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While Kovacs wanted to join the Envoys and fight the man, Reileen was concerned that they would get them both killed, and so she acted first. Kovacs is devastated, and understandably can’t quite accept his sister’s assertion that she did this all for him. Joel Kinnaman sells the slack-jawed shock at all of these revelations, including the one that Reileen killed their mentor and his girlfriend, Quellcrist Falconer.
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Remember the clones that Kovacs found at the end of last episode before his sister revealed she killed Quellcrist Falconer? It turns out that Reileen has been using those at will - which means she was the socialite at the party who put a cortical stack in a snake she was the kid at the Envoy Massacre exhibit and, most important, she was Hemingway, the mysterious figure that we know has been orchestrating action throughout the city, including getting information from Tanaka and controlling the assassin, Dimi. Basically, we learned that Takeshi Kovacs’s sister, Reileen, has been behind almost everything. It’s a bloody, startling battle, and this entertaining, plot-packed episode untangled a lot of this season’s mysteries leading up to the nude showdown.
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Altered Carbon has really embraced the lack of censorship afforded by Netflix, but perhaps no more so than during the climax of the eighth episode, during which a half dozen or so naked clones of Dichen Lachman attack Officer Kristin Ortega. Naked swordfighting! You can’t do that on Fox.
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