Altered Carbon: 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Quellcrist Falconer

Quellcrist is the second main protagonist and lady love of Takeshi Kovacs in the Netflix’s original and well-received cyberpunk sci-fi series Altered Carbon. By the end of the second season, she pretty much took over the entire show.

Many fans loved Quell for her ferocity, leadership and training skills. They showered love on her character on numerous Reddit, Tumblr and YouTube threads. Here, we are going to share with you ten things about Quellcrist that you might not know. Prepare to needlecast yourselves right in!

10 Personal History

Quellcrist Falconer was born as Nadia Makita in somewhere around 2080 to 2090 on the Earth. She named herself Quellcrist on the name of a seaweed. This seaweed dries up in absence of water and seems like it’s dead, but, as soon as it gets even a drop of water again, it grows ten folds. Quell likes to think herself as this seaweed and asks her whole army too, to take what is offered.

9 Character Arc

Quell started off as just a voiceover in the first season. But, by the end of the second season, she became the single lead lady of the show.

In a show which was mostly single-handedly led by Takeshi Kovacs, Quellcrist took the show from him, on her own shoulders in the finale. She assembled an army, led her people, fought, fell in love, played the villain and lost her love. In a nutshell, she has completed her lifecycle.

8 Mixture Of Two Characters

Quellcrist originally is a mixture of two characters from the books. Fans might remember a woman Vidaura from the early episodes of the first season. She was one of the envoy rebels in the show, but, in the books, Vidaura was the actual mentor of Kovacs. Quellcrist Falconer of the show, is actually a mashup of Quell and Vidaura from the books.

7 Early Life & Struggles

Quellcrist was one of the first colonists on Harlan’s World after the team of founders brought an initial lot of inhabitants. She studied the Elders’ alloy and discovered that it could be used to store human consciousness and could function as a hard drive. She invented that drive and called it a stack or Digital Human Freight(DHF).

6 Why Did She Discover Stack?

Quellcrist had a purpose in mind when she created the cortical stacks. She wanted humankind to see stacks as a tool for advancement and use them for the greater good of the race than as a way to escape from death. She was a scientist and she thought from the point of view of an idealistic inventor.

Quellcrist main motive was to allow people to travel larger space distances effectively. In her words, she just wanted to see the stars.

5 Why Did She Want To Revive The Uprising?

Quell soon saw her invention leading people to crime, injustice and depravity. She couldn’t bear the thought of a society where more than three fourth of the people didn’t have food to eat and one-fourth of the people were not even afraid of death because they literally owned it. She saw the class differences increasing rapidly, heinous crimes mushrooming and thus decided to scrub her invention off.

4 General Trivia

Quellcrist Falconer from the books is a long-dead influencer who started the revolution against the class differences and discrimination. Her fight was against the government and the system. She had written several books and Kovacs keeps quoting her from them.

In the series, her quotes have been used as voiceovers. The flashbacks of Stronghold is a separate addition to the show and is not written in the book series.

3 Quell From The Books

Quellcrist Falconer from the books hated the insane and criminal levels the wealthy had stooped to. So, she started the revolution to turn people against the Protectorate and the system. She had renamed herself after she started a new religion called Quellism. She was highly educated and had been writing articles way before she started writing books.

2 Why Does She Forget Things?

In the second season, Quellcrist did not seem to remember or identify Kovacs at once. She also didn’t remember the fact that an Elder had been riding her sleeve to avenge the genocide founders had wreaked on its race. She showed split personality disorder at times. This was all because an external consciousness (the Elder) had invaded her DHF and it took almost everything for her to keep herself alive.

1 Where Is She Going?

At the end of the second season of the show Altered Carbon, Quellcrist is shown to be leaving the Harlan’s World. She needlecasts herself to some other planet where she could revive the Uprising again and fight against the Protectorate. But, where exactly is she going? Well, according to a few theories and guessing from the coordinates she is keying in, she might be going to her home planet Earth.

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