Altered Carbon S1E2: “Fallen Angel” (part 3)

Kovacs tries to assure Mr. Elliot (did he ever get a first name? I don't think so. I'll call him Hubert. Hubert Rudolfo Maximillian Elliot) that he's here investigating Lizzie's sort-of-murder and trying to solve it along with Bancroft's, calm down. Hubert asks why the hell Kovacs would even care about Lizzie, and Kovacs truthfully answers that he doesn't, but solving her case might be part of solving his employer's. That isn't a good enough answer for Hubert, but the discourse is put on hold by the arrival of a pair of roided-up cyborgs who are here to attack one or both of them.

It doesn't seem likely to me that these guys are just random robbers choosing to go after two armed and strong-looking men. Whoever sent Dimitri last time is now trying a semi-mechanized approach.

Before attacking, they shout "you shouldn't have come back," but it's not clear if they're addressing Kovacs or Hubert. "You shouldn't have come back from the dead" or "you shouldn't have come back to this neighborhood after the last time we warned you about heckling everyone about your stupid daughter." Could just as easily be either. They appear to go for Hubert first, but that may just be because his back was turned.

There's a short punchout that I can't really say much about because between the darkness and the shakycam it's really hard to see what's going on. Then a police hovercar arrives, causing the cyborgs to scamper before they can get arrested. Hubert looks like he's about to do the same thing, but is taken aback when he sees Kovacs just stand in the searchlight, drop his gun, and raise his hands up. Kovacs tells him to hurry up and GTFO before he gets hit by a facial ID or something, and Hubert gratefully does.

New contact acquired! Kovacs is just Commander Sheparding this, wandering around the hub city and building the team by committing crimes.

Kovacs is arrested for "organic damage." Seems like a hard case to make, given that the other three combatants all vanished so it's impossible to say who inflicted injuries on whom. But, naturally, Ortega made sure she was the officer onsite to make the arrest, so that doesn't matter.

On one hand, the narrative has sort of proven her right. Almost every time Kovacs goes somewhere unsupervised, criminal violence happens. On the other, she was like this even *before* that started happening, so I really don't know what to think of her at this point.

At the station, Ortega admits that she can't really charge him with anything with the available evidence, but she's going to hold him overnight anyway because she's Kirsten Ortega. Before leaving him in his cell, she asks him why he's still working for Bancroft after all that he's learned about the man at this point. Wait, when did she start assuming that Kovacs had that kind of moral compass? True, he told her he was planning to choose death over Laurens Bancroft earlier, but he framed that as a pride/will-to-live thing rather than a moral objection.

Also, her asking him this after finding him outside the Jack-It-Off specifically suggests that she knows about Laurens' predilections. Just a detail that might be important later.

Anyway, in response to her (inane, but whatever) question, Kovacs tells Ortega that before he was a Falconerite, he was a Protectorate black ops agent. *Very* black ops, he doubts there was ever an official record of it anywhere. He's been a state-sponsored killer. He's been a mercenary hired gun and human trafficker. He's been a revolutionary. What it all comes down to in relation to her question is, basically:

He may or may not be telling the truth about the black ops part. I don't think it's been hinted at, and like he said it's not like there'd be any proof. But I don't doubt it either.

She tells him that if he goes far enough, she WILL be there to stop him. Kovacs wryly comments that he's not sure she's any better than he is, and certainly not any more self-controlled. Then Officer Sanely walks up and tells Ortega that no, she cannot just arbitrarily hold Kovacs overnight just to fuck with him. Ortega is silent. Kovacs chuckles. Soon, Prescott the lawyer arrives to retrieve Kovacs, telling Ortega that she's going to regret it really badly if she keeps doing this kind of shit. I'm pretty sure at this point that Ortega either isn't capable of regret, or just regrets everything about her own existence so much that no one thing can phase her.

Then we see Blondie being thrown off the boat again. Okay.

Then Ortega sneaks into the city morgue, carefully avoiding being spotted, and pads up to a cell labeled "empty." She opens it, and an automated voice says "this cell is empty." These things don't seem to have very good internal sensors though, because Blondie is in it.

I guess that's the missing body from the open case, not one that's been frozen for three hundred years or whatever. Maybe the kid in that boat at the beginning *wasn't* actually Takeshi Kovacs. The voiceover made it seem like it was, but maybe not. Or maybe throwing dead blond girls into bodies of water is just a longrunning galactic fad, who knows.

Anyway, Ortega unfridges the dead girl and whispers that she hopes she knows how much her mother loves her. Oh god what has Ortega been doing to this corpse she stole holy fuck why.

Fortunately, we now jump back over to Kovacs. He returns to the Raven, and finds Poe in a pulp detective outfit waiting for him in the lobby.

Yes yes, the cyberpunk genre drew heavily on 1930's pulp/noir aesthetics, I'm very grateful that you went out of your way to point that out to us show, we didn't know.

It's one of those things that makes sense and is fairly endearing for Poe in character, but Doylistically (heh, no double entendre intended!) kind of annoys me.

Poe tells Kovacs that he'd like to serve as the quirky but dependable partner for this detective story. I guess that's *close enough* to Chief/Cortana, but given that Poe uses a physical (human sleeve?) avatar it makes the most sense. Kovacs tells him fuck no and shuts the elevator door behind him as he heads to his room. Poe follows him (actually, he seems to teleport or something. Maybe he has holographic projections as well as his actual physical avatar) and tells him that there's also someone waiting for him up in the penthouse.

Poe assures him that, unfortunately, he was powerless to stop this one, even though he really wanted to in order to follow his guest's instructions. Either Ortega badgered her boss into giving her a warrant, or it's more Bancroft fuckery. Turns out it's the second one. Porn Stepmom Bancroft is here alone, for reasons that are self-evident from the nickname. She initially claims to be here to ask about progress in the investigation, but that's pretty transparent. Kovacs asks her if she knows what her husband does down in Licktown when she goes home early for the night and so forth, and she says that she does. Being married to someone for over a century is complicated, she explains, and she's learned to deal with complication. The boundaries she's set is that he can't have children with anyone else, and so far he seems to have kept to that (naturally, she doesn't think the dangerous, abusive nature of what he's doing to the prostitutes is something that even bears commenting on). That said, the constant complexity does get exhausting for her, and Kovacs seems like the antidote to that.

Remember, she started eyefucking him pretty much the moment she saw him, and she hasn't exactly taken the time to get to know him yet. She decided that this is what he was before she even met him.

...

It's an interesting scifi reinvention of the colonialist fetishizing phenomenon. The idea that subjugated peoples are more raw and primal and have an animalistic allure that their conquerors lack, often without any research or close observation of their culture at all. Only here it's not being done along racial lines, or even really class lines (though there's obviously an element of that), but temporal ones.

In addition to fucked up European sex fantasies about Africans and Native Americans and so forth, this also brings to mind an article series I read a while ago about romanticization of a culture's own "noble savage" past. It's the same kind of romanticism that turns up in pseudo-traditionalist regressive ideologies a lot.

Kovacs has the double whammy of having been brought here straight from the past and therefore not had a chance to be corrupted and watered down by modernity, and being a dangerous, mysterious outsider (whose society was destroyed by her own) due to being an Envoy.

It's a surprising mixture of concepts, but one that really makes sense if you think about it even a little.

...

Getting over his revulsion takes some visible effort on Kovacs' part, but he decides that giving her what she wants shouldn't be any more painful than doing detectivework for her husband. Maybe she has some secret plot of her own that she's trying to embroil him in. Maybe she really is just a spoiled horny idiot. If the former, he'll try to figure out her angle and beat her at her own game. If the latter, then maybe he can use her to get at her husband somehow. Either way, submission is the tactically optimal decision for now.

This scene gets a lot of praise from me, really. The camerawork and dialogue is done just right to titillate a little bit while also being extremely unsexy for most of its runtime. Doing that with a pair of attractive actors in dim mood lighting is an accomplishment. The effect, overall, is to make the audience feel more or less what Kovacs is feeling. On one hand, sure, she's hot, and there's the transgressive allure of doing his tyrant boss's wife (even if it probably wouldn't actually bother him if he found out). On the other, this is an almost literal monster he's indulging, and what she's doing is more an act of dominance than of mere innocent lust - it's the sexual version of putting his friends' melted cortical stacks on display for children to gawk at. And it feels like it.

As they start, she also recites an almost infomercial-like list of sexy traits that her trophy wife sleeve comes with. Her body fluids can all get you high, apparently, and she has some fucked up neurotransmitter nano-agents that let her and her partners feel each other's sensations during intercourse.

...Hmm. If all these sex drugs are active in her body in its resting state, that might explain why she's such a ridiculous thirstmistress; she's constantly getting low-key erotically stimulated by her own sleeve.

While Miriam colonizes Kovacs with her vagina, we flash back over to Ortega. She's somehow managed to get allowed in a church (maybe a non-Juggalo branch of Catholicism that schismed off in recent years or something), and is confessing her sins. She goes through quite a lot of them. There's lust, and there's wrath. There's excessive force in her line of work, and possibly outside of it. Lol, a cop who's actually ashamed of that, yeah the fuck right. She's abused her authority with results that caused immense chaos for her organization and suffering for the public she's supposed to serve and protect. Etc.

As she confesses, we briefly cut over to the morgue, where a mortician finds the missing body laid out on an autopsy table and wonders where the hell it went for all these months and why it's back now. On further investigation, the mortician finds a new incision on the back of the corpse's neck. Flash back to Ortega, and it becomes clear that the thing she's holding isn't a charm or an idol as it initially appeared, but a still-bloody cortical stack.

Well fuck. I'm guessing she think she has a way of jailbreaking the stack and forcibly reviving the murder victim. As for what's been taking her so long to do this, or why she even thought to do this when it was never a case of hers in the first place, I couldn't say. Something about this girl's murder must have gotten Ortega's attention...well, okay now that I put it like that maybe it really is just completely random lol.

The episode ends with Kovacs and Miriam tangled up in Poe's bedsheets, the former silently vowing that he WILL find a way to exploit this. Sometimes, after all, surrender is the most devastating form of attack.

Meanwhile, an unfamiliar face peeks in on them through the penthouse window.

Not sure who this guy is, or how he got up there, but I suspect he's connected to whoever's been trying to capture Kovacs. End episode.


On one hand, I'm invested enough to want to continue. On the other, I feel like I'd have a much better time of it if I read the books instead of continuing the show.

I don't actually *know* that the books are better, of course. But, the majority of the problems really do feel like bad adaptation and characteristic TV-writer hackiness. Not all of them do. For instance, the failure to follow through on the implications of the setting's transhuman technologies is fundamental enough that it pretty much has to be from the source material.

I also suspect that, just like the show, the book would have me wish I was reading about the rise and fall of a mystical philosopher-queen and her creation of supersoldiers using alien biotech instead of the traditional cyberpunk-noir exploits of one of her former soldiers. Maybe there'll be an extended backstory arc at some point, but this is definitely one of those stories where the backstory seems like it should have been the primary narrative.

Also...fucking Ortega.

Am I supposed to like her? Am I supposed to hate her? Am I supposed to be baffled by her? I honestly cannot tell what the story's intent was with her, because she's just THAT badly written. It's like, if Poe and Kovacs stick out like a sore thumb by being much better written than the supporting cast, Ortega does the opposite, making the more mundanely bad writing of most of the others look excellent by comparison. Watching her and Kovacs interact is one of the more surreal experiences I've had watching a live action show; it's almost like watching an improvised roleplay between an accomplished writer and actor and some shy, awkward teenager. The degree of unevenness is uncanny.

The concepts here aren't exactly novel, but they're still GOOD concepts, and aside from a few blind spots I like the way that the story explores and expands on them. They're good enough to make me *want* to like the show. I think I actually am succeeding at liking it. But it's hard work to look past the flaws in order to do so.


Regardless of the show's quality, it's a hell of a lot denser and more complicated than the last hour-long live action show I reviewed (Black Mirror) so I definitely need to switch to a more summary-and-analysis format with it going forward, instead of my usual live commentary.