Altered Carbon S1E1: “Out of the Past” (continued)

Ortega the well-written and believable character brings the hovercar in for a landing on the outer garden of one of the Methuselan sky-castles. Kovacs points out that she's on a course to crash through the branches of the decorative trees and hit the lawn at just the perfect angle to gouge it with the underside of the hovercar, and she acknowledges these observations without acting on them. A moment later, they crash through the branches of the decorative trees and hit the lawn at just the perfect angle to gouge it with the underside of the hovercar, coming to a grinding, lurching halt as the vehicle drags itself through grass and topsoil.

She even managed to hit one of the walkways at the end of their skid. As they get out of the vehicle he asks her what the fuck, and she just smugly says that she works for the city, not for Bancroft with his stupid sky palace. She pulls out her badge, and Kovacs reacts with apparent surprise.

Erm...I'm like 95% sure she already told him she was something like a parole officer, not just a corporate merc. What's the reveal here, then?

...then she asks him for his name. What. But. How...how was she even able to pick him up from the prison without knowing his...what?

I am confused.

He nonchalantly gives her his name, even though I could have sworn she already said it herself when she picked him up. She presses a button on her watch, and seemingly looks up something connected to his name on the internet with her brain or something. What she finds makes her react with a slightly alarmed expression. She looks back up at him in disbelief and says that he can't possible be Takeshi Kovacs, the Envoys all died long ago. Kovacs tells her that there was apparently at least one exception. Before the conversation can proceed further, Ortega and Kovacs are accosted by a team of armed private security with guns trained on them.

She shrugs off the security chief's threat, saying that "I'm Bay City PD and you know it." Um...yes? Yes, he does know it, given that he knows your damned name? And...she also knows his (she refers to him as "Curtis" immediately on seeing him) so...I'm confused about what kind of preexisting relationship she has with these people. She demands to speak with the boss, but just then a blonde Rich Bitch sterotype wearing a literal toga strides across the yard and starts asking questions. Like why Ortega is trespassing on private property, and why she stole one of their hover-limos.

Is this Bancroft in a female sleeve? He's been referred to with male pronouns so far, but given the ease of body-switching at least for rich people this could just be an aesthetic trend he's following or something.

S(he?) tells Ortega that shooting her on the spot is feeling like a good idea. Ortega just smiles smugly and dares them to try. Then, another hovercar - this one with recognizable police markings - descends much more elegantly from above and lands beside them. A plain clothes cop gets out, escorting a teenaged boy. Young Isaac Bancroft here was sent by his parents to pick up Kovacs, but somehow failed to arrive at the jail and instead got picked up on a DUI elsewhere in the city.

So, the police picked him up, impounded the limo he was driving, and then sent one of their own officers (who the Bancrofts and their servants apparently already know on sight and vice versa, for some reason...) to drive it to the jail, pick up Kovacs in his place (without knowing who Kovacs even is...), and then bring him and the car back to the Bancroft residence. While also bringing dumb, drunk Isaac back in a police car. For reasons.

Ladies, gentlemen, and assorted transhuman intelligences; your tax credits at work.

Isaac tells his mother that it's all her fault for sending him to pick up Kovacs, he's an heir not a chauffeur. Perhaps if he wasn't drunk and stupid, he'd be objecting to his parents' decision to send him to pick up an INCREDIBLY DANGEROUS ROGUE SUPERSOLDIER specifically, rather than the more general indignity of being sent on an errand. She simpers over him and tells him to go inside and recover from what the mean police did to him, and then turns angrily back to Ortega and her newly arrived comrades and tells them that this is police harassment and she's not standing for it.

...

However little sense the operation as a whole makes, I will give the Bay City PD credit for realizing the insanity of letting this twiggy little dumbass ferry an emotionally unstable killing machine across the city and taking pains to keep them separate until both were brought to the Bancroft palace. They evidently care more about Isaac's life than his own parents do.

I guess the Bancrofts might have sent a security detail in the limo with Isaac. But in that case, where the hell are they now? The plainclothes guy who got out of the car with Isaac looked like he might be private security, but he specifically said that "we" picked up Isaac on a DUI, so...no, they actually sent their fucking kid alone.

...

Ortega brushes off the accusations of harassment, and tells Mrs(?) Bancroft that she has her kid, her car, and her new pet terrorist now, so the show's over, bye. She also glares at Kovacs and aggressively tells him that he hasn't seen the last of her. Um...okayyyy? Then she and the other cops leave, and the show's character writing gets slightly less confusing.

With the cops gone, Mother Of The Year introduces herself to Kovacs as Miriam Bancroft, while smiling and batting her lashes at him like she wants to rip her toga off and jab her erect clitoris through his eyeball right this second. That actually is how rich people have sex, you can look it up. She escorts him into the foyer, where a number of historical artifacts are displayed; Miriam brags about how it's she, not her famous husband, who is the collector. Attention is called to the crown jewel of her hoard; an unusually large piece of alien biotechnology that resembles a tree.

The "Elders" have apparently left genetic constructs like this one behind on a number of abandoned worlds.

Miriam also explains that this is a "songspire tree," and that no one knows what their function was, only that the Elders created them and left them hidden on a few of their old colony worlds. Even though Kovacs clearly already knows what these things are. I would normally take this as Miriam just being really condescending and loving the sound of her own voice, which is consistent with how she's come across so far, but unfortunately she's far from the only character to indulge in As You All Know in the last thirty minutes of screentime. Kovacs is polite enough to understand that the audience of the show doesn't already know all this, so he lets her drone on about how the *biggest* songspire trees in known space are in fact much, much larger than this one, before interrupting her to say that he's seen one. Apparently on a planet called Stronghold. Cue very brief flashback of him looking up at a much taller tree, and at what appears to be a cultic gathering of humans crowding around its roots, before she brings him upstairs to meet her husband Laurens.

Frontier human colonists coming to worship alien artifacts is actually a much more interesting and unique premise than the one this pilot is mostly exploring. Hopefully we'll get back to this sooner rather than later in the episodes to come.

A short elevator ride. Miriam spends most of it gazing and licking her lips at Kovacs like a porn milf at a cable repairman, but also asks him one question about his Envoy powers at the end. No, he tells her, Envoys are not actually telepathic. She says that that's a pity, in a tone that suggests that she wishes he could see what perverse things she's imagining doing to him right now. Still, more natural than most of the exposition so far, so I do owe her a bit of respect for that at least. Finally, Kovacs meets big boss Laurens Bancroft alone in the latter's study.

He's a thoroughly unimpressive, uncharismatic, unremarkable guy. I don't know if this is an intentional choice on the part of the creators, depicting the sky-dwelling multizillionaire methuselah as a mediocre man hiding his banality beneath wealth and mystique, or if he is supposed to be a more memorable character and the actor just isn't up to the task.

In any case, Laurens' first words are to apologize for that whole embarrassment with his son.

He considers this to have been an error of misplaced optimism on his part. I assume he was optimistically hoping that Kovacs would rid him of his embarrassment of a son, but alas, the boy failed at failing.

Kovacs replies that that's alright, the ride here ended up being very informative for him. Yes, I suppose being informative is something that scene succeeded at, now that you point it out. Laurens then goes on a little ramble about the Envoys' legendary powers of perception and attention to detail, and demonstrates that he's read the written works of their creator, Quelcrest Falconer. In fact, he did so while Falconer herself was still alive, and the war in progress, even though he was on the opposite side of it. Laurens remarks that for himself, that war was centuries in the past, but of course for Kovacs it feels much, much more recent. Yeah, he's saying this, but I don't think he's really internalized it, or he'd be a little more cautious to put himself alone in a room with Kovacs. He condescends for a while about how he always had a grudging respect for Falconer's super soldiers, and refers to them as the most formidable army in human history (Kovacs dryly reminds him that they lost, and Laurens just changes the subject). Laurens then gives Kovacs a historical artifact; Falconer's own, pen-and-paper diary.

He bought it at an auction some time after the war, apparently.

This guy is doing a really, really bad job of making Kovacs not want to tear out his cortical stack and toss it onto a stove. And, yep, a moment later, Kovacs tells him to cut the chase already; Kovacs fought a war to prevent people like Laurens from coming into existence, so he'd better stop babbling right the fuck now or Kovacs is going to try and relive the good old days.

...

Aside from a few minor exceptions, Kovacs is so much better written than any of the other characters that he actually feels out of place in this show.

I suspect more strongly than ever that the writers are just mindlessly taking Kovacs' internal narration from the novel this is based on and having the other characters say them. Kovacs himself would naturally be the character who suffers the least from this sort of clumsy adaptation.

...

So, at long last, Laurens cuts to the chase. He's managed to cajole the president of the Protectorate to grant a full pardon to Kovacs, but Laurens will only release the document - and also give him a fuckton of money and any new sleeve he wants - if Kovacs does a thing for him. Specifically, he wants him to solve a murder case.

Let me guess, Laurens himself was the victim.

...lol.

The book was written in the early 2000's. I'm pretty sure this was already a cyberpunk cliche by then.

Cut to the police station, where Ortega is reading up on the old Envoy program and freaking out about it. Envoys were designed to be able to transmit their minds across the extranet, download into a new sleeve anywhere in human space, and be fully integrated into the local culture, aware of their new environments, and combat-ready within literal minutes.

And apparently no one since Falconer has recreated whatever training/augmentation method she used in the two and a half centuries since then. I'm guessing she used Elder technology. Given the imagery in Kovacs' memories, and the general "vibe" that Falconer's faction has given so far, I'd say that fits.

For now, Ortega is panicking over what Kovacs is capable of and why Laurens Bancroft has seen fit to unleash him in her city. Hell, if he's that dangerous I'm not sure why they even kept his cortical stack all these centuries instead of destroying it just to be safe. Her partner assures her that Kovacs will fuck up and end up bodiless or permadead soon nonetheless. Not sure how he figures, but okay. Also, they're doing the language-switch throughout their conversation, just like Kovacs and that one bad guy did in the flashback sequence. Still not sure what the deal with that is.

Anyway, cut back to the Bancroft skycastle, where Laurens explains the story as he knows it to Kovacs (punctuated by vapid pseudo-philosophical rambling that would annoy me if we weren't clearly intended to hate this guy). Laurens' previous sleeve was found dead up here in his private sanctum, its head - and his cortical stack with it - completely vaporized by a handheld particle beam weapon. Laurens survived only because he's fantastically wealthy enough to afford a remote personality backup using a private satellite that automatically updates itself with his current brainstate every 48 hours.

I'm not sure *why* this is something that you need to be super rich to do. The private satellite part obviously takes money, but the personality backup itself seems like just an extra stack should be sufficient. Not sure why not.

Also, this should mean that personality forks ARE, in fact, a thing. I can't imagine why they wouldn't be. The setting doesn't look or act like those exist, but...well, again, how could they possibly NOT exist if all the tech required for them does?

Well, regardless of those questions...

Laurens happens to own a particle gun similar to the murder weapon, and he keeps it in a secure safe that only he and his wife have access to. That would suggest that either she killed him, or he committed suicide. However, there's also the fact that someone tried to hack into the satellite and delete his backup. The hacking attempt was awfully clumsy. He and Miriam would have both done a much better job than that, if one of them had wanted to kill him. There's no word on whether the energy pistol that killed Laurens was confirmed to be the same one from the safe, but the implication is yes. Also, the murder happened ten minutes before Laurens was due for another satellite sync, so he's missing 48 hours' worth of memories.

Kovacs tells him that that's very interesting, but not enough so to make him care. Just disembody or kill him again (or...attempt to do so, at least). Laurens tells Kovacs to take the day to think about it, and has him flown back to the surface with the Falconer diary as a pro bono gift.

...

Alright. Unless they really DO have a killswitch in Kovacs' sleeve, it seems like the obvious next step is for him to use his Envoy powers to maneuver himself into getting needlecast access, wiping Laurens' backup for real, blowing up his skycastle, and then zapping himself into another sleeve on the other side of the Protectorate empire.

Let's see how close I am.

...

Cue some scattered flashback footage of Kovacs having some kind of breathy, sexual conversation with Falconer. Then to him as a kid, playing with his sister by a lake on...it looks like the same planet he was eventually killed on, going by the planets visible in the sky.

He and his sister's original sleeves look pretty distinctly Asian, and there are some Japanese words mixed in here and there in their dialogue. Noted. Then he's back in the present, sitting on a terrace over the Bay City bay, hallucinating a figment of an older version of his sister wearing another sleeve (the dialogue makes it clear that it's supposed to be the same sister he hung out with by that lake as a kid).

If this sounds cheesy to you...well, yeah, it is. More than anything, I'm reminded of the Sam Raimi Spiderman movies, when Peter has those cheesy talks with Imaginary Uncle Ben. I guess it could be justified in this case by Kovacs using his Envoy powers to reconstruct a partial personality simulacrum of his sister in his own brain or somethingut even so, on a Doylist level it's eyeroll-worthy.

After some totally unnecessary dialogue in which Kovacs and ghost!sister make sure we understand that she's just in his head, Kovacs starts venting to her about the state of humanity. Just as Falconer warned, her faction's defeat enabled the rise of transhuman capitalist oligarchs who own the rest of the species.

At the moment, Kovacs thinks that he'll just get drunk, get laid, and then get himself disembodied again, hopefully for good this time.

Jump ahead to Kovacs exploring the inner city nightlife. Weirdly retro pop music, street food, a poorly acted drug dealer who sells him a bunch of drugs he's never heard of but that he takes all of, etc. I guess Laurens gave him some money before turning him loose earlier that day. Enough for drugs, at least. He gets himself all fucked up, and then puts on some GoogleGlass contacts and blisses out staring into the mass of advertising holograms flying all around him.

He giggles childishly at the holo-billboards, gets annoyed at the augmented reality hookers advertising their brothels (real or simulated sex at said brothels? Who even knows), and then gets into a fight with some illusory pit fighters before falling over on his ass on the pavement and just kind of writhing drunkenly around.

while he's on the ground, someone comes up behind him and plants a thingy on the back of his neck.

After a few moments, the thingy on his neck clears his head a bit, and the woman who attached it to him explains that it's basically an ad-blocker that syncs with the contacts he put on. Also, the woman in question is Officer Ortega. She asks him if he wants to go get a drink.

Um...okay?

I guess she tracked him to this alley using public surveillance cameras, or something? Maybe?

He tells her no thank you, and asks her why she's stalking him. She just says that she's a cop and he's a psychotic terrorist, so her stalking him is just the natural order of things. She then asks what Laurens Bancroft wanted him for, and he uses his Envoy intuition powers to infer - out loud - that she was the detective assigned to his murder case, and that he was less than pleased with her investigation. Okay, that explains why they all know each other I guess. She glowers at Kovacs and asks him if he's high. When he answers in the affirmative she disgustedly turns around and starts to leave.

So, she went through all the trouble to track him here, and then just left again because he was high?

...also, how the hell did she not already know that, if she's been tracking him via camera footage or whatever other means?

He picks himself off the floor and says that on second thoughts, he would like that drink, and asks if the two of them can just start over. She - seemingly grudgingly - accepts. Either she's doing some intricate psychological manipulation herself, or her characterization is even more all over the place than I thought.

They go to a pool bar that Kovacs picks out. Ortega asks him how he figured out the backstory with her and the Bancrofts, and he explains that that's just his Envoy mind doing what it was upgraded to do. She shrugs that off and calls it a lucky guess, though I don't think she's serious about that.

I'm starting to wonder if she's secretly a surviving Envoy herself. Just doing all these seemingly nonsensical things that are carefully calibrated to hit Kovacs' psychological weak spots. I'm either giving this show way too much credit, or not nearly enough, I dunno.

She explains that after her investigation didn't turn up any leads besides the obvious, Laurens started trying to sabotage her career. In fact, he's still doing it. And...okay, she seems to already have figured out that Bancroft resurrected this Envoy to try and solve his murder when the police couldn't. What does she actually want from Kovacs, then? I don't know. Anyway, she tells him that she thinks it's pretty obvious that Bancroft ineptly tried to kill himself, maybe after getting fucked up on some weird undetectable drugs or something. Kovacs says that he doesn't think so. Ortega tells him, irritably, that in the time Laurens has been having her waste time on this case, multiple other murders - including at least one of a Neo-Catholic who lacked a cortical stack and is now permadead - have been waiting for her attention. Okay. So why are you spending even more time asking Kovacs about this? What do you think Laurens Bancroft would have told Kovacs that he hasn't already told you?

A holographic stripper interrupts the conversation by trying to get tips out of Kovacs. Kovacs seems to decide that some hookers - synthetic or otherwise - would actually really hit the spot right now, and tells Ortega that he'll be leaving now. She angrily tells him that he isn't going anywhere yet, she's not finished with him.

-____-

Ortega, MAKE UP YOUR MIND.

Kovacs tells well-written, believable character Officer Ortega that, as is often the case with new sleeves that have been kept unconscious for a long time, his current body is dealing with some short-term hormone imbalances. Because of that, in addition to all the drugs he took, he's feeling really horny right now, and might feel more forthcoming if Ortega feels like getting a hotel room with him. She gets outraged, and tells him that if that's the idea he was getting then he can just pay for his own drink. With a sigh, Kovacs nonsequitors back to the original topic and tells her that as far as he can tell, Bancroft legitimately believes that he was murdered, which is what made it extra fun to turn down his offer. Ortega is shocked to hear this. Kovacs tells her he'll be staying at the Raven hotel if she changes her mind, and leaves.

As he exits the bar, she warns him that the Raven is one of the "AI hotels" that nobody stays in anymore, and that he should stay away from them because...um...they're hardwired to want guests. Why is this a problem? I guess we'll find out. Kovacs says he'll risk setting off the Raven's paperclip maximizer tendencies, that's fine, he just wants to enjoy the rest of his vacation before going back to sleep forever. So, off he goes, Ortega staring after him in...

rolled 1d6 = 3

...disgust again now. Okay, whatever.

Kovacs enters the Raven, where a very Jeeves looking man with nineteenth century Victorian mannerisms receives him at the front desk. Pretty sure the receptionist is a hologram. It politely, but slightly creepily, offers Kovacs an overly detailed menu of robohookers he can order to his room along with dinner, and Kovacs just kind of takes the path of least resistance to get through the conversation. Before he can seal the deal though, some randos come up behind him and put guns to his head, the leader of their group cackling about how apparently those Envoy senses aren't all they're cracked up to be.

Kovacs is unhappy.

Four thousand words, and there's still enough screentime to probably fill another good-sized post.

I hope this show isn't all as slow and dense as the pilot. If it is, I'm going to have to adjust my reviewing style to get through the following episodes in anything like a timely manner. Even just watching this without reviewing was slow, and I had trouble staying focused for more than a few minutes at a time.

Anyway, so far I like all the concepts and most of the aesthetics, and the production values are great aside from a little bit of questionable acting here and there, but it's really badly written and paced. Some of this may be down to flaws in the original novel, but most of the issues feel much more like the product of bad adaptation.

Part three will come tomorrow.