Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Late into “The Killers,” with the Head In The Clouds brothel plummeting from the sky and his sister dead in his arms, Takeshi Kovacs asks the ghost of Quellcrist Falconer to tell him a story. “Something that doesn’t end in death and tragedy.”
It’s a funny thing for a person to say in the world of Altered Carbon, where everything is peppered with death and tragedy and nothing—not stories, not life—ever really ends. But the story Quellcrist spins as they fall toward the Bay is a surprisingly hopeful one, about a princess and her peasant boy, who searches the galaxy for his lost love long after she dies. It’s important to note that Kovacs is technically telling this story to himself. A reminder, that even in the bleakest of stories there’s always a little bit of hope.
“The Killers” is a finale episode that very much so has its eyes primarily on a possible season two. There’s a ton of set up here, and the moves that writer Laeta Kalogridis and Nevin Densham make to put some pieces in their proper places edge close to the lazy side; a lot of really terrible security guards are easily disarmed, is all I’m saying, and BCPD Captain Tanaka—who I’m not even sure earned any time of redemption arc—made it up to Head In The Clouds mighty fast to shuttle the important characters to safety. Some of the plot-points are excusable because they’re so brutally uplifting, like Lizzie Elliot traveling into the body of a synth wearing Halle Berry’s Catwoman costume, walking the halls of Head In The Clouds dispatching pervy Meths. Some are odd in their brusqueness, like the barely explained death of Poe. And some are like Mickey’s real-death, which serves mostly as a reminder that, right, Mickey was a character.
What’s important is that those pieces do get moved, though, and we’re left in the first half of the episode with the series’ two most important showdowns. Ortega vs Leung, the man who murdered her family, and Kovacs vs. Reileen, the woman who once was his family.
The brawl between Ortega and Leung is the more impressive sequence on a technical level, a violent, messy thing that isn’t pretty because it shouldn’t be. “Are you a believer, motherfucker” is such a great callback I can practically forgive the fact it came moments after “where is your God, now?” a line from page one of the cliche handbook. But Ortega spiking Leung’s stack is where the over-the-top cruelty of the previous episode comes back to haunt this one; it’s cathartic, yes, but it still doesn’t feel like enough. Ortega gets a measure of revenge, but she’s still returning to a ground where her entire family is dead.
The stand-off between Kovacs and Reileen has its own issues. For as much as the writers effectively wrapped up the dozens of mysteries this show built for itself, it seems like they never quite got a handle on Reileen. Even as she’s tossing her brother around her headquarters, she yells at least three different motivations at him. Is she a super-criminal who would rather die than go to jail? A fiercely devoted sister doing this all for family? Or is she just, like, thoroughly insane? Even the reveal that Quellcrist’s consciousness is still alive out there lacks weight, because Reileen has so consistently lied about everything else up to this point. Why believe her now? Unfortunately, the questions only come close to interesting in her final moments, in which—and kudos to Dichen Lachman for some stellar, subtle face acting—Reileen seems to realize that after all this time she doesn’t even understand what roles she’s supposed to be playing in her own story. “Do it,” she tells her brother, a gun to her stack. “I won’t stop.”
Things are wrapped up pretty neatly in the weeks after the brothel crash, but Altered Carbon lives in such a bonkers setting that even the neatest of threads are at least thought-provoking. For instance: Sex-tired and presumably dehydrated to a dangerous degree, the second Kovacs returns to Bay City to discover the government needs either he or his twin killed. Now, it’s a bit of a stretch that no one immediately thinks to preserve the memories of the Kovacs who has been alive for longer than two orgy-filled days. But I do like the brotherly sort of affection that builds between clones. They play another game of rock, paper, scissors to decide who stays alive. “Which one are you?” Ortega—waiting for a pardoned Elias Ryker to regain his face and his freedom—asks after Kovacs re-emerges.
“The one you said goodbye to,” he answers.
There’s a ton of more tidy resolutions to be had before the credits role. The Elliots are reunited, Ava back in her birth body and Lizzie choosing to keep the synth. Bancroft is arrested for murder and government coercion—which I don’t exactly buy, considering the heinous things all Meths do every time they throw a tea party—and Miriam is taken down with him. It turns out it was the Bancroft matriarch that beat Lizzie Elliot into insanity, after finding out the young prostitute was pregnant with Laurens’ child. “We’ve ruined each other, haven’t we?” Laurens asks Miriam.
That might be the biggest takeaway from Altered Carbon‘s first season. Live long enough without the fear of an end and you will be ruined in some way. Find a line you’ll cross. Destroy a love or two. But the thing about endless time is that it comes with endless opportunity to make things right. Reileen promised her brother he’d never find Quellcrist without her help. But nothing is really lost if the search can last forever.
“Someday,” Kovacs says to himself in the finale’s closing seconds, another reminder, “without fail, he will find her.”
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.
