He threatens to harm the sleeve until she tells him who Riker is… she is about to explain as the episode ends. He realizes that she was onto him before she knew who he was, meaning it was the sleeve she was following. Ortega goes to confront Kovacs, but he turns the table on her. Ortega and Abboud ( Waleed Zuaiter) are called to the scene and she is stunned to see the carnage and learn that Kovac found the tracker she placed on him… it was in the signal filter she gave him in the first episode. At once point she gets the children laughing as she yells out from the bathroom that she is peeing standing up.Īnd just so you don't forget them, Poe ( Chris Conner) helps Vernon ( Ato Essandoh) find Kovacs, but he arrives just as the Envoy is walking out of the building covered in blood. It is one of the funnier moments as the older woman is running around as a large, bald man covered in tattoos. Though her mother, Alazne ( Marlene Forte) is catholic and doesn't believe in re-sleeving, her Abuela ( Matt Biedel) renounced Catholicism before she died and enjoyed being brought back for the dinner and to see her family. To offset the intense torture scenes we get to see Ortega ( Martha Higareda) celebrate the Day of the Dead with her family and she puts her grandmother into a gang-bangers body so she can come home for the dinner. We see Modern Kovacs wait for his opening, stop his own heart to force them to bring him out of the virtual and then scare the hell out of the techs until they free him, where he grabs his gun and kills everyone around him including Dimitri, taking his head and stack with him. Original Kovacs eventually figures out how to control the scenario and turns it against her because of her feelings for him. Meanwhile in the flashbacks we see Quell ( Renée Elise Goldsberry) trying to teach the Envoys how to survive virtual torture and she foces on Kovacs ( Will Yun Lee) specifically because he was part of a group that had tortured a friend of hers. Dimitri goes through a long and sorted parade of tortures trying to break Kovacs. But when doubled, they don't share memories going forward, so he wants to know what Kovacs killed the other Dimitri… except this one thinks Kovacs is a former cop named Riker.

Dimitri double sleeves (copies his stack into two bodies at once), hence the nickname. He is then confronted by Dimitri the Twin ( Tahmoh Penikett), the guy who attacked Kovacs at the Raven. Kovacs ( Joel Kinnaman) is captured and taking to a clinic where they do virtual torture. Having recently read the novel, I was anticipating this episode and how it might be very uncomfortable to watch. Though in fairness, Altered Carbon is such a retread of The Matrix in so many ways that it's a good thing, in the long run, the Wachowskis pursued far more creatively challenging projects instead.This article contains spoilers for Altered Carbon episode 4 – Force of Evil. (There's probably an alternate universe where the Wachowskis are behind the adaptation of Altered Carbon, and it's a much better TV show. It's the sort of idea that other creators haven't been afraid to explore: A fun bit of Matrix trivia is the fact that the original plan for Switch was to have the character played by a man in 'real life' and then played by a woman while inside the Matrix - an idea deemed too much for 1999, but the kind of concept that viewers in 2020 would be more than able to handle. But in Season Two, the very few times a character occupies a sleeve that differs from their previously established gender happen as part of a ruse they quickly return to their previous side of the supposed gender binary. This definitely stands out in relation to gender, an issue which you would think would be privy to a certain level of fluidity given the ease with which one can choose the body they occupy. ( Will Yun Lee, who played another incarnation of Kovacs in Season One and also appears in season two, fares significantly better in straddling the line between both actors.) Without getting into spoilers, Mackie does manage to find real chemistry with the rest of the ensemble cast, especially when things get into more romantic territory. In Season One, then-star Joel Kinnaman's grim onscreen presence reflected an actor in search of a personality for his character, and it's understandable that Mackie at times seems to be struggling to find his own performance in Kinnaman's wake. This isn't really Mackie's fault (who can be incredibly engaging on screen - just check out this recent interview on The Daily Show as one example). Unfortunately, his primary predecessor didn't leave him much to work with: The character is more often than not a stoic cypher who, in theory, is supposed to be both empathic and charismatic, but those qualities rarely come through. Kovacs swaps bodies with some frequency, which is how Anthony Mackie inherits the role of Kovacs this season.

Altered carbon cast episode 2