Title from: Experiment Perilous (1944)
When Quell's sleeve begins to shut down, Poe and Ms. Dig send her into VR, where Kovacs finally learns the truth about her deadly rampages.
Tropes in this episode:
- And This Is for...: Myka temp-kills Danica with the Bond One-Liner "That was for the Archaeologues."
- Calling the Old Man Out: Kovacs Prime calls out Carrera over how he lied about getting Rei into a good family. Carrera protests that he made it up to her, presumably by brokering the deal that gave her the wealth to become a Meth.
- Battle in the Center of the Mind: Kovacs fights the Elder-Quell inside the construct to give Dig time to construct the firewall.
- Bio Tech: Elder technology was based around the Songspires, trees that stored and transmitted data.
- Body Surf: Trepp borrows Kovacs sleeve while his DHF is inside the construct, so she can rescue her wife and son.
- Bulletproof Human Shield: Kovacs (actually Trepp in his sleeve) uses a mook as protection during a fight scene in the warehouse.
- Deal with the Devil: The reason that the Elder was only killing the Founders was because Quell had made a deal with her: The Elder gets her revenge, and humanity gets her mercy.
- Dug Too Deep: The mining mission that Trepp's brother Anil was sent on was to find Quellcrist Falconer in her cryo pod. They succeeded, but they also found the Elder's mind in the Songspire tree's roots, which infected them.
- Enemy Mine: Now that her patsy Joshua Kemp is dead, Governor Harlan is faced with a genuine revolution by his followers who can now turn to Quellcrist Falconer and the Last Envoy. She therefore releases Colonel Carrera so he can hunt them down. When Carrera asks why he should play along, she offers him the fame he was denied by the Protectorate after he destroyed Stronghold. It's not revealed whether Carrera truly cares about this, or whether he's more influenced by the news that Kovacs Prime is alive as well.
- Explosive Leash: Danica forces Trepp's son T.J. to wear such a device around his neck in order to get Myka to cooperate.
- Extra Eyes: The winged creature Carrera encounters in the construct has multiple eyes on each side of its face.
- Eye Scream: Danica's assistant gets his eye pierced by Kovacs's knife.
- Game Changer: Danica is obsessed with discovering how Quell called down Angelfire, because a human has never been able to control Elder technology before. If she can control the Elder orbitals, she can keep the Protectorate off her planet.
- Headbutt of Love: Happens during the heartwarming farewell scene between Poe and Ms. Dig before he powers her down to avoid further tracking of their position.
- Heartfelt Apology: Kovacs finally apologises to Poe for acting like a jerk towards him.
- Heel–Face Door-Slam: Carrera reveals that he thought of Kovacs as the man who would succeed him, and he sacrifices himself so Kovacs Prime can live on and become that man. Then he gets possessed by an Elder Guardian bent on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against the human race.
- Help, I'm Stuck!: Carrera gets stuck under debris in the construct which leads to him getting possessed by the Elder spirit.
- In Space, Everyone Can See Your Face: The rescue team sent to the forest in the opening scene have their faces lit up under the helmets of their hazmat suits.
- In-Universe Catharsis: Myka acknowledges that killing Danica is little more than an inconvenience since she'll just be resleeved from a remote backup, but that doesn't mean doing it isn't cathartic.
- I've Never Seen Anything Like This Before: Line said by Ms. Dig after seeing strange red strands in Quell's scanned stack which stem from the Elder intruder.
- I Will Only Slow You Down: Carrera orders Kovacs Prime to abandon him in the simulation after he's pinned by debris, since as long as Carrera remains in the simulation, he can serve as a lifeline to track the simulation to its physical location. Unfortunately for him, he ends up playing host to the Elder when he's the only mind left in the simulation.
- Literal Metaphor: The explosive charges left by the Founders turn the walls of the cave to flame in the construct, just when the "firewall" is completed by Dig.
- My Greatest Failure: Carrera viewed Kovacs as someone who could have been a greater soldier than himself, but he 'wasted' that talent by deserting to join Quell. He tells Kovacs Prime to go and become that man he wanted Kovacs to be.
- "Not So Different" Remark: When Danica confronts Carrera in his holding cell, she mentions that they both have more in common than he thinks, referring to the Protectorate trying to keep them both small.
- Oblivious Guilt Slinging: On viewing Anil's memories, Trepp hears her brother dismiss her as being Only in It for the Money. Trepp can only futilely object since her brother's stack has deteriorated past the point of recovery.
- Precursors: We finally get more detail on the Elders. Most of their technology was biotech, based around their Songspires and controlled by their thoughts. When some Quellists stumbled on a living Songspire, the mind of an Elder infected their stacks like a memetic virus, burning them out as she tried to find a host. Quell, who spent her entire life pushing the limits of the human mind, was the only one who could contain her.
- The Reveal: Two. The entity inside Quell is an Elder guardian, and the reason she is killing founders is because they committed genocide against the children she was meant to protect.
- Roaring Rampage of Revenge: The founders killed Elder children so that they wouldn't have to give up the planet. The guardian of the nursery was not happy. Kovacs even says she deserves her revenge, but he can't give her Quell.
- Sealed Inside a Person-Shaped Can: Quell kept the Elder guardian contained by promising her revenge, but only against the founders. When she jumps into the Colonel, he doesn't have the ability to contain her, and she starts rampaging.
- Smash to Black: The last scene of possessed Carrera exiting the construct cuts to black with a loud drum beat.
- Soup Is Medicine: Poe offers Ms. Dig chicken soup as a symbolic act of sustenance. He admits it's not very practical when exchanged between AI's, but such symbols are important in themselves.
- That Man Is Dead: Being reminded of his past by Danica, Carrera notes that he left the name "Jaeger" behind a long time ago.
- Token Good Teammate: Tanaseda is the only one of the Founders to object to—and refuse to take part in—the massacre of the Elder children.
- Took a Level in Badass: Trepp downloaded into Kovacs' military grade sleeve is able to tear through two Praetorian soldiers and Harlan's bodyguards.
- War for Fun and Profit: Governor Harlan resurrected the Quellist Uprising to increase the price of the Elder alloy used to make stacks. Harlan of course sees herself as maintaining the independence of Harlan's World when the Protectorate was intent on asset-stripping it.
- We Come in Peace — Shoot to Kill: When Harlan's world was first settled, the Protectorate had First Contact protocols. The exact details are not revealed, but Konrad Harlan was convinced that reporting the discovery of intelligent life would result in him losing the planet. So he burned the Elder nursery he found and covered it up.
- What Would X Do?: Trepp (in Kovacs' sleeve) asks Danica to do the right thing and prove she is her father's daughter. Danica rolls her eyes and says she'll do what her father would do—and orders a child killed. Shortly thereafter, we find out that Konrad Harlan committed genocide by burning Elder children.
- With Us or Against Us: The Elder guardian wants her revenge, and needs Quell to do it. When Kovacs says she deserves her revenge but he can't give her Quell, she immediately declares him as bad as the founders and flies into a rage. The only reason she wasn't indiscriminately slaughtering everyone on the planet in the first place is because Quell made a deal with her.
- Would Hurt a Child:
- The Elder-Quell tries to deceive Quell with images of a child they could have together, but when Kovacs calls her out as a fake the child is then shown incinerated as if by Angelfire. We find out why when she then shows Kovacs her memory of the Founders exterminating the children she was tasked with protecting.
- The Governor's aide puts an explosive collar around TJ's neck to control his mother.
