they decided to have 250 years pass between his death and re-sleeving

where Kovax was on Earth in the city in a room with a merc. This was immediately before Kovax got arrested / shot dead and put into cold storage. This was long after the betrayal on Harlan's World in their guerilla raids against the DHF protocol; this scene was at a point where Kovax was already used to being haunted by mentorship from the late Kell. Even so late in the game, the merc in the room with him was asking what the Stacks might be - she didn't know about them.

that Rei, normally inhuman(e)ly pragmatic and calculating, was completely suicidal and disoriented immediately after waking in a clone

The explanation given to Bancroft made no sense. Is this why it was delivered in the middle of the night when everyone was groggy and wouldn't notice? The claim was that an AI had caught eRabies an hour ago, rapidly deteriorated, and shut its sadism club down. Top cop confirmed this. Through a leap of logic I couldn't follow, that is somehow a threat to a meth assassinated a month ago.

There seemed to be no explanation for the attempted hack on his backup either.

So Kovax then pins the murder on the only lawyer in the room. The one person with professional training in arguing cases convincingly. There's established precedent that Mrs Bancroft was subject to polygraph to test her testimony, so Mrs Attorney can suggest a similar test for herself and Kovax - after all, Bancroft doesn't want the real killer to remain at large, does he? But instead she incompetently whimpers "he's lying" and "please no" like a complete Luddite. Was she drugged? Or was she really that impotent at even the basics of being a lawyer? There didn't even seem to be a convincing motive presented - she had nothing to gain and everything to lose by such a hypothetical assassination. Or was this all part of the Envoy Jedi Mind Trick scrambling everyone's brains?

Otega knew there were no little girls locked in a lift after hours in a secure cloning facility she had just broken into because she was just in that lift a minute ago. That scene broke all credibility in suspension of disbelief. "It's cold and I'm scared" BTW I'm also wearing an IT'S A TRAP T-shirt. She was on high alert. Unless Rei's blades were doped, there's no way she could have lost the plot there.

The aircar in the Head-In-The-Clouds hangar could provide enough power and a good position to relay microcam data back to the ground. Surely? The final investigators recovered Kovax's stack but not his drowned / burnt / shot / stabbed sleeve... but they didn't mention recovering the microcam (hopefully he had the foresight to close his eyes firmly before dying!) Was an excerpt from it what Otega played from her watch?

Rei knew that Kovax had taken down the sadist AI with Rowling malware - she had been present at the Bancroft case presentation. Yet when Kovax said in her skyplex he'd just spiked her backup with Rowling, she scoffed that he didn't have access to any Rowling. That made no sense unless she had had to restore from a backup made prior to the Bancroft case presentation. I didn't see any suggestion she'd needed to do so. How had she forgotten he had access to and had used eRabies?

But Rei was also surprisingly oblivious to other things. Kovax deduced (in conversation with Otega) the Bancroft case had initially been Otega's, and Bancroft confirmed this (in his leper colony theatrics). In Rei's confession, she clearly had no idea Otega had run the investigation for a while (a few weeks maybe?) despite Otega ('s limp body) being right there in the room with her to remind her. As far as she was aware, Bancroft was shot one day, and Kovax was immediately revived and put on the case straight away.

Out of the blue, Rei suddenly declared there were no guns on her skyplex except her own. Where did that come from? In the same room was a bright yellow example of one of her many sex pistols. Saying "there are no guns here except mine" is like a sex toy shop saying "there are no dildos here except mine". So what? Even if there are none except for the hundred Rei owns, that's irrelevant - those guns seem to fire for whoever is holding them regardless of who owns them. That line just seemed to stand out from the script like an experimental glimpse from an early cut that was meant to be removed and had slipped through.

Bancroft's offer was for Kovax to get a stipend, and upon completion, a new sleeve of his choosing, a pardon, and a payout. He completed the mission and got his pardon; he ignored the resleeve. He met his birthsleeve in Carnage's Fight Club and Rei woke him up to say hi before resleeving him - no doubt into his birthsleeve from Carnage's Fight Club - but he demanded she save Ryker's sleeve for Otega. She knew it was Ryker's sleeve for Otega, because she had set-up Ryker to get him off the Mary Lou case. She knew all she had to say to Otega was that she has Ryker's sleeve as ransom, and the entire Lemmings Scene would have been avoided with Otega capitulating. Kovax planned to double-sleeve so he could (a) protect Ryker's sleeve for Otega (b) back up his own DHF in case he didn't survive © mislead Lung tailing him. But force-growing a Ryker clone was unnecessarily complicated. Surely he could cash in on the new sleeve he'd been awarded (no doubt choosing his birthsleeve) and send his Ryker-with-Kovax-DHF to meet Rei and then straight to orgy island safety, while sending his Kovax-with-Kovax-DHF to carry out his sabotage mission. I can only assume he decided to force-clone another Ryker because the producers thought a TV audience would be confused seeing Kovax in his own body (just like in all the flashbacks). Surely this wouldn't be a challenge for book readers. He just seems oddly determined to not upgrade his sleeve before the season's credits roll.

Lizzie was ripped from The Matrix as a hybrid of The Oracle's cryptic prognostications and Neo's virtual-trained-ninja-in-shiny-black-leather style. She hadn't had much screen time, so we knew she would get her moment in the spotlight making all that investment by Kovax and Poe worthwhile.

Mary Lou had also been lurking in the background the whole time (opening scene, Ryker's conspiracy, the stolen stack) and needed resolution.

Hollywood Karma demanded some kind of justice for Rei, Lung, Mary Lou's killer, etc.

Victory needs heroes and sacrifices, so some character(s) who'd had their time in the spotlight were sure to die for the cause.

You have Otega who's abusing her police privilege left, right and centre to track sleeves, hide stiffs, run DNA matches, etc. etc. and she goes and accuses another cop of being corrupt / on the take. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.

Then you've got Kovax, who murdered his father in front of his sister, then went into a career as a robocop, massacring and torturing people for a living until by chance (or was it contrived by his superior in order to tie up loose ends?) he met up with his sister again and they shared in creating an utter bloodbath. He's quite perverted, having sex with at least three women he's not married to, possibly the merc in the first episode too, during the season. And yet he still attempts to take the moral high ground and condemn Rei because she too has killed people and she too has participated in torture and she too has endorsed illicit sexual encounters and she too has applied Kell's teachings to recruit locals in whatever environment she finds herself and turn them into a fanatical army. Yet Kovax somehow thinks he's justified and she's guilty. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.

The nudity scenes just reinforce that. You've got clones who have a full head of hair which would have taken years to grow, yet they have an unorthodox absence of adult body hair to nurture the sexualisation of prepubescence, which is confirmed in the explicit offers by the Maître D' of Head In The Clouds. What with Rei's zeal for Kovax I was fully expecting her to initiate a sexual encounter with Kovax while riding any one of her (or her captives') sleeves just to press home that attitudes in this fiction are confrontingly different to in reality. It almost looked like they were grooming the audience for that by providing Lizzy's parents in two male bodies. After all, if Rei is riding a borrowed sleeve which is genetically dissimilar to the borrowed sleeve Kovax is riding, there is no chance of incestuous unions causing birth defects, so hey - why not? But they apparently decided not to push that issue all the way home.

Kovax will use immortality to hunt down Kell's DHF. Rei said he'll never find it without her help. But Rei said she made a covert backup of Kell just before betraying her. Rei scolded Kovax harshly for trusting the robocops who told him they'd put her into a good family if he served them. So she definitely wouldn't trust them a second time. And if she has the ability to backup Kell's DHF she'll also back up her own at the same time, in case the robocops turn out to not be as charitable as their money / clones / pardon offer seems. The backup wouldn't have been before Kovax's and Kell's tryst. Rei and Kell were standing on the fire-proof, bomb-proof, permanently-absolutely-rigid, conspicuous-suspension-bridge-in-the-middle-of-nowhere when they realised they were the only survivors and needed to take the shuttle. They ran into the hangar and that's where the backup would have happened and the stacks hidden. Rei said she had returned there since, uncertain of what she'd find, and no doubt to retrieve and hide the backups. After a suitable number of novels and adventures, Kovax finds the backups and reinstates Rei, redeeming her character in her still-innocent state, and quenching Kell, who wanted to shut down stack immortality anyway.