'Altered Carbon' Season 2: Quellcrist Falconer's return from the dead has finally been explained
The article contains spoilers for 'Altered Carbon' Season 2
Right from the beginning of 'Altered Carbon', Takeshi Kovacs (Anthony Mackie) has been haunted by the death of his lover and leader of the Envoys, Quellcrist Falconer (Renée Elise Goldsberry). Now in Season 2, Quell is back from the dead but the path back to the living hasn't been easy.
Ever since Netflix's trailer for 'Altered Carbon' Season 2 revealed that Falconer is back, we've been trying to figure out how she might have made her return. We considered a number of possibilities but the truth is something much stranger than any of us could have imagined.
So remember how Reileen Kawahara (Dichen Lachman) had hidden away a copy of Quellcrist's DHF (Digital Human Freight)? Turns out she put it into a cloned body and left Falconer to rot for eternity stuck in a pod under Stronghold, the base where the Envoys were finally defeated by the Protectorate. While that does explain how she's alive, the mystery doesn't end there.
Throughout Season 2, we see Quell behaving as if she has Dissociative Identity Disorder. Turns out she actually has an alien entity (emphasis on alien) hiding in her stack: one of the Elders who lived on Harlan's World before they were wiped out.
The Elder was apparently trapped within the Songspire tree at the heart of Stronghold until it was unleashed by a number of Quellist miners including Anil Imani (Kareem Tristan Alleyne), the missing brother of Trepp (Simone Missick). The same people also woke Quell from her imprisonment, allowing the Elder to make a deal with her and take her body.
According to the deal, Quell would host the Elder and allow it to kill the Founders of Harlan's World as revenge for them exterminating the rest of the Elders. In exchange, the Elder promised not to decimate the rest of the people living on the planet.
So summing up, Rei brought Quell back to life but left her trapped. Anil then woke her and the Elder up, leading to her making the deal with the Elder and the alien helping her escape Stronghold so that she can find her way to Millsport and, eventually, Kovacs. Talk about a complicated journey, right?
All episodes of 'Altered Carbon' are currently available for streaming exclusively on Netflix.