‘Altered Carbon’: We Need To Talk About That Naked Sword Fight Scene

Now that Altered Carbon has been streaming on Netflix for about a week and a half, can we take a moment to talk about the show’s most audacious battle sequence? It comes towards the end of Season 1, Episode 8, “Clash By Night” — so if you haven’t gotten that far, or frankly through the entire series yet, you may want to bookmark this discussion. We are getting into what the kids call, “SPOILERS.”

You still with me? Good. So we’re going to chat about that insane “naked sword fight” between Detective Kristin Ortega (Martha Higareda) and a very stripped down Reileen Kawahara (Dichen Lachman). Technically, calling the scene a “naked sword fight” is incorrect because it’s more of a desperate brawl between Ortega and about a dozen of Reileen’s clones. Reileen uses a sword for a few rounds, but both women lean on whatever’s around them to survive, i.e. broken glass. It’s a great scene, and it’s okay if you think it’s there to titillate. After all, there’s gang of (empirically very beautiful) naked ladies attacking another woman. It’s vicious. It’s terrifying. It’s kind of hot.

But we need to stop and examine this scene because there’s a lot more going on than what’s just on the surface. As I’ve written before, Altered Carbon is a show that wants to confront our society’s complicated feelings about nudity and sexuality. What do our bodies mean to us? Are they treasures or prisons? Are they worth worshipping or coveting? From the beginning of the series, showrunner Laeta Kalogridis puts the naked human body on full display. However, nudity is usually used in Altered Carbon to project vulnerability, sexuality, or pure emptiness. Reileen’s first and only nude scene puts her in a position of aggressive power. That’s important because it tells us a lot about who Reileen is. She is above all, a woman who refuses to be made into a victim. She is so bent on this, that she will go to any length — including creating a grotesque snuff house brothel empire — to maintain her own sense of power. 

In an interview with EW.com, Kalogridis explained that she wanted this scene to express female nudity in a new way: “Societally we associate female nudity with shame, vulnerability, and with sex…In this sequence, I wanted to do an expression of something that isn’t often associated with female nudity in the present day United States, and that’s power — not sexual power, but physical ownership of the power of your body in a way that women are not really allowed to show.”

Lachman added in the same piece that it was this subversion of expectations that got her “excited” about the scene. “I assumed if I was ever going to be naked on screen it would be in a different way, like in a sex scene, or being manipulated. But in this scene, Reileen was fighting. And she was fighting another woman, and that got me excited too,” Lachman said.

Like a lot of science fiction, Altered Carbon wants its audience to confront the values of its own society. Does nudity have to express vulnerability? Or can it be a display of strength? The “naked sword fight” imagines a nude woman as an aggressor, and not a passive subject. The moment where all of Reileen’s waking clones break out of their cells and try to kill Ortega isn’t fantasy, but pure nightmare. This is a complex, layered scene that combines feverish fight choreography with bigger conversations about our cultural mores. (Oh, and it pushes the plot forward in a big way, too.)

It’s entertaining and troubling and thought-provoking. It is, indeed, a scene worth talking about.

Stream Altered Carbon on Netflix