Altered Carbon S1E3: "In a Lonely Place"

This episode opens on a flashback to Takeshi and his sister, as children, reading a picture book to themselves. It seems to be a reactive smartbook that creates text and images in response to the story they're making up as they go along, which is a cool toy. Naturally, because they're preteens, it's a cartoonishly gory attempted horror story.

...wait hold on a sec.

That kid definitely looks like it's supposed to be a younger version of his previous sleeve, and he's acting the same age as his body in this scene. But when they resleeved him in the pilot, it showed them scrolling through a bunch of mugshots of previous sleeves before this one, all with the legend "Takeshi Kovacs" written next to them.

I'm confused.

Regardless of my confusion on that front, the Kovacs children hear their parents shouting, and hide in the closet. Their drunk-sounding father is freaking out at their frightened looking mother. Something about how they moved all the way out to a new planet to start a new life, and she's *still* complaining about everything. The two of them wander into the room the children are hiding in, where he starts beating her to the ground. Babby Takeshi turns to his sister and says something that a mediocre writer might think a little kid would say in this situation.

Back in the present, Kovacs is doing his morning routine when Poe comes to his room with two pieces of disconcerting news. The first is that Laurens has demanded his presence the Bancroft skycastle this evening, no further explanation. The second, quite possibly related, is that Poe's security systems were hacked last night, and someone used his blindness to sneak a camera drone disguised as an insect into the hotel. He caught and destroyed it before it could escape, but it very likely had already sent the footage out.

So that's what the face in the "window" last night was. That guy wasn't actually peeking in the hotel window, he was leaning over his monitor while watching the live footage from his drone.

Anyway, from what Miriam said about their relationship I don't think Laurens really cares about what she did last night...but she could well have been misrepresenting it. Still, the timing is a little ominous.

Later that morning, Laurens calls Kovacs and asks him why he hasn't yet RSVP'd tonight's dinner party. And, happily, it turns out that there actually is a party going on tonight, and even more happily it's happening because Laurens actually decided to do as his hand-picked private investigator advised him. He's invited a long list of fellow meths to this party, including quite a few grudge-bearers and business rivals. He'd never be able to get Kovacs a chance to properly interview or investigate these potential suspects, but letting them freely interact at a party without the others knowing who and what Kovacs is might be nearly as good.

Looks like Laurens actually managed to pull his head partway out of his ass. Nice. And he either doesn't know or doesn't care about Kovacs' head having been in Miriam's. Also nice.

Kovacs is still nervous about this, though. Laurens might not be willing to kill off his valuable super-investigator over this, and he doesn't really have much to threaten him with besides that, but still, Kovacs doesn't like the timing. Poe says that he'd be happy to come with and watch his back, but alas he can't control an avatar that far away from his central brain in the Raven.

That line of thought does give Kovacs an idea, though. After confirming that Poe has unrestricted internet access even if his realspace capabilities are limited, he asks him if he can get himself a certification for "psychosurgery therapeutics." He can, and does so within the space of seconds when requested. I'm surprised that that kind of software is available for free, but maybe we're supposed to infer that Kovacs is paying for it using that huge bank account that Laurens gave him and that Poe just took this for granted. Poe has now been upgraded to a multipurpose hotel-host/brain-surgeon bot.

Cut to the police department, where Ms. Prescott the lawyer has come to ask Ortega why the fuck she tried to hold Kovacs without cause last night, and also to invite her to dinner.

Oh ho ho? Laurens considers Ortega to be a murder suspect? I'm not sure why else he'd have invited her to this event. And, this would mean that he thinks she had a grudge against him even before she botched his murder investigation. How did she get put ON that investigation then, I wonder?

The only other reasons I can think of for him to request her specifically like this would be 1) just to be petty at her some more, or 2) in the hopes that she'll goad Kovacs into throwing her off the edge.

In any case, there's a reason she's being approached at the department rather than at home. Apparently, Laurens Bancroft filled out an application for an "organic damage permit" this morning, and has specially requested Ortega to be the mandatory officer onsite to "oversee the bout." Sounds like gladiators are a thing. I guess that makes sense in this setting. I wonder if this will also be his cover story for who Kovacs is and why he's in attendance; impressing the guests in the fighting pit might give him a chance to get private conversations with some of them.

Anyway Ortega is miffed about this. While she'd normally be happy at opportunities to troll the Bancrofts such as this would likely provide, the fact that Laurens requested her specifically suggests that he's a step ahead of her on this one. She tries to convince the chief that she doesn't have time for this, she's got cases to work, but he tells her they can't really say no to the meth after the shit she pulled on his agent the other night.

...

Missed writing opportunity here. His response to her saying she has cases to work on should have been "Oh, really? I never would have guessed, you sure haven't been acting like it."

Oh well.

...

When we return to Kovacs, he's returning to the shantytown that I only now realized is built onto/into what used to be the Golden Gate Bridge.

On one hand, that's some cool scenery. On the other, I'm almost surprised it's still standing at all. Given the state of California's infrastructure I'm not sure if we should expect it to last until 2050, let alone 2500 or whatever year it's supposed to be.

He finds his way to a not-yet-repaired door and, since he's now a close and trusted friend of the occupant, strides in without knocking or announcing.

After snatching away Hubert's pistol and removing the cartridge (Kovacs has gotten better at predicting his moves with experience, it seems), Kovacs tells him that he just created a competent psychosurgeon and will lend him to Lizzie in exchange for some fieldwork. Huh, I guess psychosurgery includes memory/personality doctoring of disembodied stacks. Also...if AI's can gain that many new skills that quickly, then that raises yet another can of worldbuilding worms that the rest of the setting doesn't seem to have taken into account, but I'm starting to get numb to that at this point. Regardless, Hubert replies that he doesn't want any treatment paid for - even indirectly - by Bancroft (okay, so Kovacs did pay for Poe's medical degree back there. Got it), but Kovacs tells him that he really, really doesn't think Laurens is actually responsible for what happened to Lizzie. Try as he might, he can't think of a reason why a guy who normally buys his hookers shiny new sleeves when he breaks one would have randomly made an exception, or failed to pony up for psychosurgery in the event that something like this happened.

Hubert says that killing hookers is still pretty fucked up regardless of whether you resurrect them afterward. Kovacs agrees, but says that that's beside the point. If he can count on Hubert's security and criminal contact assistance for the duration of the Bancroft murder investigation, he will not only have Poe do what he can for Lizzie but also investigate what happened to her as well. And, if it turns out that Kovacs is wrong in his intuitions and that Laurens really did leave Lizzie for dead with software damage, he'll help Hubert permakill Laurens. Kovacs was probably going to do that anyway just on principle, so making it a team activity is no skin off his back.

Hubert repeats his assessment that Kovacs doesn't give a shit about Lizzie's welfare. Kovacs requests that Hubert stop leading the conversation off on these irrelevant tangents.

Next thing we know, the two of them are at the Raven, where Poe has repurposed one of his VR interfaces for use in personality repair and can begin as soon as Hubert hands over Lizzie's cortical stack.

Would it not be better to go to an actual hospital/workshop place, with specialized equipment? You'd think so. Ah well.

...also, we see Poe flicker into existence like a hologram when they enter the lobby. He WAS pouring Kovacs a physical drink earlier, though, and I'm pretty sure he's been seen carrying other definitely physical objects. Does he have some kind of hard light thing going on? If so, I feel like that technology should be seen in a lot of other places in this world where we haven't seen it. Maybe it's just a matter of him having one actual android body and also projecting holographic duplicates of it where he doesn't need actual hands? Could be.

There's also a cute moment where Poe tries to introduce himself as Kovacs' partner, or sidekick, but keeps getting shot down until he grumpily just admits that he's his landlord. Kovacs is tsundere.

Anyway, Poe explains that repeatedly spinning Lizzie up in VR space to attempt amateur therapy was a very bad move on Hubert's part. If you don't know what you're doing, the additional runtime can just cause further personality deterioration. In order to treat Lizzie, he's going to have to have her in total isolation; no virtual contact with other humans or AI's, just Poe's fine-tuned healing sim.

...

I'm predicting some malicious actor sabotaging the sim and doing something even more horrible to Lizzie.

Overly negative? Maybe. But I feel like this show is establishing a pattern when it comes to female characters being either victims or useless. Falconer could still turn out to buck that trend if she has living forks who will show up later in the story, but otherwise every woman is either a blundering pain in the ass or in the refrigerator.

Here's hoping Lizzie gets restored and is a bamf.

...

For now, Hubert agrees, but makes sure that Poe understands what will happen if he fucks this up even worse than it already is.

Everyone understands everyone else. Cool.

Now that Hubert is officially onboard, Kovacs tells him that between his extensive gun collection and his blackhat hacker wife, he seems like the kind of guy who might know other guys who might know other guys. Before going to the skycastle banquet full of murder suspects tonight, Kovacs would like the two of them to pick up some contraband equipment.

Cut back to believable, well-written character Ortega, and oh boy. This scene. This scene here. You kids ain't seen NOTHING yet. You see, Ortega has taken all the lemons that life just handed her and is gleefully trying to turn them into hot chocolate.

You know that dead Juggalo girl that was pulled out of the river? You know, the one whose case Ortega isn't supposed to have anything to do with and that she should have finally washed her hands of after returning the body she borrowed? Yeah, that one. Anyway! That girl's body was reportedly dropped into the river from the sky. OKAY, so the man and son on the boat just found the body after it fell into the water next to them, and the resemblance to young Kovacs was coincidental, got it, my bad. Well, anyway. Normally, Ortega explains to her longsuffering partner while sounding very proud of herself, bodies don't fall out of the sky. So, that means she must have been tossed out of an aircar. In possibly related news, people die when they are killed. Aircars fly high up in the air, sure, but you know who else lives high up in the air? Meths. And tonight she's going to be in a palace full of them. She'll be surrounded by suspects, and now is her big chance to investigate them! So, she's spending the afternoon until then researching the known attendants to prepare for the event.

Okay. Ortega. As you yourself just pointed out, methuselahs are not the only people with access to flight. Aircars don't seem to be rare commodities. We've seen tons of them flying around in the background in external city shots. Compare the number of Bay City residents with access to aircars to the Bay City population of meths. Oh, huh, that's not a very good ratio, is it?

Here's another subject I feel compelled to raise. The reason you have this association between "meth" and "sky" is because they live up in the aerium sky castles, right? So, if the body wasn't thrown from an aircar (which anyone could have been flying) but rather from a skycastle, then that WOULD strongly imply a meth culprit. However, it would also mean that the specific meth who did it would have to live right there at that spot. Maybe a few kilometers off if it was windy at the time, but in that case you should be able to look at the weather reports from the time and determine what direction the body would have been blown from. In which case, you'd have a (very) short list of addresses to investigate, rather than just "it could be any of the rich people."

In other words; if they can somehow tell that the body was thrown off a skycastle, then they should also be able to narrow it down to which skycastle (or, at worst, which two or three skycastles), and scrutinizing random Bancroft guests is stupid. If they can't tell what exactly the body was thrown from, then statistically it's much more likely that she was thrown out of an aircar than off the edge of a skycastle, there's no reason to assume a meth culprit, and scrutinizing random Bancroft guests is stupid.

Those are the two possibilities. Pick one.

...fucking hell, and that's not even getting into the fact that meths don't live alone up there. How many security guards and servants did we see at the Bancroft residence, in the pilot? Even assuming that Laurens had an extra large security detail at the moment due to recent events, these people have servants and security. What if the murder was done by a butler, or a rent-a-cop, or a skycastle technician, without any connection to their employers? Could you investigate THAT possibility by meeting the meths at a party?

She was complaining about how going to this party is a waste of her time when she has cases to work on. And now she's spending her entire workday on...this.

Words fail to encapsulate the sheer scope and magnitude of detective Kirsten Ortega's batshit insanity.

Her partner begs her to please, kindly, stop obsessing over cases that aren't supposed to be theirs and just help him do their actual job. In response, she looks up from the list of dinner guests with a twitching, rictus grin and asks him if he ever wondered how she got these scars.

With that psychological horror vignette over with, we return to Takeshi Kovacs and Hubert Elliot on their illegal weapon shopping spree. A kindly old shopkeeper selling seasonal Day of the Dead candies to some local children takes them deeper into his store and lets them pick out some goodies better suited for creating ghosts than honoring them.

They get a rail pistol with AP flechette rounds that you can magnetically return to the rails from a dozen meters away at high speed to hit a motherfucker in the back, a biomechanoid combat knife that secrets nerve poison along its edge, and a near-silent coil scatter-pistol. That last one, chosen by Hubert, is a very old model, but one that's remained deadly and tightly regulated throughout the centuries. Seeing it takes Kovacs back to his time at Stronghold, where Falconer used similar pistols for live fire training. And also for training that demonstrates how useless weapons of any sort are against someone with proper mastery of their own mind, body, and senses.

Well, at least when it comes to personal combat. She kinda didn't have an answer to the Protectorate burning her forest lair to the ground. But as far as face-to-face violence goes, she has several of her disciples - including Kovacs - come at her with guns and try to kill her, only to incapacitate all of them with her bare hands and feet.

Hardware is interchangeable. Software is where true value can be found. The wolf's greatest weapons are not its teeth and claws, but its hunter's instincts. And, to change the subject of the training a little, the deadliest of those instincts is its pack behavior. Assess individuals with useful abilities and resources for ways they can be made loyal. Create a cell at whatever location you are needlecast to, using whatever sleeve you find yourself in, out of whatever useful people you encounter. Integrate new software using cult of personality, just as she has already done with theirs. That is why they are to be called "Envoys." Also, remember that all assets are ultimately expendable in the interest of fueling further expansion and accomplishment of other strategic objectives.

...there's some ancient alien brain hidden underground that was speaking through Falconer, wasn't there? I'm very, very much getting "I will rebuild my civilization anew using the minds and bodies of these hu-mon scavengers as materials" vibes from Falconer.

Granted, given the direction humanity seems to have gone without being conditioned into neo-Elders, the Falconerites might have still been the better option. Maybe. I'm not as sure as I was until now.

...

Anyway, this explains something that I'd been planning to talk about at the end of this episode.

Kovacs has been very strangely...conservative? I think that's the right word?...in his choices so far. When he decided to turn in for the night, he just went for the hotel that he happened to have looked at the advertising holo of the longest, rather than researching or asking for recommendations. When looking for backup, he went with the tough guy who he already knew - regardless of how poorly their last meeting went - instead of using the ample resources at his disposal to find someone new. When he decided to offer treatment for Lizzie as payment, he upgraded the AI he already knew with the necessary skills instead of just hiring an existing psychosurgeon like most people would do.

I was wondering if this was a personal tic of Kovacs', or a trained Envoy thing. Turns out it's the latter. For them, the best choice is always the one you already have the most information about, with few exceptions. On one hand, this seems like it would make them extra vulnerable to the sunk cost fallacy. On the other...when you get *as much* as they do out of your sunk costs and would have to start all over again if you switched horses, and your missions are generally time sensitive, it may not be such a "fallacy" at all.

...

So, Kovacs has been doing what he's trained to do. Turn the first few people with the requisite skills that he meets into loyal companions by pressing the right emotional buttons and dangling the right carrots, and honing them into a team. Whether or not he'll come to value them as more than tools like his training and generally bleak worldview would have him do, I guess is the whole crux of the story.

Fastforward a bit to Kovacs and Hubert at the Raven again, new toys stowed and ready for tonight's mission. To kill time, they're watching Poe's current attempt at rehabilitating Lizzie on a monitor. She can't have any interactions outside of Poe's control, but they can at least watch from outside the sim. After applying a range of seemingly nonsensical, but actually very carefully medically calibrated, sensory stimuli, Poe is able to get Lizzie to say something besides nazgul screams.

She seems to have mentally regressed somewhat, and is rambling sort of poetically about her mother getting arrested and put on ice for stealing meth personal data. It's progress. Significant progress. Her father wasn't able to get coherent words out of her at all, and Poe has her at least saying something meaningful within less than a day's work. Poe informed them that this would likely require prolonged treatment, given the extent of the personality degradation, but he's off to a good start. The screen then snows out as Poe begins a more abstract therapy without visual elements.

Hubert freaks out at first, banging on the screen and demanding to see more, but Kovacs calms him down. He now engages in some introspection, realizing the extent to which he's been failing his daughter. He's also got some weird, almost luddite, ideas about what a parent should and shouldn't be able to do. He's bothered by Poe, despite not even being human, being able to reach his daughter in a day when her father trying for months couldn't. Seeming to gloss over the fact that Poe is (as of his upgrade) a licensed medical professional, while Hubert is a guy who's good at punching things.

I'm getting worse and worse vibes from Mr. Elliot, to be honest. That kind of overcontrolling, egotistical parenting, where you feel like you've failed if you personally can't do everything your children need yourself, is extremely toxic. And betrays a motive other than actual concern for the child's wellbeing.

Anyway, Kovacs pours them some drinks and tells Hubert to calm down.

He then changes subjects to tonight's mission. Kovacs wants Hubert on hand, watching his back and ready to defend it, for the entire evening. And no, he is NOT to do any poking around of his own or confrontation of Laurens Bancroft about Lizzie. That comes later. For now, Hubert is paying his side of the bargain and being security, that's it. Hubert agrees, and seems serious about it. Jump ahead to that evening, and the party at Bancroft Skycastle.

I will say, I appreciate the costume design that went into this scene. You can't see more than a little of it in any one screenshot, but there are a range of styles and fashions on display, including some weird-but-plausible looking ones that you wouldn't see anything like at a modern San Francisco rich person's party. It doesn't go super over the top, and it maintains some design elements between different styles so that they look like products of an actual fashion industry following actual trends. It's well done. Kovacs is wearing a modern looking tux, and various others criticize him for it.

Kovacs enters the main building, and passes through the metal detector. Apparently, Laurens didn't give him any special permissions, because the guards just look dumbfounded when they take one of his pistols out of his back. Kovacs has the best explanation ever for them, though:

How are Kovacs and Ortega in the same script? It's seriously night and day.

Disarmed (at least, to the best of the guards' ability), Kovacs wanders through the foyer. He hears a soft, otherworldly chanting sound coming from the songspire tree; it's not clear if he's the only one who can hear it, or if everyone can. He gives a surreptitious greeting nod to Hubert, who is dressed as a waiter and very, very awkwardly carrying a tray of drinks around while looking like he's about to have a psychotic break. In his earpiece, Poe apologizes that he couldn't get him a more comfortable uniform at such short notice. Oh cool, he's being their Cortana after all, nice!

Meanwhile, Ortega - dressed unhappily in a red tube dress - swears at the guards as they take her weapon at the gate. At least she didn't try to pee on them this time.

Still mingling through the crowd, Kovacs eventually finds himself approached by Miriam Bancroft. She criticizes his boring costume, and asks if this is supposed to be his "unique something" that he was supposed to bring. Apparently this is a theme party, and everyone is supposed to bring something totally unique. Kovacs was not told about this, and he and Miriam both suspect that Laurens had an ulterior motive for doing a theme. I suppose we'll see what it was soon enough.

Kovacs also tells Miriam about the spybug. She acts unconcerned, but something about her expression hints that she's more worried than she's letting on. When Laurens joins them a moment later, his word choice and mannerisms kind of vaguely suggest that he knows what happened last night, but not conclusively. He doesn't seem too put out about it if so, though. Either way, if Miriam is worried about someone having seen one, I don't think the someone is her husband. Anyway, Laurens exchanges a few pleasantries and then tells Kovacs to meet him upstairs in a bit before vanishing. Miriam smiles forebodingly and tells Kovacs to be careful before melting away into the crowd herself.

Up on the balcony over the foyer, Ortega voice chats with her partner back at the station, telling him that all the guests have arrived and he can now feel free to start hacking into their aircar computers using the relay she planted. He repeats his earlier opinion that this is stupid and a waste of his time, but complies. How desperately does this guy want to stick his dick in crazy, exactly? Desperately enough I guess. Then Ortega spots Kovacs among the crowd, and reacts like this is some sort of horrifying twist of fate that's taken her completely by surprise.

She didn't see this coming? Really? With all the inane connections her mind seems to make, you'd think "the guy I'm obsessed with stalking" and "the party I'm obsessed with sleuthing" wires would have crossed by now? I...guess not, though.

You can just hear the dread and despair in her partner's voice when he reacts to her spotting Kovacs again.

He tries to get her to just have a drink or something and get Kovacs out of her mind. She tells him it's pretty rich for a Muslim to be proscribing her alcohol. He's a Muslim? That's weird. How could you be partnered with Ortega for multiple years and still believe in god?

...

I just realized who these two remind me of.

...

Luckily for Officer Kif, she does NOT go chasing after Kovacs as soon as she sees him, but rather goes upstairs to where the gladiators are getting ready, to do her official job at this event. She's surprised to learn that tonight's entertainment are a married couple who have killed each other's sleeves more times than they can count. Huh, interesting.

She goes through their licenses and physicals, and...then Kovacs walks into the room.

...why?

Like, I'd have snarked about it if Ortega really had forgotten what she was doing and gone chasing after him just because he had the audacity to exist in her presence, but at least it would have made sense in character. Why would he come in here? Especially when Laurens has just told him he wants to talk with him somewhere else? The only explanation I can think of is that Kovacs noticed Ortega and decided to follow her, but then why would he just walk up and make his presence known now while she's dealing with the fighters?

This feels shoehorned. Like, the writers just needed Kovacs to be present here for whatever reason, and made it happen without much justification.

And also, this scene is just badly written. Really, really badly written. It's a rare case where Kovacs seems to have the same bad TV writing as most of the supporting cast. Apropos of nothing, the gladiators randomly tell him that they have kids, aged 5 and 7. Kovacs asks them if it bothers them to have their parents coming home in strange bodies all the time. They tell him they're used to it. He insists that they aren't. Then Ortega decides that she does need a drink after all, and Kovacs follows her and randomly tells her about someone having spied on him and Miriam last night.

That kind of drive-by busybody judgement is so out of character for Kovacs it had me reeling. He judges the lifestyles of the people around him silently, or to his companions after the fact, but he doesn't proactively moralize at people like this. When he does give people life advice - like Alice in the previous episode - it's been from a place of sympathy for their circumstances, not self-righteousness. And then the scene just abruptly ends with Ortega leaving and Kovacs following her and volunteering this information that she has no reason to care about...it's not good.

Also, Ortega seems to get salty about Kovacs having had Miriam's clit in his eye. Is she jealous? It's written and acted like she's jealous. Holy shit what is even this lady's damage.

She leaves Kovacs in disgust and tells him to stay out of her way. To her credit, this is the one time that she's said that after he approached her rather than the reverse. So, like. In this tiny little few-second sequence, she's actually being the sane one. Weird. Like I said, this is not a good scene.

After they part ways, Kovacs heads up to where Laurens is waiting in the buffet room. Hubert is also in the room...uh oh, something bad could happen if he loses control. Good thing Kovacs got here before that could happen. Anyway, Kovacs follows Laurens to a private corner, where the latter tells him that he's had some new thoughts on which of the guests are likely suspects. Laurens continues to be much more cooperative with his investigator than he's been in the previous episodes. Kovacs says that he probably should have shared more information with him before now, including his habit of temporarily murdering lower-class prostitutes. That's the sort of thing that might attract negative attention to a person, ya know? Okay, here Kovacs is moralizing again, but given the circumstances it feels much more natural and in character for him.

Laurens is fairly nonchalant about this accusation, simply telling Kovacs that he didn't think it was all that relevant. After all, he pays his girls well and even upgrades their sleeves afterward. He's done quite a few other dangerous leisure activities in his time - including zero gravity knife fighting - that involve sleeve death as a matter of course, and he doesn't view this as any different. Also, he tells Kovacs, unlike him, he actually has a line he won't cross. Laurens Bancroft has never, and will never, permanently kill a human being.

Yeah, because no one has suffered permanent death because of his business practices, or at the hands of police or military defending his interests. Uhuh. Right. Kovacs doesn't seem to buy this paper-thin veneer of self-righteousness any more than I do, but he wisely keeps it to himself for now.


Halfway point of the episode. Splitting it here.