Last time we’d seen Takeshi Kovacs he’d gotten Elder spirit out of Quellcrist Falconer and hopefully trapped into a construct . . . not knowing that it had actually slipped out and into Colonel Carrera. Now with this spirit wanting nothing but pure destruction for everyone Kovacs and his crew must find a way to stop them.
1. Prime Time
In the opening scene, the Protectorate soldiers surrounded Kovacs, Falconer, and Trepp after finding their signal through the construct. Prime Kovacs is leading the group, but he kills all of the soldiers in an off-screen betrayal. The last time we’d seen Prime interact with Falconer, it seemed like her spell and words of living his own life had started to sink, and this was a confirmation. Prime, similar to the original, betrays the people he was once a leader too. Prime understands that he has to earn their trust with this final mission, and the original Kovacs is plenty skeptical and ready to shoot him in the head. But Falconer understands that he is doing it not for her but himself. Between the truth that Falconer told him about Reileen and Jaeger’s final admission of his fear that he would lose Prime like he did the original, he wants to forge his path. With the Elder spirit getting ready to destroy the whole plant, he has to make that move right away.
2. Trepp’s Father
Since the Protectorate is right behind them, the crew tries to think of a place that would be off anyone’s radar. Trepp suggests her father’s shop to gather supplies and come up with a proper plan. Since they’ve previously been there, everyone seems on board . . . except for Prime, because he knows one thing that the others don’t: Trepp’s father is dead, and his stack is destroyed, so there’s no way to bring him back up. Once they realize the truth, Trepp becomes inconsolable after just getting back her wife and son from Danica Harlan, and her father was the only blood family she had left. Trepp demands that everyone leave the shop and leave her out of everything since she has sacrificed and put so much of her loved ones in danger. This scene also stands out because Prime tries to lighten his conscience by blaming the original Kovacs for leading them to him, but it’s only because he’s never had to deal with guilt before and to react in strange ways.
3. Doublecross
Kovacs and Falconer join forces with Danica Harlan to try and take down the Elder inside of Colonel Carrera because it doesn’t just want destruction – – it wants total annihilation. They tried to take Konrad Harlan to the Elder as a penance for what he did, but it turns out that Danica had put a hole right through his stack, so he’d be killed with no chance of being re-spun back up for who knows how long. They decide to try to offer it anyways, and the Elder demands “No guns and no soldiers” to their final meeting. It seems semi-working before Danica pulls a hidden gun out of her sleeve, and all hell breaks loose.
This is one of those obvious double-crosses that, as a part of the audience, you’d think our two protagonists would have the idea to double-check her because of her checkered past. It turns into a huge fight scene with the ultimate reward, for people heavily invested, the death of Danica Harlan. She goes down semi-swinging, but since it’s an Elder of the planet, it doesn’t seem like she ever really had a chance.
4. The Final Play
The actual double-cross was meant for Falconer to do to Harlan. Her plan was to contain the Elder spirit inside her and then use the Angelfire to reign down solely on her to destroy the Elder, the sleeve, and the stack. Kovacs hated the thought because he wanted nothing more than to have a life with her. Throughout both seasons, he couldn’t understand why every big play she decided to do herself would be a sacrifice. It was supposed to relate to real death, and how life wasn’t meant to keep going as long as it does in this time. She’d been the one to teach him the value of life and how powerful it is with an ending. Once Prime Kovacs had shown up, it was known what was going to happen: the original Kovacs was going to be the one to make the sacrifice play.
Although the moment is powerful, despite some slightly cheapened CGI, it does feel like it was meant this way all along. No matter what Kovacs did, he would never make Falconer happy because she always felt like she needed die a martyr to justify all that she’s done. Kovacs’ decision to do it instead gives her a new quest and some peace, knowing that his spirit would always be with him like she was with him.
5. Dig’s Return
In the final moments of the episode, we find Dig writing in a journal inside the hotel that Poe used to own, talking about how much she misses him and cannot fully start anew without him by her side. Poe suddenly appears in the middle of the room but has no memory of Dig, or any of the adventures in the last two seasons. According to him once his defragmentation program had finished he found a slip of paper with the address for the hotel and a bit of code that was a decryption key for a human DHF. The series ends open-ended with Dig and Poe looking at the code that is hinted at being Kovacs.
It seems even in the final play, Poe was able to sneak away from a piece of Kovacs that could bring him back to the world. I do think by leaving it open, it would have ended up in a similar adventure of Kovacs chasing Falconer around the universe trying to make a life together, but again it also gets rid of the power that the sacrifice represented since he may be back after all.
