Welcome back for another episode of Altered Carbon. After a terrible dinner party, Takeshi Kovacs ends up getting kidnapped and taken hostage. In this episode, he’s going to need to find a way out and, maybe, reveal some information about his past to help him get out of it. Let’s just jump right into episode four, “Forces of Evil.”
1. VR Torture
This episode takes place in a virtual reality interrogation/torture room. Kovacs got drugged at the end of the last episode and is now being held in a “clinic” where he’s been put into this VR room. It can be intense at times because the torturer, Dimi The Twin, demands to know who is working for. However, he doesn’t call him Kovacs or even an Envoy and instead he keeps calling him Ryker.
While Dimi has his fun burning off Kovacs’s legs at one point, the entire scene feels like a Mission Impossible or James Bond movie. Kovacs is tied up and nearly on the verge of death but waiting for his time to break out. It’s cool to see him squirm, since his usual demeanor is stoic and dry. He, at one point, hallucinates about Quellcrist to help get through the pain. Once it is all said and done, he gets right back into killing mode and takes out everyone in his way, which is a strong reason to tune into any episode of this show.
2. Ortega’s Grandma
On the lighter side of the episode, we’re following Detective Ortega and her family dinner for Dia de Los Muertos. The big twist for the night is that Ortega has re-spun up her Grandma in the sleeve of a big, bald, tattooed guy that was brought into the police station. It’s alluded that Ortega did it with good intentions of allowing her Grandma to come back to spend the night with their family for one more meal, but also to show her family that being re-sleeved is a good, viable option. Their faith makes it seem as if it an eternal sin, but Ortega straddles both sides of the argument by being able to re-sleeve murder victims to capture the people who killed them.
The show talks about re-sleeving like a person simply changing outfits, so it’s a good reminder that it’s not so black and white for those of faith. Ortega’s mom is torn because it would mean being reunited with her parents, but she wonders if God would punish her for indulging in such practices. While the grandma did have a fun night out, she does tell Ortega not to do it again next year so that she can simply rest in peace and accept that death is a part of life. People may be able to live longer, but death is a needed piece to appreciate what was there.
3. Kovacs Past
During the interrogation, Kovacs is constantly flashing back to his Envoy training, preparing for this very moment. Quellcrist Falconer runs the training and puts him in a simulation for some real-time training. Kovacs’s experience is far different than the others as Quellcrist has a personal hatred for Kovacs due to his past. It is revealed that he was once on the side of their enemy, a former CTAC officer, and he only survived an attack because he wasn’t as high ranking.
It’s a strange teacher-student dynamic between the two of them, as he is trying his best to be a part of their movement but she has this deep hatred for him due to what he was once a part of. It feels as though she still wants to make sure he understands the importance of the lessons, but she wants to inflict her own kind of pain on him. Especially given that they are in a virtual setting, so she can stab and beat him all she wants without killing him. I think the reveal of his past and the use of the tension between the two helped keep the audience’s attention during the flashback as opposed to just a training memory.
4. Ryker
Throughout the VR interrogation, Dimi kept referring to Kovacs as Ryker. While watching it, I kept wondering if perhaps it was another name that Kovacs went by in his long life, but it turns out it was something else. Ryker was the name of the sleeve that Kovacs has been in this whole time. Aside from being a nicotine addict, there’s not much else known about the sleeve until now. It’s an interesting tidbit in this story because as the story has progressed so far, we as an audience never really felt the need to ask “Who is this guy?” It just felt like Bancroft used his money to get a well-abled sleeve for Kovacs.
Continued belowDimi reveals that Kovacs was a cop that he set up, and who wasn’t supposed to see the light of day for who knows how long. The episode ends on a cliffhanger, as Ortega is in Kovacs’s room as she’s going to say who Ryker is to her. This is a solid hook for the next episode, as we’ve watched Ortega watching Kovacs closely in every episode. We were led to believe that it is because of Bancroft, but it has a much deeper meaning and explains how the tracker was implanted in him from the jump.
5. Where’s Bancroft?
Last episode, Bancroft made it explicitly clear that he looks at Kovacs as part of his property; he owns him. And yet, when his prized possession and hired PI goes missing, he’s not doing anything about it. It felt like a piece of the show was missing; I kept expecting to have him check out the motel that Kovacs stays at to talk to Poe or Elliot, but he never does. The decision to have him not be a part of this episode, as it is more about Kovacs’s past, is understood, but even a slight mention of Bancroft would helped this episode.
