‘Altered Carbon’ on Netflix Episode 5 Recap: The Ghostwalker

“The Wrong Man” is a jam-packed episode of Altered Carbon—there’s religious assassin ghosts, sad graphic sex, and a bloody death that actually sticks—but that doesn’t excuse it for starting off with one of the laziest storytelling tactics there is: The “plot-twist” that is actually just more like a lie.

The twist: Takeshi Kovacs is currently sleeved in the body of disgraced BCPD officer Elias Ryker. What’s revealed is that Ryker was also Kristin Ortega’s partner and boyfriend, which explains her borderline obsessive tailing and protectiveness of the sleeve. Make no mistake, that is a show-altering twist; it introduces another lofty idea to chew on in a show filled with them, this concept of looking into your lost lover’s eyes and seeing another soul staring back at you. Appropriate enough for a series as bare body-obsessed as this one, though, this twist comes with a lot of buts.

The fact that known revolutionary Envoy Kovacs is wearing Ortega’s boyfriend’s sleeve really feels like something another character would’ve mentioned over the course of four episodes. Or at least alluded to. Or at least, I don’t know, shared a knowing glance over. Instead, Ortega’s mistrust of Kovacs has entirely been predicated on the idea she isn’t comfortable with a marked terrorist walking around Bay City. At no point do any of her friends or colleagues raise the possibility that maybe she’s upset because the man she once loved has a whole different man inside him. Like I said, the writers didn’t build up a plot twist as much as they just lied by omission for a few hours until the story was ready to drop a bomb.

Still, though, the revelation that Kovacs is wearing Ryker does largely change the dynamic of the show, often into something a little more lighthearted. There’s a lot of humor to be mined from Kovacs having to mimic Ryker’s mannerisms. “I did the talking and Ryker mostly stood there looking angry,” Ortega tells him.

“I can do angry,” Kovacs deadpans, correctly.

And when this show sharpens its focus into a sort of fucked-up buddy-cop story starring Kovacs and Ortega, the pace really crackles. The investigation into Bancroft’s murder leads the pair to an underground deathmatch ring named Fightdrome—this future really does seem to be 100% fighting and fucking—managed by a fantastically peculiar character named Carnage. It helps that the manager is played by damn Max Headroom himself Matt Frewer, but Carnage almost feels like something out of an entirely different breed of sci-fi, like your Blade Runner stream skipping over to The Fifth Element for a hot second.

Fightdrome surveillance footage reveals that not only was Bancroft in attendance the night he died, but so was his dickhead alcoholic son, Isaac. Bancroft assaults his son on the tape, screaming at him over and over, “You’re not me. You never will be.”

It turns out that’s the entire crux, motivation and all, of Bancroft’s murder. A quick, invasive search of Isaac’s apartment reveals a black market cloning device and a couple copies of his father’s sleeve. One of the billionaire’s own children had designs to permanently replace the family figurehead. “The Japanese didn’t deal with Bancroft in Osaka,” Kovacs deduces. “And Bancroft wasn’t Bancroft.”

It’s a very tidy resolution to a complex story, so I’m sure the Bancroft murder has more reveals in store. But while “The Wrong Man” does deal heavily with the investigation it’s mostly a vehicle to get to quieter charged moments between Kovacs and Ortega. Once again, Altered Carbon‘s body-swapping conceit almost allows it to get away with plot beats that aren’t exactly earned. The slow-motion Netflix sex Ortega and Kovacs engage in might be jarringly out-of-the-blue on another show—Ortega has spent most of the series hating this man—but there’s layers here. Ortega might hate the center, but she loves the shell.

There’s also, apparently, several layers to the deaths plaguing Bay City. Every sleeve-murder victim was suspiciously given Neo-Christian coding before they died, ensuring they could not be spun back up. Add in the presence of Dimi the Twin, the frame job that originally sent Ryker into custody, and Mary Lou Henchy dropping out of the dang sky and you got yourself a good old sprawling sci-fi conspiracy haunting every action in this show.

And where there’s a haunting, there’s a ghost. Or, in this case, the Ghostwalker, the name for the mysterious mustachioed man who has been lurking through the threads of this story but somehow leaving no trace.

Here, though, he leaves one hell of a trace, mostly using a few people’s guts all over an elevator wall. Ortega spins Dimi the Twin up for questioning—into the same tatted sleeve she used for her grandmother—an interrogation quickly shut down by Captain Tanaka. Ortega is ordered out of the building and into an elevator, along with Dimi, Abboud, and—Kovacs realizes too late before the doors close—the Ghostwalker, disguised as a cop.

There’s been no shortage of elevator fights lately; Marvel’s Netflix shows have at least two of them. But director Uta Briesewitz keeps this one as frantic as possible, more a close-quarters massacre than it is a cohesively-coordinated fight. The Ghostwalker takes bloody chunks out of Ortega immediately while Dimi incapacitates Abboud.

“May the Lord, in his love and mercy, help you with the grace of the Holy Spirit,” the Ghostwalker says. He aims a gun at Ortega—at her stack, which means lights out forever—and fires.

But Abboud takes the bullet.

It’s hard to give a show dramatic weight when death means nothing for most of the characters; hell, in this episode alone we watch Bancroft go through all the stages of a deadly virus in a minute. So the sight of Abboud’s stack exploding, and all of his being along with it, is one of the more jarring moments Altered Carbon has pulled off.

The gun clicks empty for Ortega, a lucky break. But the dynamic of the story has changed once again. There’s a ghost in town, and he brought real death with him.

Vinnie Mancuso writes about TV for a living, somehow, for Decider, The A.V. Club, Collider, and the Observer. You can also find his pop culture opinions on Twitter (@VinnieMancuso1) or being shouted out a Jersey City window between 4 and 6 a.m.

Watch "The Wrong Man" episode of Altered Carbon on Netflix