Altered Carbon “The Killers”

As I type this, I have no idea if Netflix has renewed Altered Carbon for a second season.  I’ll be a little surprised if it is.  The show doesn’t seem to have hit the zeitgeist the way many other Netflix shows have, and it looks to be incredibly expensive.

But even if it doesn’t, this first season ends with a bang.

So, when last we saw Kovacs and Vernon, Reileen was holding them prisoner.  She was torturing Ortega with an endless VR loop of coming home to her murdered family where the Ghost Guy who really did kill them would taunt her and reset the whole thing.  Reileen puts a stop to that by sending her goons to capture the rest of Kovacs’ allies, which essentially means Ava.  The cop tech is shot through the stack and Edgar Poe is….well, it looks like he’s deleted.

Dang. I liked that guy.

Poe’s last act is to download Lizzy’s consciousness to the Head in the Clouds brothel where she can take on an artificial body that makes her rather dangerous seeing as how she’s been practicing martial arts and knife throwing in the VR simulation.

But what is Reileen’s deal?  Well, she thinks having loved ones makes someone weak and wants her brother to realize the same thing.  Doesn’t wanting her brother with her make her weak by her own logic?  Oh well.  She gives him a gun with one bullet and says he needs to shoot either Ortega, Vernon, or Ava, and Reileen will let the other two go.  Kovacs actually tries to shoot himself, but hey, the gun wasn’t really loaded.  Reileen had the only real one.  Ghost Guy takes the Elliots and Ortega away, and Kovacs manages to shoot a hole through the hull of the floating brothel.  That seals off the room with the two siblings, and after Lizzy rescues her parents, Ortega and Ghost Guy duke it out in what may not look like a fair fight until you remember Ortega has a superstrong cybernetic arm.  The Elliots throw the switches to make Head in the Clouds crash to the ground, and the cops show up to arrest whomever they can find.  Kovacs and Reileen fight some more, Reileen reveals she killed their mother back when the two were still kids and she still has the stack of Kovacs’ long lost Envoy love interest stashed somewhere.  But, she also seems to get killed and that would be the end of the Kovacs family if this were a show other than Altered Carbon where Kovacs’ stack can be saved from the crash site and put into a new cloned body with a pardon…for one of him.  Remember he made a clone of himself before he set off for Head in the Clouds after all.

Bottom line is, Reileen said enough about Laurens Bancroft’s death to get him arrested for someone else’s murder even though he was on drugs, and it gets his wife Miriam arrested for the drugs and being the person who beat the hell out of Lizzy.  Oh, and Lizzy was pregnant at the time, which was why she was seeing the Bancrofts at all, and Miriam’s assault killed the unborn baby, so both Bancrofts get arrested.  I’ll say this for Laurens…he doesn’t argue too much when the cops show up.

So, that’s it.  The season, and perhaps the series, ends with Kovacs off to find his lost lover’s stack.  Ortega is alone without Kovacs or her family.  The elder Bancrofts are going to prison from the looks of things.  The Elliots are a family again, and it looks like Ava got a woman’s sleeve now.  Poe still seems to be gone.  Will there be more?  Should there be?

Let’s say eight and a half out of ten new bodies for season one.

But now it’s time for a new Monday show, and while I was writing these up, two of my previous shows returned with new seasons.  We’ll go with the cheerful one next and jump back into A Series of Unfortunate Events.

Maybe “cheerful” isn’t the right word, but it is if you compare it to the other series.