Altered Carbon S1E4: “Force of Evil”

We start with Kovacs, still unconscious, being wheeled out of his stasis cell of unintentional musical comedy and into some kind of operating room. A bad actor pretending to be some kind of evil businessman or something asks a pair of technicians if they're ready to do the thing already. The technicians, who are acted better than their boss but still not well, assure him that they'll "crack him like a walnut."

Kovacs has now had a bunch of wires attached to his head. And the gurney across the room from his has another person on it with similar wires, who I guess is about to perform inception on him.

At a guess? These people who have been trying and eventually succeeding at capturing Kovacs don't actually have anything to do with Bancroft's murder. They're hunting for Quellcrest Falconer's hidden personality forks (or at least, her method of creating Envoys), and they're hoping Kovacs knows something. Let's see how close I am.

...all that said, I'm still not sure why they needed to take Kovacs alive. You'd think killing his sleeve and spinning him up in VR would make this easier? Dunno.

Bad actor boss leaves the room, and the technicians get to work. While having a sort of hilarious-in-context (despite their meh acting) argument about needing to respect women in the workplace. What makes it even more darkly funny is that apparently the bounty hunters also brought back Alice's dead body, and some machines are dissecting it in the background as they talk. Respect wahmen, right.

They turn on the dream inceptor, and we see a half-naked Kovacs in some kind of bombed out metal bunker. I'm guessing they're drawing on a painful memory or something for this sim, with this being the ruins of Falconer's base or something. Suddenly, one of the bounty hunters materializes behind him and attacks. Kovacs fights back, but - as the assailant gleefully explains - this sim is limiting his speed and strength and also making his virtual bones easier to break.

I guess this is a conventional torture sim, rather than anything weirder or more psychological like I initially thought.

Also...the man tormenting him has a Russian accent, and some familiar ultraviolent tics. Ah, I didn't think he was back already, due to how silent this character was during his Jack-It-Off ambushes as opposed to his other self's bombast. I guess Dimi the Twin was just behaving professionally and taking this mission much more seriously after Kovacs took out one of his forks.

Dimi calls for a gurney and restraints, and the technicians running the sim cause them to materialize. Dimi can easily manhandle Kovacs in this sim, and throws him onto the gurney and puts him in the cuffs. I'm...not really sure why they didn't just have him start in that position in the first place. Maybe just to demonstrate the futility of trying to fight before the torture starts.

Cut to the Raven, where Hubert is reviewing the security footage he stole from the Bancroft skycastle. For some reason, Kovacs is still tolerating his presence here, and letting him review the security data that he risked ruining their mission and getting his daughter's benefactor killed to steal. He finds nothing, but it's a very informative nothing; three hours worth of security footage and records were deleted from the skycastle's main computer, and it's a three hour period that corresponds with the time at which Lizzie was assaulted. Now that's suspicious.

...a little *too* suspicious, honestly. It's not like the deeds would have been done at the skycastle itself. All the footage would show was that Laurens left before the incident and returned after it, and there could be a million alibis for that. At the same time, I doubt this is a coincidence. This feels planted. For someone to plant it though, they'd need to know an awful lot about Kovacs and his allies, which narrows it down to just two suspects as far as I can recall.

1) Poe. In this case, it might not be a willful betrayal so much as him having just been hacked.

2) The mustache guy with the bug-drones who was spying on Kovacs and Miriam. I don't think he was working for Laurens; Laurens would have had plenty of other, more elegant, means of finding out what his wife was up to.

Of course, it could easily be both. Poe mentioned that the spy must have hacked his security systems in order to get his drone inside. If he could do that, maybe he can also listen in on Poe's conversations or access his memories.

For now, Hubert is just getting angry and shouting at himself over the lack of anything actionable. When Poe comes into the (lobby? lounge?) room, Hubert demands to be allowed to speak with Lizzie in the sim. She's kinda sorta interacting with Poe now, so certainly seeing her father would help her at this point, right? Also, he really needs to ask her for specific details about the night that traumatized her to the point of personality death, that won't screw anything up I'm sure. Poe tells him that that would be 100% out of the question, and Hubert gets not only furious at Poe, but disbelieving.

...

The vibes that I got before about Hubert being a narcissistic parent are just getting stronger and stronger.

He cares about getting revenge for his daughter much more than he cares about his daughter. It's all just pride and ego for him. Little to no actual love.

At this point I'm actually starting to doubt that Ava is in jail and not hiding from him somewhere.

...

Poe brushes his stupid feelings off entirely, and - to add insult to injury - he does so while wearing a crash victim "fall holiday" costuming mess and spreading similarly schizophrenic decorations, all with a giant, goofy grin.

Hubert then goes off on Poe about how all holidays are about family and community, two things which a creature like him could never understand or appreciate. Holy fuck the projection. Did Poe hit a little close to home there by pointing out your insistence on putting your daughter at greater risk so that you can go and do some manly violence in her name, Hubert? I think Poe touched a nerve there.

Poe just placidly counters by explaining that he knows more about community and the value thereof than the vast majority of humans. In his decades without customers, he felt a loneliness and despair at not being able to perform his function that nearly broke him. He spent much of that half century insane, punctuated by agonizing fits of torturous awareness and sanity. So yes, he knows damned well how important community and social ritual is, thank you very much for asking, jackass.

...

I don't know if I should believe Poe either here, though. If he was really that miserable being a failed hotel for all those years, why didn't he just switch industries like his former union buddies all did?

Yeah. That even being an option makes Poe's current story hard to believe.

I can't tell if this is just the writers having goldfish memories, or if I'm actually supposed to be catching on to Poe being a manipulative liar.

...

Poe then tells Hubert that if he's so concerned with the holiday spirit, perhaps he ought to consider crawling up to Kovacs on his face and begging his forgiveness for that stunt he pulled the other night. Hubert just blows up at him all over again for that, of course. Then Hubert has his first coherent thought of the episode so far, and asks Poe where Kovacs even is anyway. Poe doesn't know. Hubert pressures him into activating the tracking app that he automatically installed in Kovacs' smartphone when he rented his room, and Poe reluctantly does so even though doing that without Kovacs' own instruction isn't technically what he's supposed to do.

Cut back to Kovacs, whose avatar is still restrained in virtual space by Dimi the Twin's avatar while both their bodies lay on cots in the lab. Dimi tells him (for some reason...) that they're in a place called the Wei Clinic; a business that specializes in data extraction from resistant subjects. This appears to be an aboveboard and legitimate company. Yay dystopia.

Dimi then asks Kovacs his first question: "who do you work for?" Which is either just a test question, or Dimi really isn't working for anyone with knowledge or interest in the Bancroft case. I'd already kind of figured as much, but this is another data point. The beginning of the interrogation cues a flashback to early in Kovacs' Envoy training, when Falconer was teaching him and some other disciples how to resist torture. Specifically, how to resist torture in a world where VR technology allows them to torture you to death as many times as they want and then keep on going.

Also, it's notable that this scene opens with the camera descending through the forest canopy and passing some kind of cloaking field, at which point the Falconerite camp shimmers into view. I wouldn't think much of that, given the ambient tech level of the setting even during this era, except that the field *appears* to be projected by the trees themselves. Which, given the association that's been made between Falconer, trees, and Elder technology, has some implications.

Falconer explains that there's no way to harden the human mind against this sort of infinite torment. Eventually, no matter how much training you've had, the torturers *will* break you. However, using her alien wisdom, the Envoys can choose to break in certain ways, at certain intervals, in a manner that can turn the tables against the interrogator.

Maybe this is partly my aforementioned weakness for Falconer's archetype talking, but this scene really demonstrates how good a job her actress has been doing. What Falconer is saying here sounds completely batshit, even in the context of a weird scifi setting, but the delivery makes you feel like if you were talking to her face to face you would have little choice but to believe it. Not only that, but the sort of charisma she uses is equal parts primal fear and primal allure. Like you can't tell if you're afraid she's about to burst out of her human suit and tear you to shreds, or if she's just the sexiest thing ever.

...okay, rereading that paragraph right after I wrote it is making me a little worried about myself, ngl.

Back to Kovacs being tortured by Dimi. He asks, once again, who Kovacs is working for. Kovacs whispers weakly under his breath, causing Dimi to lean over close to hear, only so that he can headbutt him hard enough to draw blood.

I'm not sure why Dimi's avatar is even vulnerable at all, but okay. Anyway, I assume Kovacs did this to play off of the high aggression, short temper, and machismo that the last Dimi fork he fought demonstrated, though I'm not sure what he might be trying to goad him into doing this time.

Dimi retaliates by calling for the technicians to spawn some pliers for him to pull out fingernails with. Also, he refers to Kovacs as "Ryker," to the latter's confusion. Hmm. The last fork knew who Kovacs was. Is this one working off of incomplete information, or has someone deceived him about Kovacs' true identity since his other self's death?

For now, Kovacs just asks him who this Ryker character is supposed to be, and repeats his Ava Elliot cover story for the moment. In response, Dimi just tells him to cut the shit, he's been found out already. He also - apropos of nothing, as characters tend to exposit in this show - compliments "Ryker" on his cunning in hiding his tracking chip in his virtual adblocker. Once again, Kovacs has no idea what he's talking about. Wait, hold on, Kovacs the elite superspy *never checked the thing Ortega stuck on him for bugs?* Really? Eh, I suppose he could have left it there on purpose to give Ortega a false sense of security and just be playing dumb as part of his Ava Elliot routine now.

Also, Dimitri says something hilariously stupid about the tracker chip:

The building is a dead zone, Dimi gloats, so his employer isn't going to be able to come rescue him.

So...the GPS beacon tracked Kovacs to the known and registered corporate torture facility and then vanished. Not *before* they brought him there. As they entered the building.

-____-

Yeah. No way could anyone possibly figure out where he is based on that information. Truly, the perfect crime.

Cut to the police station. Oh no. Oh god. I'm predicting nothing short of complete and utter existential agony as I watch Ortega try to solve the difficult puzzle that I outlined above. I do not have enough popcorn, booze, or lung capacity for this.

Well, we're not getting that psychedelic spectacle just yet as it turns out. Ortega, Kif, and some police IT guy we haven't met before are going over footage from the skycastle party that Ortega recorded on her iris cams. And, while it's not the same sanity-blasting shitshow I was expecting, this scene still ends up delivering an absolutely sterling example of Kirsten Ortega being herself. It starts with her trying to convince the other two that she saw a man at the party who doesn't show up in the footage. And, holy shit, just think about everything we know about Ortega so far and then read the caption in this screenshot:

Remember that time when Ruby, Weiss, and Blake were all telling Yang that they know she'd never randomly cripple someone on an impulse? I also remember that.

It's official: Officer Garfield Minus Garfield is now the Psychopatch of this Let's Watch.

Ortega gets a reprieve when the tech guy - after making an EXTREMELY stilted sexist comment about having thought Ortega was just on the rag and seeing things, which...okay, to be fair to the guy, while people in general don't suffer hallucinations during menstruation, if there was ever an exception to that it would be Ortega...but either way, that line was still stiff and inorganic as all hell - does a microscan for air movements in the footage. It turns out there is in fact a ghostly humanoid figure moving around the party where Ortega says she saw this suspicious character. Okay, fair enough! Ortega's description of the man she saw also matches that of the guy who used the bug drones to spy on Kovacs at the Raven, so there's definitely plot stuff happening. My guess is that this mystery saboteur learned about Kovacs' partnership with Hubert during his Raven hack, and then went to the Bancroft party in order to delete the security footage and send them chasing after shadows.

Of greater interest to Kif and the straw misogynist tech guy is the fact that if the man was visible to the naked eye but doesn't show up on camera then he must be using a previously unknown stealth technology. Guys, seriously, it's called being a vampire, please try to use your heads. Anyway, just as it seems like Ortega might actually not be crazy after all, she declares that this invisible party guest is their prime suspect in the murder of the Juggalo girl. Her logic being that if he can make himself disappear from cameras, maybe he can make other people disappear too. Despite this case not in any way requiring the perp or victim to be invisible to cameras.

As usual the other characters recognize this as complete moon logic.

But, also as usual, they don't follow the implications of this through and decide that Ortega needs a mental health related leave of duty. Kif keeps reluctantly following along, and tech douche seems to do likewise. The latter mumbling about how he really shouldn't be getting involved with any bizarre side-investigations right now after the higher ups are already on his case about that locater chip that vanished from the inventory.

We've gone past Kafkaesque and are tumbling into Junji Itoh territory.

Ortega then leaves the computer lab, reminding Kif to come over to her place for the Dia de los Muertos dinner her mom is cooking. As she steps out into the department's main room, she begins a voice call with said mom, and gets very irate at an arrestee for daring to shout and make noise while being arrested when she's trying to talk to her mom on the clock. Yes, she actually says this out loud, to him and the other officers escorting him. She goes "Shut up, I'm talking to my mother!" while in uniform, in the station. This happens in the show.

The suspect responds, bizarrely, by making a sexist comment. Between this, IT douche, and the conversation between the torture techies at the beginning, I feel like this episode is trying to say something about workplace misogyny, but I don't know what. Anyway, in response to the arrestee's comment, she tazes him unconscious.

As one does.

She then immediately goes back to arguing with her mother about the cooking for tonight. And only notices after the fact when the arresting officers have just walked away and left her with the unconscious prisoner. The station is understaffed due to the holidays, so she's forced to drag his insensate body into holding herself. I'd call this instant karma, but the other cops don't really come out of this scene looking much better than her.

She puts the prisoner in a cell and is about to leave him there when suddenly she stops in the doorway, turns around, and stares at him with a disquieting, appraising look.

Ortega. Ortega, why are you looking at him like that. Ortega. Ortega, what are you going to...no stop, I don't want to know I don't want to know I don't want to know I don't want to know.....

Mercifully, we cut away from whatever horrors are about to unfold and return to the much more wholesome scene of a man being tortured.

Dimi asks Kovacs why he's prying into the Lizzie Elliot incident, and isn't satisfied when Kovacs repeats that he's her mother. Dimi insists that he is Ryker, and that his use of a police issue tracker proves it. Guess Ryker is a cop. Dimi then pulls off a fingernail, and asks another question: "who hired you to kill my brother?" While he says the word "brother," his face momentarily glitches into that of the fork Kovacs and Poe killed in the pilot.

I guess he thinks of his personality copies as "brothers," then.

...and, Kovacs the observation-focused superhuman only now realizes who he's talking to.

-_____-

I really hope he's just playing stupid here, rather than the writers not realizing they've made him actually stupid. I could tell as soon as this guy started talking that he was a Dimi fork. I suspect most other audience members also could. If Kovacs' powers of perception and insight are worse than an average watcher's, then the show has just failed to do justice to the Envoy concept.

Or, more charitably, this is meant as an early hint that Envoys actually aren't all they're cracked up to be. But I think that's giving the creators too much credit.

At any rate, Kovacs identifies Dimi out loud, which the latter takes as Ryker finally giving up the act. Dimitri takes some issue with the nickname "the twin" though. According to him, he's worn so many faces, been so many people at once, that he's something beyond human comprehension now. Kovacs comments that what he's describing sounds more like personality decay due to excessive resleeving, which explains Dimi's erratic moods and behavior. Right, it was established that that's a risk if you don't use perfect clones like the meths do.

...also, Dimi implies that Ryker has previously claimed to be an alien. Which...either means that Kovacs did so offscreen, or that the real Ryker did this at some point, or that the entity known as Ryker actually is an alien consciousness that's infiltrated the Protectorate. The third option sounds like a joke, but if my suspicions about Falconer are correct then it's entirely possible that there might be secret Elders walking among humanity. Speaking of Falconer, we now return to the flashback.

As an example of a more primitive version of the techniques she's about to teach her Envoys, Falconer tells them about a friend and fellow revolutionary of hers who was captured by the Protectorate, allowed them to think they'd broken her under torture, and then told the interrogators she would only disclose her secrets to their commanders in person. And they were dumb enough to let her do it. And also, they somehow managed to miss the fact that she'd packed her own body with biogenic explosives, which she then activated by willing her emotional state to change so that her brain would release the right hormones to trigger.

In other words, Falconer's anti-torture technique is to count on your enemies being unbelievably stupid and incompetent. Or at least, it's a more advanced and refined transhuman superbrain version of counting on your enemies to be unbelievably stupid and incompetent.

...okay, no, sorry. If I were attending a lecture of hers and she told that story, not even her spooky alien sex charisma would keep me from wanting my money back.

She goes on to say that she can teach them to manipulate virtual environments in ways that their enemies will never be able to predict, because they won't believe it's even possible. Which...has absolutely nothing to do with what happened in that story, so way to undersell yourself there Quell. She then has her acolytes plug themselves into an Elder VR device that looks like a stone altar or something so she can start the training. Before they go in though, she has a private chat with Kovacs. He, alone among the others, already knew the dumb story about her suicide bomb friend. She hadn't been under the impression that anyone outside of the Protectorate's black ops agencies knew that story. In fact, it's the kind of humiliation that they'd probably try to keep anyone who wasn't a witness to the event from learning about.

Kovacs tells her that she knew what he was when she decided to recruit him. If she's having second thoughts now, on account of one of his victims happening to be someone she knew, then he supposes there's not much he can do about it. Just that he'll die knowing that her ideology was never as important to her as her own ego and biases.

...

It's moments like this that make me really, really want to read the damned books. Because this right here was decidedly not a product of the same minds that produced most of the shit in this episode.

...then again, it probably WOULD have to be a product of the same mind(s) that produced the suicide bomb anecdote with all of its issues. So...I don't know. I'm still leaning toward this being a book scene and a lot of the schlockier stuff from this ep being on the show writers, but if so then the book certainly still has problems of its own.

Also, hilariously, this would imply that Kovacs was one of the dumb fucks who somehow failed to notice that the prisoner's body was producing C4 instead of red blood cells or whatever. To be fair, his job might not have involved security, and if he survived the event then he couldn't have been one of the imbeciles who actually agreed to bring her to the top brass. But still. Lol.

Anyway, some pretty high brow moral philosophical content in this scene, even if it comes chained at wrist and ankle to something really dumb.

...

Falconer seems to be given pause by Kovacs' answer, as if he's made her think and check herself. It's a pretty good humanizing moment for her, on top of the decent ethics stuff. This bit makes it clear that whatever else she might be, Quellcrest Falconer is also human, with human flaws to contend with.

Cut back to the present. Dimi keeps torturing Kovacs. And, from the questions he's asking, it seems like he's been fed an extremely revisionist version of what happened to his "brother." He's under the impression that "Stryker" proactively hunted him down and assassinated him, and that someone must have hired him to do it. Hmm. Not sure what's going on with that.

Then, we cut to...somewhere? It looks like the Bay City streets, but there's a weird atmosphere effect that could just be pollution, but could also be meant to imply that this is another simulation. Ortega is walking the prisoner she brutalized into a housing complex, and attributing his shakiness to "sleeve sickness."

Ortega, what the fuck did you do?

For a moment I thought that either she's putting the guy through some messed up mindfuck sim, or that she'd put the Juggalo girl in his body and somehow defeated her anti-resurrection subsystems. But then he starts speaking Spanish, intermixed by English with a heavy Mexican accent. Which neither he, nor the dead girl's family, were heard to do until now.

Ortega, what the fuck did you do?

Back to Kovacs and Dimi. Or rather, back to Kovacs and Dimi's unconscious bodies and the technicians hovering over them. They're getting impatient; this interrogation is taking way too long, and they want to be home to their families for Halloween/DdlM. They decide its time to escalate the torture to immolation, which they're confident should end this quickly now.

The kitschy office sitcom torture chamber employees continue to be decent dark comedy, even though it's not exactly new ground for dystopian scifi to cover.

We see Dimi burn Kovacs to death, while also letting slip more about this Ryker person. Ryker, regardless of whether or not he's an alien, was a cop who Dimi tangled with in the past and eventually managed to frame for the murder of a fellow officer. He's not supposed to be out of jail for decades, if ever. Though...if that's who Dimi thinks Kovacs is, why does he think someone must have paid him to hunt his fork down? Seems like he'd have motive enough to do that on his own, once someone else let him out of jail and into a new sleeve for whatever reason. Maybe this is all just psychological torture meant to drive Kovacs insane before the real interrogation can start, idk. Then, Ortega brings the prisoner home, where her mother, her brother, and his wife and children are waiting to start dinner. In the body of the prisoner, Kirsten's grandmother greets her daughter, grandson, and the others, and Kirsten smiles and bids them all happy Dia de los Muertos.

Over dinner, it comes out that Granny Ortega is something of an apostate who objected to the church's ban on postmortem resleeving. It's not explained if she's had other bodies after her original one and before tonight, but in any case it's a point of great contention within the family.

When they ask Kirsten why the hell she brought her back in *this* body of all possible options, Kirsten just says that it was the only one still on sale for that special discount that she could afford by the time she got a chance to make the purchase. Smooth delivery. Without blinking.

The candles that the Ortegas light as they welcome grandma home with mixed emotions cut directly to the blowtorch Dimi is currently torturing Kovacs with. I don't know if the intent is to draw a (rough) moral equivalence, or if it's meant to be tonal irony, but I don't think you need me to tell you which reading I favor.

Back in time, Falconer has Kovacs enter a practice torture sim. In which she and himself seem to be alone together, even though we saw several other Envoys-in-training go in at the same time. I think the implication is that Falconer is giving them all simultaneous one-on-one mentoring. Which means that either she's forked herself multiple times within this Elder VR device, or she's got something much weirder going on. She explains that this sim is designed to pull a mix of unpleasant memories from Kovacs' past. Anything that made him feel trapped, or powerless. We see elements of his childhood home mixed with what looks like a military bunker, and eventually some armored praetorians appear as well.

The military did something to Kovacs himself, before he joined them or (more likely) causing his desertion? Or maybe this is drawing on Kovacs' guilt over his own career as an assassin and torturer, feeling trapped in the monstrous organization he'd joined. Could be either.

Kovaca manages to free himself from the chains he's restrained in, steal a gun, and defeat the praetorians, but then Falconer just disables the virtual gun and warps him back into his chains. There's no beating the simulation, she tells him. Instead of fighting it, he needs to fight the people running it. Wrest control of it from them.

Return to the Ortegas, who are now joined by Kif. Right, Kirsten invited him over. Does the poor guy really have no life aside from his relationship with her? He stands by her through all her madness at work, going along with it over his own constant objections. And apparently he has nowhere else to go for Halloween then to her? No family or non-work friends of his own? Fucking hell, they really are Zap Brannigan and Kif. I hope he starts dating Amy soon.

Meanwhile, Grandma Ortega keeps making sacreligious and/or family-inappropriate jokes and comments. Much to her daughter's chagrin, and her great grandchildren's delight.

It turns into a big debate, with Kirsten and her grandmother on one side, and her mother and brother on the other, about whether or not the Church of KISS was right to ban resleeving. Kif and Sister-In-Law just kind of sit there silently, looking uncomfortable. Nieces and nephews just laugh whenever their great grandmother says something especially off-color. At one point, Kirsten proposes that maybe it was God's will that mankind discover cortical stack technology that they might all know the miracle of eternal life. In the process, she also lets slip some worldbuilding exposition that has, shall we say, implications.

The cortical stacks are copied from Elder technology.

I probably should have been able to guess that earlier, given the glowing blue nodes of the stacks having a visual similarity to the songspire tree buds.

...when Kovacs held that little songspire totem over the slagged stacks of his companions at the museum. Was that just a funerary ritual, or was he trying to see if he could communicate with them? Testing to see if there was anything left of them, despite the mechanical damage? That seems entirely plausible now.

The possibility that there are Elders walking around in human bodies also just got larger. As did the possibility that Falconer might not actually be human, or at least not entirely human. And that her religion might have been an attempt at resurrecting a facsimile of Elder society.

Basically, this bit of background information just opened a ton of doors in terms of plot possibilities.

In the past, Falconer tortures Kovacs with a knife in her training sim, telling him that he should not fight the pain. Cry. Scream. Thrash. No reason to hold back. Just wait for the moment of weakness in the torturer. The moment that he can turn the simulation around on them. She says that she is willing to do anything to her acolytes to ensure they can withstand the real thing if they get caught. And, I don't get the impression that she's going any harder on Kovacs in particular due to what he'd done, which is to her credit. Assuming Falconer is actually a "her," of course.

It seems like Kovacs might well have actually been the top of the class when it comes to anti-torture training. It's not clear if he was ever an actual torturer himself during his black ops days, but he definitely worked in close coordination with them at the very least. Knowing this from both sides would definitely give him an advantage that Envoys from other backgrounds lack.

In the present, Kovacs holds out long enough against Dimi that the bossman comes back in and tells the technicians to pull them out of the sim for today. Nobody wants to stay here all night, especially on a holiday. They can resume tomorrow.

Halfway point. I'll end it here.

I'm going to have a lot to say in this episode's conclusion. Not all of it negative, but definitely not all positive either.