‘Altered Carbon’ on Netflix Episode 8 Recap: Attack Of The Clones

If you’ve made it this far through Altered Carbon but still felt a little uncomfortable with the sheer amount of graphic violence and nudity well, friend, I regret to inform you that “Clash By Night” is the episode where an army of naked clones is brutally gunned down one after the other. It is, at once, one of the most absurd television scenes in ages and a pretty good summation of what Altered Carbon actually is. Just an endless series of attractive naked bodies being brutally slaughtered only to come back to do it all again.

But before we get to the naked clone fight—and we will be getting to the naked clone fight—we have a case to close. It turns out that Reileen, wearing a series of different sleeves, is responsible for pretty much every aspect of Laurens Bancroft’s murder. This is…not the most exciting conclusion, no, especially when the murkier bits—what purpose, exactly, did showing up randomly as a little girl serve?—are hand-waved away with “I’m very, very rich now” as an explanation.

But still, Bancroft can’t know Reileen was responsible, so those crazy Kovacs kids need a patsy. They find the perfect candidate Oumou Prescott, Bancroft’s ambitious assistant who has made it clear, time and time again, that she wants to live among the clouds with the Meths and will do anything to meet that lofty goal. While the actual solution to the murder mystery is a bit of a dull thud, watching the crew concoct a fake but plausible scenario is a ton of fun. It’s like the Ocean’s films mashed up with a bit of Mr. Robot then fired 250 years into the future.

For one, it’s always a pleasure when this show gives Vernon Elliot and Poe something to do other than sit in The Raven’s lobby and wait for Kovacs to yell at them. But this also leads to a genuinely heartwarming bit of storytelling, especially for a show usually more interested in the guts than the heart. Kovacs needs a dipper—basically a hacker, just another term to add to this show’s ever-growing index—so he spins Elliot’s wife back up into the body of a man, played by Cliff Chamberlain. Both Chamberlain and Ato Essando sell the uncomfortable reconciliation perfectly; Vernon through a disbelieving open mouth shock, Ava through embarrassment spilling out of a face that isn’t hers. “Surely love conquers all,” Poe commentates, because Poe rules.

Ava’s return, whichever body it happens to be in, turns out to be the final bit of healing Lizzie Elliot needs. Altered Carbon show is often gorgeous to look at, but there’s never been a moment as emotionally beautiful as the stack-damaged Elliot immediately recognizing her mother. “You changed your hair,” is such a wonderful, subtle reaction.

But “Clash By Night” doesn’t dwell on the family reunion for long; there’s a life to ruin. The frame job cooked up by Kovacs and Co. (official team name for now) is a damn doozy, so take a deep breath: Poe infects a simulated rape and murder AI brothel named Prick Up—played by terrifying-voiced actor James R. Baylis—with Rawling Virus that Ava is able to extract from the Envoy stacks collected at the Battle of Stronghold. Through some video manipulation trickery, Ava is also able to make it seem like Prick Up was the last place Bancroft attended before he died. Meanwhile, Kovacs learns that Prescott was wearing a blonde sleeve while on assignment in Osaka with Bancroft. This is notable because Bancroft, a very mentally unstable human being, occasionally likes to beat and brutalize sleeves that are similar shades of blonde to his wife.

With all that falsification and fuckery in place, the lie Kovacs spins is this: Something nasty happened both physically and professionally between Bancroft and the blonde-sleeved Prescott in Osaka. As revenge, Prescott waited for the perfect moment and infected Prick Up with Rawling Virus right as Bancroft walked in, driving the Meth to his own insane suicide. Boom. Call the Bancroft murder case “Blockbuster,” baby, because that shit is closed for good.

Of course, Bancroft is actually being sold an elaborate fabrication to cover up Reileen’s scheming. But Kovacs delivers it effectively to an audience of witnesses gathered at Suntouch House. (The reveal, performed magnetically by a quick-talking Joel Kinnaman, even has shades of the greatest “gotcha” scene of all time, from the original run of Twin Peaks.) As Reileen says, “Convince the crowd, you’re more likely to convince the man” The man is convinced; Bancroft sentences Prescott to a life lived on the ground with the rest of the mortal scrubs, and Kovacs gets his pardon.

But by now we should know that Altered Carbon lives to give answers by introducing roughly a dozen more questions. Alone in Bancroft’s study, the billionaire’s telescope trained on the last thing he saw before he died (a sex club named “Head In The Clouds”), Kovacs realizes that his lie was so believable because it’s built on a whole handful of truths. Like a Spidey-Sense with way more crippling depression, Kovacs’ Envoy Intuition is kicking in. “It’s a pull at the back of the mind. A scratch inside your skull that won’t go away,” he says in voice-over. “It’s the details.”

Details are exactly what Ortega is searching for this entire time, details on the mysterious woman who attacked her at Fightdrome, on the ghost walking through Bay City, on the reason Kovacs is such a giant angry boner all the time.

Her search leads her to Psychasec, and a chamber filled with clones of Reileen. One by one, Reileen’s sleeves come to life. One by one, Ortega takes them out, first with a gun, then with her patented fighting style of “having a robot arm.”

It really is a litmus test for whether or not Altered Carbon is for you. It’s visually striking and technically impressive, but it’s also gratuitous as hell in almost every possible way. (When you Google “Extra As Fuck” it’s just a photo of a dozen naked Dichen Lachmans trying to kill someone with a samurai sword.) In the end, the only sleeve left standing is that of a scared little girl, who Ortega fails to realize is still Reileen.

There’s a single line during the fight, though, that makes the entire ending interesting on more than just an eye-popping level. Reileen—having seen the majority of her spare sleeves shot to pieces—snarls, “Do you know how much money you just cost me?”

Because that’s all bodies are in Bay City, expensive property to be used and thrown away. Even amid the chaos, Reileen isn’t registering the pain or the blood, she’s worried about the damaged merchandise. Skin is just a commodity, and Ortega just ruined a valuable collection.

Vinnie Mancuso writes about TV for a living, somehow, for Decider, The A.V. Club, Collider, and the Observer. You can also find his pop culture opinions on Twitter (@VinnieMancuso1) or being shouted out a Jersey City window between 4 and 6 a.m.

Watch the "Clash By Night" episode of Altered Carbon on Netflix