Altered Carbon – Season 2 Episode 6 Recap & Review

https://youtu.be/_MzbLQBeR9Y

The Hunt In The Woods

Episode 6 of Altered Carbon begins with Quell wrestling with her own inner-demons, sitting by the shore as the blue tendrils in her mind close in around her. Memories of her past come flooding back, including seeing Kovacs and the shattered remnants of her original memories on this planet. As Quell turns around, she finds Kovacs Prime infront of her, who pretends to be the real Kovacs. Only, it doesn’t seem to fool her as The Wedge close in on her position. Sensing something amiss, she tells the clone she can take him underground to secure the cache.

Underground, Trepp wakes up and finds herself alone and abandoned. With the real Kovacs nowhere to be seen following his tumble, she scrambles to the surface and watches from afar as the clone and Quell run off together through the forest. Quell brings him to Stronghold where he sees the ordeal she went through over the years, entombed by Rei and forced into giving up answers, showing her time through the years.

Above ground, Danica loses patience and tells Carrera to work faster. As she does, Kovacs hears Trepp’s voice in his mind, who manages to save him from his fate. As he opens his eyes, he’s clinging on for dear life on a cliff-edge and he’s still alive thanks to subconscious reflex survival instincts in the sleeve.

Having saved him from his fate, Trepp and Kovacs talk about what to do next and suggest a plan of action. As they begin killing off the squad members one by one, Joshua Kemp arrives with his men and claims to have retrieved Trepp’s message. At the same time, Quell reveals that she knew the truth about Kovacs all this time and starts fighting, until Kemp arrives and handcuffs him. Only, he handcuffs both Trepp and Kovacs too.

Underground, he tests Quell’s body and mind to see if she’s truly part of the Uprising. After seemingly passing the tests, Quell goes on to reveal the truth about Martin Kemp. Having proven herself, Kemp bows his head and welcomes her back to the Uprising.

Meanwhile, the two Kovacs find themselves face to face, tied up together, where our Kovacs tells him the truth about Rei, about how he pulled the trigger back at the end of season 1 and what Jaeger is really like.

With tensions dissipated for now, Trepp takes the opportunity to ask Kemp about Anil but when he acts shadily she suspects he’s lying. She takes Quell aside and talks to her about Kemp. It turns out he didn’t get a signal to their location and even worse, he has Anil’s stack strung around his neck.

Trepp and Quell team up against Kemp and call him out for being a traitor, deciding to use Kovacs Prime to their advantage. After freeing him and the real Kovac, they head out into the open. Only, as they do they’re surrounded by soldiers. Kemp happens to be working with Danica too, which Carrera figures out back in the control room. It turns out Danica has been plotting this all along, and turns her attention to Carrera whom she arrests for double sleeving. 

Out on the field, the soldiers open fire. They kill Kemp in cold blood and as the rest of the group hurry away, Quell hides behind a tree and loses control. She screams to the heavens and as she does, a brilliant blast of Angelfire wipes out the approaching soldiers.

What is this Angelfire? Why can Quell wield this sort of power? And what is Danica’s end-game here? There’s plenty of questions hanging over Altered Carbon and as we approach the business end of the season, things are starting to pick up. Whether the show can deliver a satisfying conclusion to this tale or not though remains to be seen.