Altered Carbon S1E4: “Force of Evil” (continued)

The Ortega family DdlM dinner finishes on a sour, silent note, with Kirsten's mother refusing to even say goodbye to her own mother before Kirsten walks her out of the apartment. Where is she bringing her, I wonder? Back to the station (or wherever else the back alley resleeving took place), or does Kirsten have something even crazier in mind than what she already did? In either case, once they leave, her mother just keeps morosely washing the dishes, and then Kif comes up to talk to her. Counseling her to accept that religions change over time (erm...wasn't the anti-resleeving thing specifically a REACTIONARY policy adopted in recent-ish times? Shouldn't he be saying the opposite?), while also doing...well, this:

Kif earlier mentioned that Kirsten's late father told him to watch over her in the field. It seems Kif may have also had something going on with the man's otherwise very conservative wife.

Well, "otherwise." Maybe Pope Coomer II made polyandry a legitimate practice three hundred years ago in Vatican IV. In which case there's no hypocrisy here, just orthodoxy.

Alternatively, maybe her father isn't actually dead, but jumped bodies into Kif, and both of her parents are secret Arabs undercover as Mexican to avoid Bay City's century-long bout of anti-middle eastern xenophobia, and they never told Kirsten this because why the fuck would you ever trust her with a dangerous secret.

It's the third one. Definitely the third one. Canon.

Mom Ortega asks if humans can even still call themselves God's creatures anymore once they've essentially turned themselves into alien technology. I suppose the answer to that question depends on whether or not the aliens were also God's creatures. If not, we have truly opened up a can of metaphysical worms. A pretty vapid religious discussion follows. Not much worth commenting on, except that it's clearly established that Kif is not secretly Kirsten's dad after all. Hey, fuck you, it's still canon. We then return to Torture Inc, where Dimi is upset to be pulled out of the sim emptyhanded and declares that their tactile VR must be defective.

Bossman assures him that this is not the case, and that Ryker will break eventually, just maybe not tonight. The Tilonians also said that, Mr. Bossman, and it didn't work out for them either. He does say that when they continue, he has a brand new torture program called "helminth" that should be effective. However, doing so is also going to render the subject permanently personality-dead; the one person who it's been used on so far experienced total personality degradation from the trauma. Going by the name of this program and the description of its effects, I'm assuming it's a simulation that forces you to read terrible Worm fanfiction until your brain physically catches on fire. Dimi says that as long as it gets him the information he wants before turning Ryker into a vegetable, he'll do it.

Also, just then, Bossman gets an urgent update from "her." Ordering him to go overtime and pay the technicians as much as he has to to compensate them for missing Halloween. Okay, I guess Dimitri and this torture lab were hired by a "her" then. Could be someone we've met before ("Miriam Bancroft having totally lost her shit" and "a rogue Falconer fork that's gone insane over the centuries" both come to mind as possibilities) or it could be someone new. Anyway, Dimi goes back into VR to make Kovacs read some godawful Wormfic.

...oh, thank god, it's just some parasitic worm creatures that he's going to implant in Kovacs' virtual avatar. False alarm.

I wonder if these parasites are just nightmare creatures designed by VR programmers to be as disgusting and painful as possible, or if they're actually based on some alien organism that was recently discovered. Could just as easily be either.

Recalling more of his Envoy training, Kovacs briefly submits and admits that he is Ryker. However, when Dimi asks his next question, he just starts babbling under his breath, provoking Dimi to start infesting his body with the parasites. Cut back to Kirsten and Granny Ortega preparing to unsleeve the latter. They have a long conversation about how Granny was always a closet atheist, and letting her husband - Kirsten's grandfather - die was the most painful thing she ever had to do. She tried to get him to join her in immortal heresy, but to no avail.

Granny also asks if Kirsten can steal her any drugs from the evidence locker, just to try them out before she gives up this sleeve, but that's one thing that Kirsten isn't sure she can get away with and/or finds distasteful.

Or...I think so, at least. It cuts away after that, so maybe she actually does get her a bunch of illicit drugs. Maybe even belonging to this sleeve's previous inhabitant; his shouting during his initial appearance suggested that he was arrested on drug charges.

...

Immortality, virtual reality, FTL travel, and yet the war on drugs has never ended.

Well, that's cyberpunk for you.

...

Anyway, back to Kovacs' training. Falconer has somehow taught him to exercise mental control over the VR construct, a la the ending of The Matrix before the sequels walked it back. She compliments him on the progress, but says that that isn't enough on its own. If he corrupts the torture sim, they'll just turn it off and try something else. Or worse, I suppose, keep it running and use it as an opportunity to study his technopathic abilities for use against his comrades-in-arms. He still needs to find a way to strike at the torturer, not just the chamber. That's why she was going on about the need for her Envoys to accept the torture itself in the first place, rather than starting the lesson with "lol I'll just teach you to break the sims, no pain required." Okay, that's more reasonable than I was starting to fear.

Kovacs explains that he already knows his torturer's weakness, in this case. Her dislike of him is causing her to keep this going for longer, after she's already let the others end their sessions. I guess he knows that, somehow. He then tells her that maybe she's trying to prove something, to herself or to him.

Then, in what appears to be a nonsequitor at least to my limited perceptions, he tells her to tell him how to escape the simulation, and she whispers something New Age sounding about finding the thing he cares most about in the world and ripping it out of himself in order to rip his way out of the simulation. Then they have their first kiss. Then they both wake up from the simulation.

The other Envoys-in-training direct some good natured teasing in Kovacs' direction about him taking longer than the rest of them.

Then Falconer glowers at Kovacs, tells him that "that was sloppy" and that "she could kill him where he stands."

...what...just happened there?

What did he do?

It wasn't like he unexpectedly kissed her to make her panic or the like. She was the one who seemed to initiate it.

Is he supposed to have somehow taken control of her avatar and forced her to kiss him? Maybe? That could have been communicated a hell of a lot more clearly, if so.

Also, if that was what happened, then was it not what she was trying to guide him toward? What was she hoping he'd do?

She then tells the whole class that escaping the simulation isn't enough. They have to be ready for action and in full control of their senses and minds the millisecond they wake up again. Okay, maybe that's what she was mad at him for? He looked kinda dazed and sleepy (or maybe just little-hearts-in-eyes-syndrome) when he woke up from the sim, so maybe that was the only disappointing part.

Regardless, back to him and Dimitri. Kovacs has been chewed to death by worms and then rebooted at least once or twice, and now, having somehow determined that the time is now right, he causes the manacles binding him to the table to open. Dimi's reaction to this is weirdly understated, like it's not remarkable or any cause for concern. Huh. Maybe this fork actually does know he's dealing with an Envoy, and the "Ryker" thing was just an elaborate headgame? Kovacs then hallucinates the presence of Falconer, and tears out his own heart and offers it to her.

Going by Dimi's reactions, the Falconer-image is just Kovacs' imagination rather than something he forced the simulation to create, but him tearing his virtual self's heart out is not.

And, back in the real world, the technicians panic as the subject's heart abruptly stops.

They're forced to end the simulation and defibrillate Kovacs. When he wakes up, he's shocked by the sight of Alice's dissected body having its organs harvested across the room from him (wait...wouldn't it be more valuable to them to just repair her body for use as a sleeve? And...why would this be going on in the same room as the interrogation anyway?). However, he's also got a plan all ready.

He tells them that from the sound of things, this "Ryker" character is some podunk corrupt cop. Could someone like that have done what he just did?

Also, has Ryker ever been offworld? Why would his mind have produced a version of the torture chamber from Harlan's World instead of Earth?

I'm not sure how the torturers are supposed to be able to tell that that building was from another planet, since there wasn't exactly a clear view of the sky from in there, but okay. Anyway, Harlan's World. That's the same colony whose founder Failson Bancroft brought the severed hand of to show-and-tell. Coincidence? Maybe, but also maybe not. If Harlan's World was the planet that Falconer's "Stronghold" was located on, then it makes sense that Laurens' envoy obsession might have been why his son chose that particular bit of history to deface in front of his guests.

Kovacs then plays a similar gambit that he did on Alice. Slipping into what I assume is his old work persona back in the black ops, he tells them that he's an agent of the Protectorate secret police who was in the middle of investigating a smuggling op in Bay City.

His ability to stop his own heart from within the simulation, of course, is a secret CTAC technique that they use to avoid interrogation. And now they're all - every single person in this room besides himself - dead. Their families are dead. This entire company is about to be repossessed by the state, and everyone who used to run it is dead. But, since he's such a nice guy, he will beg his superiors to spare whichever one of them releases his restraints right the fuck now.

The technicians (and bossman, who has returned due to the cardiac arrest commotion) all panic. To his credit, Dimi keeps his cool and tells the others that this has got to be a bluff, but one of the technicians says fuckit and sets Kovacs free.

Kovacs then grabs his guns from where they have his stuff laid out nearby and kills all of them.

A GAUSS round to bring each of them down. Then, a magnetically retrieved flechette in and out of the base of each of their skulls, destroying their cortical stacks. He then liberates Alice's cortical stack and puts it in his retrieved pack before leaving the room and killing everyone in the rest of the building.

Outside in a grimy alley, Hubert has finally done something to atone for his previous actions and hunted down one of the cyborg thugs who Dimi hired to help him with the ambush. He forced the man to bring him to the place Dimi had them bring Kovacs to, and arrives just in time to see Kovacs set off some kind of explosive and bring a third of the building down before stepping out through the smoke and ashes covered in other people's blood.

At least the musical backdrop isn't as pretentious this time.

When Hubert apologizes for taking so long and explains that it took a lot of work to get information out of this guy, Kovacs wordlessly puts a hypersonic round through the guy in question's head. I don't *think* he aimed for the cortical stack that time, but I'm not sure; the exit wound is pretty far down the back of the man's head, but not quite at the base of the skull I don't think.

Also, apparently Kovacs didn't permakill all of his tormentors. He wants to get some information in turn out of the Dimi fork he just took out. He didn't have time to dig out his cortical stack in the heat of battle, though, so he opted for the bulk transportation method.

Cut back to the police station, where Kirsten and her grandmother are getting high together. I guess she wasn't *that* resistant to the idea. Said grandmother also, despite having meandered around the subject philosophically, decides to tell Kirsten not to bring her back again after this. In her words, she's "having too much fun" in this body, and also death is a part of life that you need to accept after all. Also, enough is never enough, and if you just let yourself keep living then you'll never want to stop, which is bad.

I'd want to hear granny repeat her opinions on the subject after she's sobered up. Or, well, I would, if the circumstances of her resleeving were anything but what we saw.

The ethical issues here are actually part of the message, I think, but hold onto that detail. I'll be coming back to it in this post's conclusion. Oh boy am I coming back to this in the conclusion.

She turns Granny off and switches her stack for the drug dealer's, and leaves him in the cell. Then, suddenly, she gets a call. Apparently someone just blew up a specialty medical facility and permakilled everyone in it downtown. Everyone is being called back onto duty for this one.

Ortega and Kif regroup and head to the ruins of the torture clinic. A reporter asks BCPD public relations wunderkind Ortega if there's any information about the perp yet, and immediately regrets doing so.

I guess that's why she's so worked up about Kovacs. Rampaging maniacs are territorial creatures.

Before entering the half-destroyed building, Ortega asks her cell phone for Kovacs' location. It can't find him. I won't bully Ortega for jumping to the assumption that Kovacs did it this time, though. Really, from what she's seen of him over the last couple of weeks, what are the odds he wasn't involved in this? Tabling that line of thought for now, Ortega leads Kif inside, where they pass the dozens of bodies being fussed over by police and paramedics. When they reach the operating room where the rampage began, Ortega comes close enough for her Siri that doesn't love her to detect the tracker through the building's dampening field. The chip, which Kovacs apparently *didn't* know about until Dimi tipped him off (fucking hell is it stupid that Kovacs didn't check the adblocker himself in all this time...), has been left in the hand of Dimi's decapitated body. A hand that has been positioned to deliver a personal message for Ortega when she comes following the chip.

Learning from Failson Bancroft, Kovacs? Bad road to start down.

Next thing we know, Ortega is storming into the Raven's lobby and demanding to speak with Kovacs. Hubert and Poe both kind of chuckle smarmily at her and say they have no idea where he might be. Hubert might not be looking too great himself after these last couple of episodes, but even he has learned not to take Ortega seriously.

Not willing to take no for an answer (and threatening to come for the two of them next, because of course she does), Ortega stomps her way upstairs and bangs on the penthouse door until Kovacs opens it.

He does so fresh from the shower, half dressed, and without saying a single word to her before just turning and retreating back inside, letting her in after him if she so chooses. He says nothing in response to her questions and accusations. Just waits until she sees the severed head arranged tastefully among the vases and flowers on the coffee table. Then, after letting it answer her questions for her, he quietly says that society should be giving him a medal for wiping a business like that out, and then demands to know why she's been tracking him. She provides a satisfactory enough answer at first (he's a superhuman terrorist, of course the police should track him), but Kovacs is wise to how disproportionate her personal attention to him has been. The police haven't been tracking him. She has. And not even just with that chip. Why was she waiting for him at the Alcatraz facility when she didn't even know who he was or what Bancroft wanted him for yet? Was that something the police would just randomly do?

Holy shit. When I commented on the absurdity of that whole carpooling fiasco in the pilot, apparently I was doing something right. It wasn't the BPD behaving nonsensically. Or rather, it was, but their nonsensical behavior in this case was just keeping Ortega on staff and allowing her to keep doing this bullshit time and time again. It's kinda dumb that none of the other characters thought this worth wondering over, but still, way smarter than it seemed at the time.

But, just when I was starting to think that maybe this show is better written than I thought and that the other seemingly stupid parts might actually have explanations...ooh boy.

So, Kovacs seems to think that the reason Dimi mistook him for Ryker is because Ryker was the previous (and, at least implicitly, original) inhabitant of his current sleeve. And that Ryker has something to do with Ortega's stalking him. And it's pretty clear that Kovacs is meant to be correct in this inference.

Except...

Even if we assume that the second Dimi fork didn't know anything about what his "brother" was doing when he died, or about the whole resurrected Envoy thing in general, he DID know that Ryker was supposed to be in jail for a long time. Why would he assume that that body was still his when it was released long before then?

In fact, it's been established - and reiterated time and time again - that sleeves are in short supply. Ryker had a young, healthy, military-grade body. How could it have possibly not been snapped up by a paying customer the instant he was disembodied? Why would he EVER think that the person walking around in Ryker's body after that was Ryker?

If Dimi was responsible for Ryker's imprisonment like he said, then it might be reasonable to think that someone in that sleeve killing one of Dimi's instances was just too big of a coincidence. Except...Dimi didn't think that his brother was killed in revenge. The entire torture session was him trying to find out who hired him to do that killing.

This doesn't make sense no matter what angle you look at it from. And, it doesn't make sense in a very specific kind of way that only happens when an author outsmarts themselves. It's got a really strong sort of JJ Abrams "look at how intricate and clever I think I am" asspull feel to it.

Kovacs also infers - I'm not sure how, but he turns out to be right so lol whatever I guess - that Ortega is obsessed with him because he's in Ryker's body. Because that makes sense in a world where bodies are this interchangeable and have been that way for over a century. Ortega denies knowing anything about Ryker, or caring anything about this sleeve, but when Kovacs starts cutting himself with a knife before her eyes she becomes visibly distraught. When he threatens to permanently disfigure this body, she relents.

Did Laurens Bancroft decide to resleeve Kovacs in the body of Ortega's cop ex-boyfriend and let her know about it ahead of time just to fuck with her? That's kind of what it seems like.

How the hell could he have let her know that Ryker's body, specifically, was being reactivated without tipping his hand? And why would she take that bait?

If nothing else, I guess Ortega's boyfriend having been sentenced to decades in prison for (at least partly) fabricated charges within the very recent past might explain why she's such an emotional mess. Actually...no, no, it isn't sufficient to explain that on its own, but still, it at least opens the possibility that she isn't normally *quite* this insane. But...fff, whatever, end episode.


Ow. My brain.

I think I'll just write this up in the order of the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The good is that this episode - and the series as a whole up to this point - has some incredible moments in it, and it (at least sometimes) leans in to high concept scifi to a greater degree than just about anything else to come out in recent years. The transhumanism, the alien technology backstory, etc.

Kovacs escaping the torture chamber (and his very satisfying rampage after doing so) was a highlight of the ep for sure. Not all of the Falconer woo-woo actually applied to the situation or even made sense at all, but just enough of it did for the sequence to still work. Kovacs' escape did require him to be tortured by someone who thought he was torturing a different person, but the implication was that his training would have let him find a different angle in almost any interrogation scenario; that was just the best application of his training for this specific case.

After some disappointing showings in the last couple of episodes, I also loved seeing Poe get to be his awesome old self again, even if just briefly. The other standout in this episode, of course, was Falconer, though as I already said I think most of the credit for this goes to the actress rather than the scriptwriter (even just conceptually though, an idea like "what if instead of becoming a state-sponsored superheroine, Samus Aran started a cult" is one I can't not love). Kovacs himself had some low points in this episode, as far as writing goes, but he also had plenty of high ones. His performance as the outraged undercover Protectorate spook was particularly memorable, and as with Falconer that's at least as much the actor's doing as the script's.

I wish the show was *all* stuff like this, and that it really leaned into and explored the more interesting aspects of these characters and concepts. Which brings me to the bad.

...

Altered Carbon is a really stupid show. It's got smart stuff in it, but its heart and soul are not in the smart stuff. It's badly written, on both the grand scale of plotlines and in the scene-to-scene dialogue and flow. It's just not good.

Bundled in with the lazy exposition and (sometimes hilariously) mishandled dialogue and characterization is a degree of intellectual laziness that prevents the story from living up to its scifi high concepts. Despite the centuries of space travel and hard transhumanism, the world is basically just a grimier, more authoritarian version of modern society. The culture is "modern America, but worse." Same ethnic groups with the same trappings. Same cultural lynchpins, for the most part (Dia de los Muertos being an official holiday in California isn't exactly mindbending futurism). No exploration of how bodiless transhumans and artificial intelligences might actually really fundamentally change the social order, or push the boundaries of what civilization can even look like. Perhaps most incriminatingly, there doesn't seem to have been any meaningful historical developments or technological upsets within the 200+ year timeframe of the show itself. The class division is bigger, due to the reign of the meths, and bodies and minds are more commodified than they were in Kovacs' native time, but other than that he might as well have been out for a decade instead of multiple centuries. No political schisms that have changed interstellar human society. No technological breakthroughs of note. Etc.

Really though, all these other issues are secondary to just the near-constant, mundanely bad TV writing. Sometimes it manages to be so bad it's good (Ortega. Just, Ortega.), but the rest of the time its just boring, tiresome, humdrum ineptitude. When that combines with the sort of unimaginative social context of the show, it also gets a bit uncomfortable at times.

I didn't want to say it for a while, but by the end of this episode I can't really deny it. Mr. Elliot is a racist stereotype. A specifically early 21st century one. Fifteen years from now, I think people are just going to reflexively cringe looking at a lot of his scenes. The same might actually be true of Ortega, only in her case they overshot the usual "hotheated Latina" tropes so badly that the end result looks like something altogether more (grimly) fascinating. All the way down to her conflict with her family being literally just modern pop cultural perceptions of Hispanic American generational conflict, only now it's over transhumanism. Hell, even the only guy with a Russian accent in the story being a (once again, *extremely* modern) Russian Mafia caricature felt kind of hacky. I don't feel like there's any malice behind this stereotyping. It's just the same laziness coming out in a different way.

And, with that mention of the Ortega family transhumanism argument, it is now time to address the ugly.

...

I don't know if the books were also like this, and I definitely intend to find out when I'm done with these reviews, but Altered Carbon is a show with a message. It was touched on here and there in previous episodes, but in "Force of Evil" (the choice of title is relevant, I think) it becomes explicit text. Death is good. Immortality is bad. The characters themselves never provide a good explanation for why this is true, but here the world around them and the camera's focus step up to bat. Immortality creates tyrants like Laurens, who in turn create neotenic cretins like Isaac and Naomi who never get a chance to grow to fill their parents' shoes. Immortality enables horrors like the infinite torture sims and the predicaments of characters like Lizzie Elliot and Janus the Snek. In this episode, the real moral argument against immortality was made not by Grandma Ortega, but by the circumstances in which her granddaughter brought her back. Extending your life comes at the cost of someone else's, and eventually leads to all around moral degeneracy. The heavyhanded visual links between the Dia de los Muertos dinner and the VR torture session are called back to in the final conversation between Kirsten and her grandmother.

What I just described is, while memetically stupid, not really a harmful message on its own. If the ethics of immortality were relevant to our current times, I might feel more strongly, but technology isn't there yet. Unfortunately, it gets a lot worse than this.

One question that the show has avoided asking is why immortality has to come at the expense of other people's lives and freedom. And no, I'm not just crying Thermian Argument here, because there actually is an in-universe answer to that question. The real message of this show, what it knows it can't say out loud but does everything it can to slip under the radar, is as follows:


Problem: immortality within a society based on greed and exploitation would be terrible.

Solution: don't have immortality.


That's what it's saying. Not just once, but everywhere. Constantly. That's Altered Carbon.

...

Why can't everyone be a meth with a lovingly made succession of clone bodies? Because clone bodies are too expensive for most people. Okay, but WHY are clone bodies too expensive for most people? Could it perhaps have something to do with the fact that a tiny, tiny subset of the population owns virtually all of the wealth? If nearly all the galaxy's wealth wasn't being hoarded by just a few people, I wonder how many more immortals there might be.

In the previous episode's conversation between Kovacs and Laurens, the argument being made is that Laurens and Miriam's immortality is preventing their children from being able to grow up. The argument that is very loudly NOT being made is that if Laurens wasn't determined to sit on his entire fortune like Smaug under the fucking Lonely Mountain, he could have given each of them a few gazillion dollars and watched them set out to build their own empires.

Another argument that is loudly not being made in that scene is that being raised with too much privilege in general might be bad for your ability to mature.

Note that neither of these factors require immortality to come into effect. Also, note that if you keep immortality but get rid of them, the argument becomes patently absurd. They have "no room to grow if their parents are still around" in an interstellar civilization? Please.

...

If the show was making the argument that immortality will inevitably produce such a society, that would be one thing. I don't think it's a position I would agree with, but it's one that I could respect. That's not what it's doing.

The Protectorate was an atrocious authoritarian regime that used torture and extrajudicial killings liberally before the rise of the meths, even if it got worse under them. Ortega brutalized and stole the body of that prisoner *in order to* bring her grandmother back, not as a consequence of bringing her back. In all cases, the bad outcomes of immortality are clearly the result of preexisting material conditions. Not every society allows wealth to become that sequestered, regardless of how many lifetimes a person has to build up savings. A Protectorate with reasonable restrictions on corporate enterprise - I'm not talking communism here, just basic bitch social democracy - would not have produced creatures like Laurens Bancroft or Clarissa Severin. It might have had other problems adapting to immortality tech, but not those ones.

The show doesn't want you to think about any of that. It wants you to hate the meths and their minions, but it also wants you to think that they were a problem caused by immortality. Rather than having been caused by, oh, I don't know, maybe the exact same things that gave rise to their closest real world equivalents?

The more I think about it, the more it reminds me of the people who vote for politicians that they know will slash their health care, leave their infrastructure to crumble, poison their air and water, and trample on their personal freedoms in order to own the libs. "You can't have immortality and still live under the grinding heel of a late capitalist dystopia, so fuck immortality!"

...

If it were only the bad and not the ugly, Altered Carbon would fall happily into the "so bad it's good" category, spiced with some nuggets of actual goodness on top. Unless the show's (very overt and deliberate) ideological tune changes though, I'm only going to be able to hatewatch it.

They say that cyberpunk died because it came true, and everyone saw that the reality of it was boring. I've got another take for you. Cyberpunk died because the forms of media that get a lot of attention nowadays can only be made by people with money, and those people really don't like what cyberpunk has to say.