Altered Carbon S1E2: “Fallen Angel” (continued)
For now, Kovacs has Poe discard all threats made from offworld, and then make a priority list of threats from people known to have committed violent crimes, people with military or intelligence training, and people who specify a killing method similar to the one used against Bancroft. This reduces the list to a much more manageable few dozen credible-seeming threats. One of which, in particular, catches Kovacs' eye. A masked man with a soldierly posture and body language, vowing revenge for his daughter Lizzy, hefting a plasma rifle that could have left the type of marks seen at the scene of the crime. And, in addition to naming a "Lizzie," the serial number on the man's weapon is distinguishable.
He's also, specifically, promising to infiltrate Bancroft's skycastle and disintegrate his head and cortical stack with said plasma gun.
That's definitely sus.
Kovacs, face still bearing the scabs and bruises of last night's battle, looks up the rifle's serial number and then sets out. Elsewhere in Bay City, Ortega - riding another tube-bus herself while fondling a little rosary thing - gets an update from her Siri about Kovacs' new trajectory. Is she supposed to be at work right now? If so, she hasn't started caring since the last time we saw her. Fortunately it's back to Kovacs for now! He arrives in a grimy lower-class neighborhood that looks just a step up from outright shantytown.
It's not clear if this is within the Bay City, or just somewhere nearby, but either way it's not a nice place to live.
As he looks for the address he's hunting, he happens to see some flyers for a special exhibit at the nearby history museum.
That should make for an interesting museum trip, albeit probably an enraging one as well. Meanwhile, I'm just surprised that a museum is advertising itself in a neighborhood as poor as this one. Unless museums in this world are publically or philanthropically funded and made available to all, I'm not sure who here would be worth advertising to.
More and more, this setting is starting to feel less like the hypercapitalist dystopia it was initially framed as, and more just a normal dystopia with some hypercapitalist elements on the margins. I'm not sure which of the two was the writers' intent, but an increasing number of details point toward the latter.
Kovacs puts the flyer in his pocket for now, and finds the address he's looking for. A *very* ramshackle second floor suite that advertises itself as a "data brokerage" and has a slightly faded Protectorate army flag mounted by the door. He knocks at the door and waits for a response. There is none.
He takes a moment to recall some words of Falconer's: "The machinery of justice is slow and cold, and entirely theirs. Hardware and software." God, that's such a quintessentially cyberpunk line. I can practically smell trenchcoats and taste the nineties.
Then, he kicks in the door and enters the dingy, horribly unkempt workshop/apartment. It turns out someone is home after all, and he's not at all happy about having his door kicked in. Kovacs tries to be as conciliatory as he can given the circumstances, but that can only get him so far after such an introduction. Especially once he reveals that Bancroft sent him.
Marine, huh? I wonder if the "praetorians" who killed Kovacs and his comrades back in the day are still a thing as well? They could be another branch of the armed forces, or they could just be defunct by now, it's been two hundred years after all.
When pressed, the marine denies any wrongdoing, and when Kovacs still won't leave he fires a warning shot. Which Kovacs reacts to by disappearing into the junk-filled room like a ghost and then materializing out of nowhere behind him, pushing a heavy thing over on the guy in the process.
The fight scene that follows is much better done than the one in the lobby. The choreography is fluid, except where it's deliberately disjointed to call attention to Kovacs' preternatural stealth and agility and how it confuses his opponent. One thing I especially appreciate about this fight, though, is that it highlights the limits of Kovacs' Envoy powers as well as the strengths. He's not any physically stronger or faster than his current sleeve would be under anyone else's control. When it comes down to a direct contest of strength during grappling etc, the marine consistently seems to retake the advantage. It's only when he has room to maneuver and use the environment that Kovacs can use his disappearing trick or come at the marine from an unexpected angle and take the advantage back. A one-on-one fight in an unfamiliar environment with no prep time seems to be the worst realistic combat scenario for an Envoy (well, aside from having your fortress firebombed from orbit of course) , so this battle is a challenging one for Kovacs. It's very illustrative and well executed. I only wish this show's verbal exposition could be half as fluid.
Anyway, Kovacs eventually manages to knock the guy out. When the marine comes to, he's tied to one of his own chairs, and Kovacs is standing over him looking at a family photo he found in the apartment.
Ignoring the marine (now named as Elliot)'s demands for him to put the picture down, Kovacs makes some inferences about his domestic situation. The apartment is a disaster zone, and the table looks like it's been cleared off just enough for one diner. His sleeve doesn't look much (if at all) older than it did in the photo, though, so he must have lost his family very recently. We know that he at least thinks Laurens Bancroft did something to his daughter, but what happened to the wife, eh?
...
I can't believe it took me until now to realize that this whole thing was a Great Gatsby tribute, lol. Well played, story, well played.
...
With a little patience and the right verbal prodding, Kovacs gets Elliot to explain that his wife is a dipper who got caught, and is currently serving a thirty year disembodied sentence. Keeping criminals temporarily dead as a form of punishment still just seems weird and pointless to me, but the show seems very sure of itself on this subject so okay. The implication is that we're no more than a handful of years into hacker wife Ava's sentence. so Elliot's got twenty-some years before he can see her again in whatever body they happen to give her. In the meantime, their daughter Lizzie is the only family he has. Or she was, at least.
As they talk, Kovacs notices a strange marking on Elliot's face. Like a sore or callous left by sticking and unsticking some sort of headset to it too many times in too short a timespan.
Elliot asks what the fuck he's staring at. Kovacs assures him that he's not his type, don't worry. Lol.
Kovacs also sees that Elliot sees what he's looking at, and that in response to it his eyes briefly flicker toward a closet door. Naturally, Kovacs opens said closet (over Elliot's threats and demands for him not to) and inside finds a strange device with an attached VR headset. Kovacs turns it on and puts on the headset.
He finds himself in a color-distorted fish eye lens city street. A canned voice from somewhere says "wake up and smell the coffee." He wanders the simulated street until he hears a woman sobbing, and follows the sound to an alley where he finds Lizzie sprawled out on the concrete, twitching and whimpering.
He tries to speak to the Lizzie simulation, but she just slowly cranes her eyes up toward him and then screams like a ringwraith from the Jackson LOTR movies. Kovacs wakes up, removes the headset, and marches back out toward the restrained Elliot with fire in his eyes. He asks Elliot what the fuck is wrong with him, keeping his daughter conscious in VR when she's clearly stuck in a "trauma loop."
So that's not just a VR recording of her death. Elliot's actually got her cortical stack hooked up to that computer, and is condemning his own daughter to a Black Mirror episode.
Elliot defends himself, saying that he's been using the VR to try to counsel his daughter back to sanity. Somehow. She was found beaten to death. Her stack was intact, but something about her body's death was so traumatic it seems to have damaged her mind to the point where she can't move on past it. I'm guessing he isn't *constantly* keeping her conscious in VR then, just turns the machine on when he tries to help her. Or so he says.
...
Okay this opens up a big can of worms for the worldbuilding.
First of all; if they can activate cortical stacks through a simulated environment, then that does make a lot more sense of the disembodiment for criminals. They'd be spending their sentences experiencing *something* in subjective time, either rehabilitation or punishment or crunching numbers as slave-minds for Big Data or whatever.
Except that Kovacs has no memory of anything. It's as if he was just dead all this time since then. I guess it's possible they erased his memories of his virtual reality prison time, but why would they do that? And, more importantly, why the hell wouldn't this have been explained to us by now? Maybe Kovacs the dangerous anti-government guerilla was just kept dead in a warehouse for historical purposes as opposed to "normal" criminals who actually go to VR jail, but...again, no one has said anything about any of this. No one has acted as if Kovacs' experiences with the criminal justice system are out of the ordinary, aside from being out for much longer than most.
But really, that issue pales in comparison with the much broader implications that this should have on the worldbuilding.
Cortical stacks can be active in VR. More than that, people can "needlecast" themselves from stack to stack, so they're not even bound to a particular server farm or whatever. VR doesn't seem to be especially hard to operate, if a lower-middle class guy can do it in a closet in his shithole apartment. And it's apparently been this way for over a century, if not longer.
I made the offhand Black Mirror reference a minute ago, but I'm being serious now when I say this is a world that hit the Lesbian Nipple Missile singularity generations ago. These people shouldn't be waiting on flesh sleeves so they can continue their humdrum lives in an inefficient physical world. In fact, after over a *century* of this tech existing, they shouldn't even be recognizably human. A species of software entities, that have been software for this long, probably reproducing within the virtual environment and slowly expanding beyond mere imitations of realspace and into true abstracts...
I just can't think of a reason why this world *wouldn't* be a posthuman phantasmagoria beyond our comprehension. It has the entire road to that destination paved and open for business. How could it have AVOIDED turning into that?
It's possible that it didn't avoid that. Maybe we're looking at what became of the tiny fraction of stubborn humans who continually refuse to go fully virtual, with a civilization of posthuman data creatures many times its size just kind of tolerating it. But that doesn't work either, because the society we're being shown is a very unpleasant one for at least a big chunk of its people, so if there was an alternative to it...
Yeah, this worldbuilding is just not doing it for me.
...
Kovacs tries to ask Elliot about some of the environmental details of the simulated alley. In particular, a neon sign over the building she was murdered behind had the name "Jack" written on it. But, at that point Elliot breaks free of his restraints and attacks again. Kovacs sees it coming with his Envoy senses, but even with that advantage, and even with Elliot still unable to use his hands due to some of the ropes still holding, it's another very close match.
Bloody hell is Elliot a beast. I have little doubt that he *could* have infiltrated the Bancroft skycastle and pulled off an assassination, regardless of whether or not he did. If this guy had augmented cognition like Kovacs he'd be practically unstoppable. I have a feeling he's not just going to be a one-off character; there'd be no point in making him this badass if it wasn't setting him up for a later role.
Once again, Kovacs pulls off a narrow victory. Once again, Elliot wakes up, bloodied and (much more securely) restrained. Kovacs is sitting across from him, eating his cereal and scolding him for letting the milk in his fridge go bad. Kovacs, stop being such a dick, this is one of the few people you've met since reactivation who may potentially not deserve it. Anyway, Kovacs manages to prod a little more information out of him. His daughter had been seeing Bancroft for some time, and was supposed to be with him on the night she was found beaten to death. Yeah, this straight up IS The Great Gatsby, just with "daughter" substituted for "wife."
Kovacs determines that, for all his bluster, and all of his impressive skill in the performing of violence, Elliot is not the killer. He cares too much about his daughter to risk getting himself killed or arrested and leaving her dead or worse.
It isn't mentioned, but I also think it's relevant that Elliot doesn't seem like the kind of person who has the likes of Dimi the Twin on speed dial. An old marine corps buddy or two, maybe, but not a high-end professional assassin. Also, I don't think Elliot would try to *capture* someone who he thought might be on to him as Dimi was trying to do before he got bored. Too many things don't add up on the practical level even before you factor in the Lizzie situation.
Kovacs apologizes for the trouble. And the breaking and entering. And the beating. He unties Elliot and leaves him with a paper bill, which he says should cover the door, the cereal, and then some. The way he says it, and the way Elliot reacts in stunned silence, makes me think that the money covers quite a bit more than the damages and medical expenses. Kovacs might be an asshole, but he is a principled asshole.
...which actually matches what we know of his personal history, and the way that he's been periodically repeating or recalling bits of Falconer's sermons during his investigation. Kovacs was a criminal mercenary until he joined Falconer's army and found religion. After the Falconerites were crushed, he lost that idealism and went back to being a criminal mercenary until the praetorians caught up with him. His first and second natures are in conflict, and it shows.
He leaves Elliot with his financial compensation, and then heads to the museum to look at that Falconer exhibit. Even though he knows he's not going to like what he sees there.
As expected, it portrays her faction as basically Space Daesh.
He muses about how the controlling of historical narratives is basically another kind of war. Or, really, just another war crime. You kill your enemies, and then you kill their memory. And then keep torturing it long after that's dead as well.
...
To be fair though, we really don't know that much about the Falconerite ideology. The personality cult aspect of it isn't exactly reassuring. While it's been said that they were fighting for a more egalitarian society, there may well have been a dark side to this.
Or maybe not. But my point is that I don't know that Kovacs is the most reliable narrator when it comes to this subject.
...
Kovacs muses about how he thought seeing some memorabilia, some recordings, of Quelcrest and the rest of the gang might feel good, even in such slanderous context. He probably should have thought a little bit harder.
As he wanders around the exhibit, a particularly ghoulish display gets his attention. A pile of half-melted cortical stacks, removed from the bodies of Envoys killed by incendiaries at the Battle of Stronghold. Actually putting the literal dead bodies of the vanquished enemy on display as trophies like some spiteful Bronze Age empire. After looking around to make sure that no one is watching, Kovacs produces a little songspire tree fragment/totem that he got from somewhere (stole it from another display case, maybe?) and holds it over the case of slagged stacks, performing some kind of low-key funerary ritual.
Then some kid who's here with a school group randomly approaches him and asks him where he got that thing. He truthfully answers that he stole it, and the kid tells him that stealing is wrong and he shouldn't do it. He points out that someone stole these cortical stacks and put them in the museum, and she replies that it doesn't count as theft if the victims are terrorist scum. He grits his teeth and tells her to go rejoin her group, and then she launches into this extended story about how she doesn't want to because she hates one of her classmates there, and goes into excruciating detail about why she hates her and how that makes her feel and what her mom told her about not hating people.
Okay, sorry, no. This is not convincing child behavior. Kids do and say weird things, yes. They walk up to strangers and tell them random personal shit sometimes, yes. Doing so to someone who just admitted to theft in defiance of the kid's own moral prescriptions and told them, quite sternly, to go away? No.
The unconvincing-to-the-point-of-uncanniness child keeps monologuing about her stupid elementary school drama and her mother's advice about it, and then asks the strange man who just admitted to theft in front of her and told her to go away what he thinks. He tells her that her mom is a fucking idiot who doesn't know what she's talking about, and it's better to not have friends so you have no one to mourn when someone shoots them in the stack - and someone WILL, inevitably, do that to them. The little girl looks traumatized. Hilariously, she first starts looking shocked when Kovacs starts swearing, even though she (creepily enough for how young she is) described her classmate as a "bitch" just a few seconds ago.
I don't know what age this part is written for, but I have a feeling that it doesn't match the age of the actress. Also, it's just horribly written regardless. There are a number of conflicted emotions the viewer is probably MEANT to be feeling when Kovacs says this to a child, but it's hard to feel anything at all about him saying it to this creepy, stilted little mannequin.
Speaking of hollow caricatures of humanity, we now return to Ortega. She comes home from work (or... from 'work.' How much actual policework has she done today in between stalking Kovacs? Any?) and unexpectedly finds her mother tidying up her apartment. She isn't too surprised though, so I guess this is a semi-regular occurrence.
They speak Spanish to each other, which kinda fits with the family dynamic. I know that in at least some parts of Latin America parents stay very proactively involved in their adult children's lives, and it could conceivably still be so a few centuries from now.
Also, Momma Ortega is scolding her for having not finished unpacking yet. So I guess this is a new-ish apartment for Kirsten. She also is whining at her for moving so far away from the rest of their community, and - after some conversational segue - moves on to whining about Kirsten not yet having disabled her cortical stack to prevent resleeving. Ah, her family are devout juggalos, I see. And apparently, until Kirsten de-transhumanizes herself, she won't be able to take communion, make confessions, or buy any ICP music or merch without paying the extra heretic fee.
This is also the reason her bigshot cop father exists today only as a framed photograph. He took the faith seriously, and when he died he died.
Kirsten and her mother keep fighting about her excommunication until Kirsten's pager goes off. Alerting her to an unfolding emergency situation that requires immediate attention. Kovacs has left his hotel again!
Cut to Kovacs exploring a grungy, drug-and-prostitution filled neighborhood known as "licktown." He follows some familiar landmarks, including a recorded voice advertising a local coffee shop.
Ah, this is the street where Lizzie was murdered.
He quickly finds the specific building that she was found behind. The neon "Jack" sign is apparently short for "Jack-it-off," as the place is an extremely seedy and cheap-looking brothel. Like, literally the first thing you see past the bouncer is the hall of glory holes. Kovacs enters the building, leaves his handgun with the bouncer, and goes to one of the private cubicles. A woman starts trying to get money out of him, and it turns out to be an actual woman, not an AR sim or anything. I guess she could be an embodied AI like Poe, but I don't think so. Kovacs lets her smear her body up against his before telling her that he's actually here for information. Specifically, about a girl who he suspects used to work here.
Upon hearing Lizzie's name, the hooker drops the work persona immediately, straightens up in a posture of anger and fear, and tells him to get the fuck out before she calls security. Kovacs responds by pulling out the absolute wildest lie ever and saying that he's Lizzie's mother, Ava, who got snuck out of jail in a male sleeve by someone who needed hacking work done, and that "she" wants to know what happened to her daughter.
He's mixing plenty of truth into the colossal fucking bald-faced lie, with the "someone got me out of jail for shady reasons" part. But still, holy shit that's a bold one.
And it works.
He gets the woman to tell him that Lizzie had an anonymous, very wealthy, regular, probably a meth. But she doesn't think he would have done anything to Lizzie or "any of his other girls." He's one of the good slumming meths. When he kills one of his favorite hookers, he always buys them a brand shiny new sleeve, often younger, healthier, and hotter than the body they had before.
"Whenever" he kills one. As in, this has happened more than once prior to what happened with Lizzie.
Also, when he removed the gaudy necklace of the woman he's talking to, he finds a mess of bruises, as if from a combination of hands and ropes. When asked if the same meth did this to her, she neither confirms nor denies it.
Well then.
He asks if Lizzie might have had a jealous boyfriend or the like, but her former coworker doesn't know. She and Lizzie got along pretty well, but they were never close friends exactly. Still in character as Lizzie's mother, Kovacs gives her some inspirational words about how she shouldn't let her customers hurt her, no matter how badly she needs the money, if what happened to Lizzie is a potential result. The woman thanks Kovacs, and shares her own real name, Alice. She tells "Mrs. Elliot" to come back tomorrow night, and she'll try to get more information for her from the other girls. New contact acquired! Not through ethical means, but still, a good thing overall.
Speaking of people who Kovacs has introduced himself to in morally questionable ways, when he leaves the brothel again he finds Mr. Elliot waiting for him with his plasma gun.
How did he know Kovacs would be poking around here at this particular hour? Maybe he just planned to stake the place out all night every night until he showed up or something.
Well, I'll call this a post. I really do need to adopt a less verbose style with these longer episodes. I'll think about how to go about it before I start the next AC episode. For now, the final part of episode 2 will go up tomorrow.
