Welcome back to Bay City where Takeshi Kovacs is on the case for Laurens Bancroft’s murder. He just got away from being tortured in virtual reality and heading into the city to find the murderer. This week, Kovacs finds a solid lead and gets a history lesson on his sleeve. Let’s jump right into episode five, “The Wrong Man.”
1. Miriam Bancroft
Kovacs heads out to find Bancroft after escaping virtual interrogation and is pissed off because he wants to solve the case and get back his freedom. The only problem is that Bancroft is not home when Kovacs gets there, only his wife. Miriam Bancroft tries to seduce him, not only back into bed but with a new deal to drop her husband’s case and live on her private island. While Kovacs is slightly tempted, he knows that Bancroft will never let him leave and these two have some kind of sick game they play.
In many detective stories, there is a trope of being offered a better deal to just drop the case; “who cares it doesn’t need to be solved anyways?” This often means that this person has a secret that they do not want to be revealed. Kovacs is smart enough to know that Miriam has something that she’s hiding but he still has no idea what that is. Miriam hasn’t gotten enough screen time to give any insight even to the audience, but messing with her husband is high on the list. Whether she can get Kovacs off the case or simply back into bed, she’s not going to let up.
2. Infection Camp
Kovacs ends up finding Bancroft at what looks like a homeless encampment, but it turns out to be much darker. It’s a place filled with people who carry a deadly high contagious disease passed down to them. Bancroft looks like a saint in the encampment distributing candy to small children and trying to make them smile. On the outside, it looks like a rich man trying to help out those less fortunate, but Kovacs sees right through it.
Bancroft does it for the sheer theatre of it all; he doesn’t truly care about them, but by showing them a display of kindness, he can stroke his ego. Bancroft even goes the extra mile by dying in front of them, but he’s going to be put into another clone sleeve of himself, so it’s all for nothing. He would rather make himself seem like a good soul than put any resources towards an actual cure for these people. It’s all just an extra errand meant to pass the time in his endless lifetime.
3. The Son
Kovacs gets a reliable tip from Poe that leads to a video of Bancroft beating up his son Isaac on the night he was murdered. It was known they had a rough relationship, but this was concrete evidence for a motive. Kovacs and Ortega go to his house and find a 3D organic printer along with a clone of Bancroft in a sleep state.
The son was initially thrown out because if Bancroft was killed, no resleeving, nobody would get the fortune so it wouldn’t make sense for anyone in the family to do it. However, with this clone sleeve at Isaac’s disposal, it would be easy for him to kill his dad and then be able to keep the illusion he was still alive. This is the big break in the case and all signs point to Isaac. It’s now about finding Isaac. Since this is the halfway point in the first season, there are going to be some more layers to this discovery, Isaac hates his dad, so murder isn’t out of the question, but leaving the clone and machine out to be found by anyone is suspect, too. This feels like it’s not going to be open and shut.
4. Neo-C
Neo-C is a term that keeps coming up in this episode. It refers to Neo-Catholicism and its religious coding inside of people’s stacks that keep them from being resleeved into a new body. It comes up when Kovacs and Ortega start discussing Ryker’s case. He believed that people weren’t actually Neo-C, but their stacks were reprogrammed by someone higher up so that their murders could never get solved.
Continued belowOrtega reveals that she has a list of stacks that she believes are connected for that reason, but is unable to do anything about it because of the coding. Between Ryker’s old case, Bancroft’s murder, and a mysterious character that has only shown a few times, it seems like it has to be connected. A villain hiding behind a religious belief or using their tools as convenience is nothing short of genius. It’s a tactic use throughout history and wars, why not cover up some murders in this city? Kovacs and Ortega both know this is going to lead to something big.
5. Ghostwalker
We finally got a “name” for the mysterious man throughout the show. This is a man who got the bug into Kovacs room when he hooked up with Miriam, who Ortega saw very briefly during the dinner party, and disappears on any video feed that should have caught him. He makes a very clear statement to Ortega when he nearly kills her in an elevator and instead takes out her partner. This is a man who feels like he can get away from anything, the laws mean nothing to him, and has Neo-C as his motivation for his bloody interaction.
Religion is used as motivation against science has been a theme shown early on in the series. This new twist with Ghostwalker shows that he is no longer going to be hiding in the shadows, and is more than willing to get his hands dirty. There is still some more to be revealed because he feels like a strong knight for a king or queen yet to be revealed.
