After travelling the Known Worlds for decades in search of his former mentor and lover Quellcrist Falconer, Takeshi Kovach finds himself back on Harlan’s World, where the Quellist Uprising began, hired – against his will – by one of the Founders as protection. It may have been one of his shortest assignments, because as his consciousness finishes decanting into his new, military-grade sleeve, he wakes up in the middle of a carnage. The Meth who hired him is dead, along with his staff and bodyguards, and Kovach is forced into hiding, now the prime suspect in the killing. He soon realizes the real murderer is none other than the woman he chased after for so long, and that she possesses a weapon far deadlier than any other, a method of delivering ‘True Death’, wiping both the stack and its backups. The value of this unique weapon is soon discovered by the ruthless governor of Harlan’s World, Harlan’s daughter Danica, and by Colonel Carrera, charged by the Protectorate with containing the Quellist Uprising, who is left without purpose once the Governor announces a cease-fire with the rebels.
In the past months I’ve become a frequent user of reddit, so as I started watching this season, I had already seen many opinions about it, mostly negative. Unfortunately, my own impression after finishing leans in the same direction: it’s inferior to the first season in every aspect, loosing almost everything fresh, unique and thought-provoking. The discussion on the social implications of immortality, on the astronomical inequality between Meths and everyone else, is largely absent. Instead we get an off-hand remark from Danica about how her father never realized her potential because she was a woman – it’s a stretch to think gender inequality plays a significant role in a setting where anyone can re-sleeve into another sex. Not to mention, coming from someone vastly richer and more powerful than the overwhelming majority of humans… I’m having a hard time sympathizing.
The plot itself is largely predictable, filled with tired tropes such as fueling a fake rebellion to stoke fear into the public, or alien being hell-bent on revenge on the people who murdered its kind – this in particular makes the story feel like a cheap horror show. The concept of a sleeve that can magically attract guns to its hands felt pretty ridiculous in this context, an idea most likely picked up from a video game without much consideration. There are some nice touches along the way, from a fireworks display showing how ruthless Governor Danica can be – one of the few moments when this season came close to the quality of the first – to Carrera reviving an old Kovach backup, from before he met Quell – a copy who promptly switches sides, just like the original.
Characters suffer from the same poor writing and lack of inspiration. The bad guys, Danica and Carrera, felt more alive, showing real presence and threat – at least until the final episode. Even Tak’s sister Rei, dead as she is, had a moment to show off her vengeful persona. By comparison the good guys were… bland and generic. We see Quell acting more like a ninja warrior than the scientist and philosopher she’s supposed to be – not that you can’t be both, given hundreds of years of practice, but shooting your way out of a situation was supposed to be Kovach’s MO, not Quell’s.
Poe, the AI everyone seems to love, to me felt completely out of place; included as a fan-favorite from the past season, his entire role could have easily been given to a different AI. His affection for Miss Dig brought nothing valuable to either character, it seemed an unnecessary distraction to underline how ‘human’ AIs are, a point better made in the previous season. His recurrent memory losses didn’t feel humanizing and relatable, but rather cheap excuses to land Takeshi into deeper trouble and drive the plot forward, a questionable way to tell a story.
Trepp, the bounty hunter who kidnaps Kovach and brings him to Harlan’s world, never seemed to click into place with him, compared to Officer Ortega from the first season. Ironically, when she enters Kovacs’ sleeve for a short time, we get a better action sequence than those when Mackie plays Kovacs – another example of inconsistent writing.
Much has been said, back and forth, about the casting of Antony Mackie and his performance as Kovach. I can’t pretend to be a good judge on this matter, but one scene stuck in my mind that makes the point pretty well: trapped by the rebels, old-Kovach (sleeved by Mackie) shares with back-up Kovacs (sleeved by Will Yun Lee, the face of the original Kovach in season one) how and why he murdered his sister Rei, with matching footage of Kovach (in the Kinnaman sleeve) in the background. Both Yun and Kinnaman had tears in their eyes, whereas Mackie didn’t… I don’t know if it was down to the script, or his acting, but it felt like a telling difference. For a short while at the beginning, Kovacs was hiding in a woman sleeve on another planet, and for those precious few minutes she played the character better than Mackie – not to mention she would have had better chemistry with Trepp, and more than a touch of sexual tension.
The ending was rather disappointing for the same reasons. I was half expecting a big reveal that Harlan was hiding from the Protectorate inside the body of his daughter, but alas nothing this clever happens here. Instead we get another cliché where all the bad guys get axed and the good guys land on their feet. As I lamented many times before, bringing someone back to life only diminishes their previous sacrifice – and yet that’s exactly what happens here, most likely to keep options open for future seasons.
Personally though, I doubt Netflix will renew the series, considering how long they postponed the decision after the first season. Book readers have pointed out that this season’s script deviates from the book material even more than before, reaching well into the third and final book, so there is no more original material to draw from – another reason to doubt Netflix will continue the series. Slowly but surely, Netflix has become a mass-market option for TV content, so I don’t think they will invest the effort and budget here, when they can churn out a couple low-budget shows for the same money or less. The best we can hope for is another two or three animated series, with the first scheduled to release in March. But maybe this is for the best, rather than having increasingly low-quality stories, without competent writers.
Update: less than half a year later, the inevitable happened and the cancellation of the series was confirmed by Netflix.
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