Altered Carbon season 2 premiere recap: Phantom Lady

Takeshi Kovacs is roped into a job protecting an elite Meth client with the promise that he can take him to his lost love Quellcrist Falconer, but the job is more complicated than it first appears on Altered Carbon.

“This is a ghost story told in the age of eternal life.” A glamorous lounge singer croons to a disreputable crowd as Poe (Chris Conner) stands behind the bar and listens raptly on the season 2 premiere of Altered Carbon. A woman named Trepp (Simone Missick) is looking for Takeshi Kovacs and asks Poe if he knows where she can find him. He is evasive, naturally, and their conversation is cut short when Poe glitches and totally forgets what they were talking about. It seems his short term memory isn’t what it used to be.

Plus it turns out Poe doesn’t even work there. He’s just a rogue AI attached to a nearby emitter. Before long a guy comes barging into the club calling for Kovacs. He has the money he owes him and soon fights break out among the patrons as some of them attempt to claim the money in Kovacs’ name. Meanwhile, the guy takes the opportunity to escape after palming the money and leaving behind a case of explosives for the thugs to fight over.

He’s not as smooth as he thinks though, because Kovacs catches him before he can get away. Surprise! Kovacs’ new sleeve is the sexy lounge singer from the club (Jihae). Before Kovacs and the guy can do any negotiation, Trepp kills the guy and approaches Kovacs with a job. Trepp is a bounty hunter, hired by a Meth named Horace Axley (Michael Shanks) to find Kovacs and offer him a job. Axley believes he needs protection and only trusts the Last Envoy with his life.

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Kovacs declines, saying he doesn’t work for Meths. However, Trepp is incredibly persuasive, and by that I mean she shoots Kovacs in the back and takes his stack. This way Axley is able to negotiate terms with Kovacs face to face in a virtual environment. Not only does he promise Kovacs a new state of the art military sleeve, but he promises he knows the whereabouts of Quellcrist Falconer (Renée Elise Goldsberry), the lost love that Kovacs has been searching for. If Kovacs agrees to protect him, he’ll bring him to Quell and pay him enough for the two of them to disappear. How can he refuse?

So Kovacs is re-sleeved and reborn as Anthony Mackie on Altered Carbon, but when he awakes he finds that it’s too late and Axley is already dead. Thanks to the disorientation involved with re-sleeving, Kovacs is surprised, knocked out, and stabbed in the shoulder. When he wakes up again, he discovers that Axley has brought him back to Harlan’s World. It’s been thirty years since he was last there during the events of season one and he never intended to return.

Kovacs can’t risk being found in a house with a murdered Meth; whatever happens, he’ll be blamed. So he grabs Poe and leaves to find safe shelter. And that means going into Yakuza territory and conning his way into an audience with his friend Tanaseda Hideki (James Saito). Hideki offers Kovacs safe housing and his support. It seems that Kovacs has arrived on Harlan’s World during a complicated time.

Governor Konrad Harlan recently abdicated his post, leaving his daughter Danica (Lela Loren) to pick up his mantle. The government has been fighting a war with the Quellist Rebellion and word has it that they have recently brokered a fragile cease-fire. But there’s more at stake considering that half the stacks in existence are made from alloy dug from their mines. Harlan’s World is a valuable asset and the Protectorate, the controlling governmental body under which all planets fall, has sent its elite military unit to protect that asset from the uprising. For whatever reason, the last thing Harlan’s World wants is interference from the Protectorate.

Kovacs must unravel the mystery behind Axley’s death in order to find Quell, but Hideki warns that while physical death may have been cured, the mind and spirit may change and degrade over time. Kovacs is not the same person he once was, and if Quell is alive then she may not be either.

Kovacs doesn’t know where to start looking, but a conversation with an imaginary Quell makes him realize that his body holds the memory of his experiences. “Feel what you felt,” she says. “Then you can remember what you saw.” In other words, state-dependent memory, which is pretty inconvenient when what Kovacs wants to remember involves being stabbed.

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But he stabs himself in his shoulder wound and suddenly remembers that the person who jumped him in his disoriented state was Quell. She is on Harlan’s World and she was the one who killed Axley and his men. She could have killed Kovacs too, but instead, she tells him, “I’m not here for you,” stabs him and disappears. What is her deal and how did she get involved in all this? And how does he find her again?

What did you think of the season 2 premiere of Altered Carbon? Be sure to tell us in the comment section below!

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