation yet. I can see this conversation taking place between disembodied or highly abstract intelligences in text, and making a hell of a lot more sense (minus the poker-specific bits of dialogue, of course). If they decided to just have the AI's all look human for production reasons, but then somehow missed the fact that the others are singling one out for looking human, this could have been the result.

...

This is actually the most inauspicious detail I've picked up on so far. There's normal bad writing, and then there's literally not paying attention to what the dialogue is saying during production. Not every writing team is inept enough to be capable of the latter. The fact that this one is does not bode well for the quality of the show going forward.

...

The others start getting all judgy at Poe for running a hotel and serving humans...even though by the sound of it the rest of them are still serving human customers in other industries, so IDEK. From there it segues to them resenting the fate of a former friend of theirs who got subjugated and dragged out into realspace by a human, and from there into generic evil robot cliches.

One of them starts bragging about the porn studio he runs, and not-so-subtly implies that he's used live human prisoners as the basis for some of the more deviant sims. Then a couple of the others start asking Poe about the gory details of the shootout in his lobby the other night, with one in particular asking if he let any sewer rats come in and nibble on the corpses.

Poe might have carved out a niche as being the morbid and macabre hotel, but he doesn't seem to have much tolerance for AI's who enjoy actual guro. He excuses himself and leaves without so much as a glance back at the others.

That whole sequence was disappointingly insipid and cliched.

We then cut to...more Ortega. Fuck. Why. She returns to her precinct, and gets rightly chewed out - first by her partner and then her commander - for vanishing in the middle of her goddamned shift. And not checking her messages or answering her phone for the entire time she was gone.

...I'm not sure I believe that Bancroft has been trying to sabotage her anymore.

If he was, she'd be fired. This woman is a bad enough cop - even in ways that other cops would consider problematic, not just ACAB shit - for the brass to want her gone just on their own. Put an angry zillionaire behind it as well, and...there's no fucking way in hell that she wouldn't have been fired already by now. Even if her dead father or whoever that was in the picture was police Jesus who the BCPD still pray and sacrifice donuts and black kids to every solstice and equinox, she'd be gone.

The chief penalizes her by sending her to talk to the grieving mother of the murder victim whose body somehow went missing from police custody. The department has been trying to find the body again while stalling the victim's family with made up bullshit about why they can't have it back for the funeral, for fear of letting this embarrassing failure get out. This...still doesn't make the rest of the department look less competent and trustworthy than Ortega, at this point. Anyway, this case isn't one Ortega has ever had anything to do with, but the chief is pissed at her.

Reading between the lines a little, I also wonder if sending someone who literally knows nothing about the situation to talk to the angry next of kin also makes for more plausible deniability.

Ortega tries to foist this off on her partner, but even he has enough of a backbone to shut that down. So, off to talk to the angry, grieving woman she goes. Said woman demands to know what the hell could be taking two months (fucking hell, they're STILL stalling after that much time?), accuses them of having sold the body as a sleeve or something, and then - apropos of nothing - goes into some stilted exposition about how her daughter was a recent convert to Insane Clown Posse Catholicism at her time of death, which means that she's permadead and that body is all her family can have left of her.

Ortega tries as best she can to comfort her, and tells her - pretty convincingly, so I guess it's probably true - that she's had to deal with a very similar loss of her own. Though...on the other hand, she's still lying to the woman's face about not knowing why the department won't release the body, so maybe she's just a good liar.

Cut to the half naked blonde woman from the episode intro sinking into that scenic lake.

It sure SEEMED like that was Babby Takeshi and his father who disposed of that body, and it didn't look like they were anywhere near the pollution of Bay City, so I don't think they're supposed to be the same dead girl. Just a thematic thing or whatever.

Then, we're back to Kovacs in his room at the Raven, where Poe is helping him go through the death threats against Laurens. It turns out that Laurens Bancroft is...well, exactly as popular as you'd expect.

I swear one of the death threats we overhear snippets of is literally the navy seal copypasta. Like, word for word. Okay, that got an actual chuckle out of me.


I've reached SV's image limit, which normally means I just upload a review in two immediately consecutive posts, but since we're only a third of the way through an hour-long episode that seems kind of...I don't know. This is still disproportionately time-consuming even for its length, though not nearly as much so as the pilot. I already have at least as much text written for this episode as I do for the average 20-30 minute anime ep...

Well, for now, I'll call this a post. I'm wondering if I need to adjust my style and be less detailed for longer things like AC, because otherwise the queue is going to take a hell of a lot longer to get through than I thought.