Let's Talk About ALTERED CARBON S2 EP 3 - "Nightmare Alley"

This third episode titled “Nightmare Alley” is more what we want from the Altered Carbon world. With a variety of intense violent scenes, strong ties to the past and actual progression from Poe, I was happy to see the season regain its footing. There are some returning characters that are mostly good, except when they seem to use them to pander heavily to last season fans. Two choice returning characters didn’t make all that much sense, but overall, this episode finds Season 2 on an upswing.

We end up with Takeshi and Poe being separated for basically this whole episode, which is understandable for the plot and also because Takeshi is pissed at Poe. But it’s unfortunate to see the development of Poe and Takeshi take a total back seat after last episode's wild outburst. Let’s quickly talk about Poe and his new found friend, Dig 301.

She is a great balance to Poe. Poe is slick and articulate, thoughtful and precise. Whereas Dig 301 is an A.I. for explorers and archaeologists, she would spend much time in the wild and scruff of the world making her more rough around the edges. This makes her passion and care feel more real and tangible than expected. It is a nice touch (and necessary for the story) to have Dig 301 feel this need for a purpose, that being staying with and helping Poe. Their dynamic brings a lot more life back to Poe, just like Elizabeth last season allowed Poe to flourish and show off his personality a lot more.

Takeshi gets interrogated, and that scene was about as on-par or boring as it could be. Getting mental images extracted from the brain? Are you really telling me in the hundreds of years of sleeves and stacks that no one has been able to look at a stack and see memories, important people or other information with a few clicks? I get they want to torture him, but it is unrealistic. It just seemed like they wanted a torture scene to make Takeshi look like a “tough-guy” when we already know he is. Another disappointing addiction was the reveal of Carrera being Jaeger in this new sleeve. It is interesting for the mellow drama and more used/explored in future episodes, but it seems extremely unlikely and coincidental for both Jaeger and Takeshi to be in the same room, on the same planet, hundreds of years in the future.

This brings us to The Circle fight, and boy was that a hot, and sometimes cool, mess. One of the reasons they did the interrogation before was to get mental pictures of people close to Takeshi and make sleeves of them to fight. It was interesting to have Takeshi fight people close to him to mess with him mentally, but there are two major problems. Picking his sister and Quellcrist makes a lot of sense, very important in his life and they act like ghosts of trauma and emotional pain for him. But then they also pick Ortega and Elliot, who had an impact on his life, for a short time though. Jaeger, Takeshi’s father, someone else we might not know or even Poe seem to be more psychologically impactful than a sidekick and some girl who he had a fling with. I get that it serviced the season 1 fans who wanted to see those characters again (believe me, I think Ortega was awesome and would love to see her again), but it just doesn't make any real sense cause they were a part of his life 30 years ago for like a month. 

The second problem with the circle was that when the characters came to fight him, he was super devastated seeing them again, when in reality, anyone could have been in those sleeves. The knowledge that sleeves exist, knowing that it had been thirty years since he saw most of them and that he is in a place to be tortured and killed should have made Takeshi more suspicious and logical when seeing each of them. Yes, he was heavily drugged, but he had the strength to fight them and not die, he is a master of mental strength and should have seen that coming a mile away. Lastly, some of the people in the sleeves knew various fighting styles or things about Takeshi and their relationship, isn’t their sleeve sickness at times? How did they know all this? Are they actors and soldiers? There were just a lot of things left totally unattended to have a “cool scene.”

At the end of the circle fight, it was a fun and interesting twist to have Quellcrist (the real one) come almost out of nowhere to save Takeshi. It was surprising how easily they escaped, but not too terrible of a thing to overlook. I think that Quellcrist could have used a little bit more screen time in this episode for making this rescue, but overall things were fine.

This episode was a lot better than the last, and is a hopeful progression for Season 2. The other plot-lines are converging sooner than expected, which is refreshing and allows the main plot to progress much quicker than I anticipated. Odd choices by the writers still plague the show at times, dragging it down to the cheesy territory, but we have some hope.