Takeshi Kovacs

The flashbacks in S1 episode 7 show Kovacs's rough childhood on Harlan's World alongside his younger sister, Reileen. Still young, he joins CTAC, the Protectorate's military force.

In a new body, Kovacs takes a job from yakuza boss Tanaseda on the planet Latimer: protect Holly, a tattoo artist hunted by ninjas, and look into the death of Tanaseda's brother. Working with CTAC agent Gena, he learns that the founder of the Mizumoto clan has been taking over his successors for generations. Kovacs beats him in a fistfight, and Tanaseda likes the work so much he offers more.

Kovacs switches sides and joins the Envoys, Quellcrist Falconer's rebels. Quell becomes his teacher and his love, and tells him she helped create the stack technology she now wants to destroy. The Envoys are wiped out, and Kovacs realizes Reileen betrayed them. Captured, he has his stack put on ice for 250 years.

Kovacs wakes up in the body of cop Elias Ryker, bought by Laurens Bancroft to solve Bancroft's own murder. He checks into the Raven, the hotel run by the AI Poe. He gets help from Vernon Elliot and his daughter, Lizzie, and keeps running into Lieutenant Kristin Ortega, Ryker's ex. The case leads him to Reileen, alive, rich and behind everything. Kovacs kills his sister once he sees she can't be saved, and Head in the Clouds goes down. Since there were two copies of him, they settle with rock-paper-scissors which one keeps the pardon. After saying goodbye to Ortega, he leaves Earth to find Quell.

Thirty years later, now with Anthony Mackie's face, Kovacs wakes up on Harlan's World accused of killing Axley, one of the founders. He learns that Colonel Carrera is Jaeger, his old commander, and finds Quell again, alive and with no memory. A younger copy of him, wearing his original face, joins the hunt and ends up switching sides. In the final battle, Kovacs sacrifices himself to save Quell and the planet. There's a hint that Poe saved a backup of him before rebooting.

Kovacs debuted in Richard K. Morgan's novel Altered Carbon (2002) and leads the whole trilogy. In the books, he's an ex-Envoy, from the Protectorate's elite force. In S1 he's played by Joel Kinnaman, and by Will Yun Lee in flashbacks; in S2, by Anthony Mackie. In the anime, Ray Chase voices him in English.