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

The holo-receptionist (who I'm henceforth going to refer to as Raven, because he seems to be a manifestation of the AI that runs this hotel) politely tells the gunmen who have just crept up on Kovacs to please settle down and stop harassing his customer. The leader of the group - a man with a scarred face and a Russian accent - very unpolitely tells Raven to not get in their way.

He then chuckles to himself at how much easier than expected Kovacs has turned out to be; why the hell did he have to hire all this backup just to bring in one stoned-off-his-ass punk who's this easy to catch flat footed?

One of said thugs gets pissy about being referred to so dismissively, and his employer - named as Dimitri - promptly shoots him in the head. None of the others seem to react to this overmuch, so I guess "you mouth off to the boss, you lose your sleeve" is just how things work in the criminal underworld.

As Dimitri and his goons start escorting Kovacs away from the front desk at gunpoint, Dimitri cackles and gloats about how he probably could have done this mission singlehandedly, seriously, what the fuck. Meanwhile, Raven indicates the touchscreen that Kovacs was about to use to pay for his room and extras and tells him that he needs to complete the transaction before amenities can be provided. While giving him a very meaningful look as the gunmen drag him away.

Kovacs makes a bewildered comment about this, and Dimitri scoffs again and tells him that these hospitality AI's are a bunch of crazy chatbots-gone-awry who are just obsessed with keeping their customers and nothing else. Similar to what Ortega said about them earlier.

Kovacs thinks about what he's hearing from the various parties involved in the scene, and also glances up at the ceiling and seems to notice something about the overhead paneling. Or maybe he uses his X-ray vision to see something hidden in it, if that's a magic Envoy power and not just something he had implanted in his previous sleeve's eyeballs or whatever. He also gathers that Dimitri is under orders to bring him in alive and sleeved if possible (or else he'd have just shot him already), and that he seems to be spoiling for opportunities to let out some aggression.

So, Kovacs starts smart-talking Dimitri himself, and lets him beat him up. While slowly guiding the beating back toward the front desk, without Dimitri or is bored-looking hired muscle seeming to notice what he's doing. Once he's been punched back onto the front desk, Kovacs wipes some of his blood on the touchscreen, letting it genetically link to the bank account Bancroft gave him and make the payment.

Raven thanks him for his business, and then extends a bunch of machine gun turrets out of hatches in the ceiling and blows the attackers to hell.

I'm not really sure how they were supposed to have not seen that coming, but okay.

The choreography of this battle isn't great, but it has enough of the coolness factor to be entertaining regardless. Mostly because of how the hotel lobby music continues playing throughout, and because of Raven's extremely amusing quips and one-liners as he manifests a shotgun and seemingly uses it to paint targets for the turrets.

Or maybe he's just pointing the shotgun and firing it wherever he knows his turrets are about to hit just for the lolz. Or else that body behind the desk is actually physical, and he's actually using a real shotgun in conjunction with his ceiling guns. Whatever the case may be, Raven is kind of the best character in this pilot.

The thugs shoot back, trying to disable the turrets, and they do appear to shoot out one or two of them, but Kovacs isn't down for the count himself. Even high and half-beaten, he does a good job blindsiding the gunmen who are shooting back, kicking them down and letting Raven finish them off. Like I said, the choreography isn't great in terms of showing how people get from place to place and so forth, but it manages to get the idea across.

Finally, it's only Dimitri left. Kovacs tries to subdue him for interrogation, but Raven isn't willing to spare someone who threatened one of his precious customers, even if the customer in question is shouting for him not to. Dimitri goes down under a multi-autogun barrage. Kovacs expresses annoyance. Raven apologizes, but says that Dimitri had just really pissed him off with that toaster comment. He then offers Kovacs a hot shower and some appetizers while they wait for the police to arrive. When the police do arrive, it's...well, to be fair he did tell her he was going to this hotel, but still, it's kind of groanworthy.

Raven's avatar is pouring an actual drink for Kovacs. I guess that means it's not just a hologram. Android? Human sleeve with a remote control chip instead of a brain/stack?

Ortega whines at him about how he's already generated a pile of corpses on his first night alive again, while Kovacs tries to explain as best he can that he has no idea who the attackers were or why they targeted him. They did know him by name and personal history as an Envoy though, so it certainly wasn't random. As Ortega nags Kovacs, her partner does actual goddamned police work and ID's the suspects. All sleeves present are confirmed as those of local Bay City gangbangers, with the exception of Dimitri's.

Apparently, "Dimi the Twin" is a notorious globe-trotting assassin. He gets his name from the practice of using highly illegal personality forks to carry out his assassinations. Okay, so those DO exist, it's just against the law unless you're a multizillionaire and have your own satellite to house the backup. Or maybe it's just illegal to have more than one of yourself awake at a time, idk. Either way, the penalty for creating personality forks is permanent death; seemingly one of - if not the - only crime that warrants this. The cops are glad to have one of him in custody now, since they can interrogate him and hopefully get a lead on where to catch his primary self. Or, they would be if Raven hadn't flooded his body with so many bullets from so many directions that he broke Dimitri's cortical stack.

Ortega, eager to have yet another person to whine passive-aggressively at, starts berating Raven for his use of excessive force. Raven simply claims that his weapons were all legally owned, and that he was within his constitutional rights to use them in defense of a customer inside his own body. Ortega's own partner cuts in and points out that she's shot people for much less than that, and Raven just kind of smirks as she yells at him to shut up.

Raven, you are too good for this show.

He also says something else that, while endearing in much the same way as everything else he's said and done so far, I kind of have trouble making sense of.

No customers in fifty years?

...

Assuming he's telling the truth here, how has this hotel been able to last this long? Even if whoever created Raven never bothered to decommission him when he stopped being profitable, how has Raven been able to afford the power and material costs for fifty years of maintenance? There's also the fact that his hotel occupies a physical space in a dense city. There's competition for that kind of real estate. In a world of ruthless capitalist megacorporations, how could he have avoided being bought out?

Maybe I'm trying to apply too much logic to a setting that isn't meant to be taken entirely seriously. Raven's...well, his everything really...fits with some of the earlier Borderlands-ish black comedy bits, like the prison hologram cheerily warning a room full of ex-cons to avoid lasers to the head. It's just that the beginning of this pilot seemed to be taking itself really, really seriously (probably too much so), so I'm not sure how it wants me to engage.

...

Kovacs, who seems to have sobered at least most of the way up from his drug trip by now, points out that it's awfully strange that a high-end professional killer like Dimi the Twin would come after him the very night after his release. The cops - including Ortega's otherwise seemingly more reasonable partner - stupidly fail to see the significance of this, simply attributing it to someone having an ancient grudge against the Falconerites and Kovacs being a dick. With a frustrated sigh, Kovacs explains that this proves Bancroft didn't commit suicide; someone was worried enough about an Envoy sniffing after them that they hired Dimitri to take care of it.

Hmm. Dimitri notably *wasn't* trying to kill Kovacs, despite that apparently being his usual line of work. He didn't even kill his sleeve and recover his stack, as I'd expect a bounty hunter in this setting to do when ordered to bring a dangerous captive in. He seems to have been ordered to take him alive and embodied. Wonder why Bancroft's murderer would have ordered that?

Ortega just kind of fumes and babbles, while Kovacs excuses himself to his room. She tries to demand that he come back here so that she can keep fuming and babbling at him, but her partner makes her leave him alone. Literally EVERY SCENE with Ortega ends with her either leaving Kovacs in disgust, or being outraged at him for leaving her. You just can't win.

Kovacs retreats to the elevator, where snow or ash appears to start falling.

Is there another flashback coming? Yes, there's another flashback coming.

Flash back to Kovacs in a younger version of the sleeve he got killed by the praetorians in. He's fleeing a lost battle in a burning forest. It's hard to tell, but I think some of those burning trees might be Elder songspires. This is probably the "Battle of Stronghold" that he was supposedly the only rebel soldier to survive.

Back in the present. Late night. Kovacs has left the hotel and is sitting in an alley, reflecting on his life and fondling a handgun. He was a criminal. Then, he was a revolutionary, the warrior-acolyte of a prophetess. Then, after her death and before his own, he went back to being a criminal. Now he's been brought back centuries later, in a galaxy rebuilt by the enemy.

This isn't his world. This isn't his life. Going by the last twenty-four hours, this isn't even going to be fun. Maybe it's best to just put that gun to his neck and destroy his own cortical stack.

But, he has a hallcuination/vision thing of Quelcrest Falconer, intense and weirdly erotic as always, telling him to either let go of his past and find something new to live for, or defy this decaying new world and restart the revolution. Removing himself from it won't change anything. It'll just protect himself from having to deal with it.

Was he in particular her actual love interest, or was she at the center of a polycule including all of the Envoys? It could be either, but I feel like the latter is more likely.

She whispers in his ear that there's something in his situation that he's not seeing. Something that he must make better use of the powers her procedures granted him in order to find. He tells her that she's dead, he's talking to herself, and there's no way she could possibly know anything about his situation.

Well...if the Falconer-phantasm embodies his subconscious Envoy senses or something, then she obviously does know. But even aside from that, I'm making the prediction right now that Falconer never actually died. The existence of personality forks has been established, as has the illegality and taboo of them. It's a pretty sure bet that the transhumanist cult leader lady hid a bunch of herself around the galaxy.

Kovacs looks out over the semi-comedic cyberpunk nightscape, and thinks.

A cut later, and he's at a tattoo shop that he passed during his earlier evening stroll. Getting the Envoy logo tattooed on his arm, just like he had on his previous body's. A sign tha...

...

...

...it's a stylized ouroboros symbol.

I won't make the obvious joke here, but I'm sure I can trust at least a few of you to do it for me in the comments.

Then, he makes a late night call to Laurens Bancroft, timed at just the hour when he's most likely to be asleep and annoyed at Kovacs waking him up.

End episode.


God I hope it gets better.

I want to like this. Hell, I want to *love* this. If you wrote a summary of this pilot and showed it to me, I'd be losing my shit with excitement to watch it. But, bad writing can ruin anything, and fucking hell was "Out of the Past" burdened with a lot of it.

It goes beyond the overly self-serious tone at the beginning that belied the zaniness to come, or even the terrible exposition dialogue. This episode was, despite my loving almost everything that happened in it, one of the slowest, most exhausting viewing experiences I can recall. I'm honestly stunned that it was only one hour worth of screentime. It feels like I've been working my way through half a season. I can't exactly put my finger on all the reasons *why* watching it feels so arduous, but it does, and apparently I'm not alone in this. Hopefully the following episodes are, if not better, then at least easier to watch and write about.

While I still can't say for sure how many of the problems were inherited from the novel and how many are the fault of the show writers, the fact that the writing quality is so uneven makes me strongly suspect it's mostly the latter. Like, Kovacs? Kovacs is cool. I like Kovacs. Most of the other characters feel like they came out of some third-rate hacky cop show. Ortega especially (I think I may have mentioned this once or twice already lol), but not just. It definitely feels like everyone besides the protagonist is being contorted to make this part of the story fit into an hour-long TV episode.

Except for Raven, of course. Raven is the best. I really hope that Kovacs stays in that hotel in the semi-long term, so that Raven isn't just a one episode wonder. Hell, I want Raven to be the Cortana to Kovacs' Master Chief and play adjutant/dispatch for him over neural commlink. It's not like that would be much sillier than the baseline for this show. Yeah, I'll say it: I fucking ship it.*

The other character who managed to come through fairly well was Falconer. Hackneyed and cheesy though the style of flashback the show uses for her is, the concept shines through. She's a very pure example of a sort of archetype that I've always found oddly fascinating. The alien messiah, offering salvation through the violation of taboo and the transformation of humans into something...mixed. I actually came up with a character for a possible story of my own that's almost creepily similar to Falconer, at least as this pilot paints her. As with everything else about Altered Carbon, I can only hope she holds up in the following episodes.

Overall, it's hard work to keep myself invested in this story through all the ineptitude. But, for the time being, I'm willing to keep doing that hard work. I won't be able to keep it up for long if the show doesn't speed up, but for now I'm on board.



*If the simulated hookers are being directly controlled by Raven, then this may already be a canon ship.