Prime Video put out the full trailer for “Blade Runner 2099” on Saturday, October 10th, right after the show’s New York Comic Con panel on the Empire Stage. It is the first long look at the eight-episode limited series, and every episode arrives at once on November 25th. The story is set 50 years after “Blade Runner 2049,” in a Los Angeles that Prime Video says has been reborn, “just not by humanity.” Olwen (Michelle Yeoh) is a Replicant Blade Runner with days left to live. Cora (Hunter Schafer) is a human fugitive who takes on one last identity as a Blade Runner and is forced to partner with her. The footage runs a little over two minutes before the title card. Its spine is a missing-persons case with no human victims in it.
Silka Luisa created the series and runs it as showrunner. Ridley Scott directed the 1982 original and is among the executive producers here, and the trailer gives him a card of his own. Jonathan van Tulleken directed the first two episodes and is also an executive producer. The first teaser debuted in Hall H at San Diego Comic-Con in July, along with the November date. This one is a different animal. The teaser sold a world. This trailer sells a mystery built around 28 Replicants who have vanished and a man who is said to hold a cure for all of them. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Blade Runner 2099” and its New York Comic Con trailer.
This trailer sells a mystery built around 28 Replicants who have vanished and a man who is said to hold a cure for all of them.”
It opens on a dark, angular structure split by a slash of light. Then it cuts to a red neon corridor as a figure walks away from camera. A woman stands in a lit booth with a swollen, pregnant belly and cradles what looks like a baby doll. Over her, a voice delivers the trailer’s thesis: “We are unhappy because we are pretending to be something we are not.” Then comes the promise: “We can return to what we were meant to become.” Olwen appears on a neon street and then in a tight close-up. The next exchange takes three words. “What’s that?” “Gods.” The answer plays over a gaunt man with slicked-back hair. Screen Rant describes this opening as Olwen talking with a rogue Replicant who is explaining his philosophy.
That pregnant figure is not a random choice. At the panel, Luisa told the room that the Replicants now run the city but still want more than they were given. “Replicants still can’t get pregnant. They can’t get old,” she said, according to The Hollywood Reporter. She also said a clip shown to the audience was set in a red-light district where, “Instead of selling sex, it sells experiences, human experience.” Forbes counted that district among four panel-only clips, so it is not in the trailer. Still, the booth in the opening seconds reads like a window into the same trade. If that is what it is, the first 30 seconds set a Replicant who wants to be a god beside a pregnancy behind glass. That is the whole argument of the show in two images.
After the “From Executive Producer Ridley Scott” card, the camera finds a city at night with a stepped, pyramid-shaped tower glowing at its center. Olwen then leans toward a monitor that holds a personnel file. The header reads “Shimata-Dominguez.” The employee name is “Marian Jessup.” The status is “Former Employee,” and two lines read “Clearance Rescinded.” The face in the photo looks a lot like Schafer’s, though the trailer never says whose file it is. Then comes the case itself. “10 females, 18 males,” a voice says, followed by “All replicants.” All of them went missing within the last year. A bald man in headphones works the sliders of a huge console before a spinner glides low over flooded streets. A single eye fills an old monitor.
Cora gets her introduction in shafts of dusty light. Next she rides a crowded train, gripping a strap and glancing back over her shoulder. The pitch comes right after. “I know what you want. You’re looking for someone. Someone with answers.” Those lines run over Olwen riding beside a younger man. They continue over a giant face projected across a tower, then over Olwen and Cora facing each other through a doorway. Screen Rant reads the offer as Olwen’s. Either way, the scene sets up the partnership the press release promised. It sets it up as a negotiation, not a friendship.
The answer comes over the strangest stretch of the trailer. “He’s out there. He knows the cure for all replicants.” A lone figure stands in a dark, overgrown space lit by one blue light. A man’s face sits behind glass in a green chamber wrapped in tubes. Olwen holds a small clear sphere up to the light. Cora cradles something glowing while figures move behind her, and a voice says, “I can help you.” Two people in blue suits work behind glass around a suspended orange shape as Cora watches in silhouette. Then a naked body lies face down in a shallow pool of thick fluid. A red crescent gives way to an enormous sun behind industrial towers. A young man lights a match inches from his face as a voice says, “You can’t even understand.”
The next shot is an extreme close-up of an eye with city lights burning in it. That is as direct a nod to the opening of the 1982 film as this franchise gets. Then comes “More human than human.” The phrase was the Tyrell Corporation’s slogan in the original. Here it is thrown back as an accusation, and the speaker insists it is not a slogan at all. Under that line, Olwen stands behind a mesh grate and meets a palm pressed against it from the other side by someone in a red sleeve. The reverse angle shows her own hand flat on the mesh with a blonde figure beyond it. It is the best image in the trailer. Yeoh does not need a line to sell a woman counting her days.
Then the montage breaks loose. A figure crosses a red, ash-covered landscape beside a column of light. A face sits inside a breathing helmet. Two silhouettes stand on a rocky peak against a blinding sky, and one of them is mid-leap. A fireball rips through a run of pipes. A woman stands in blue mist among bare-shouldered figures. Explosions bloom across a city seen from above. A tiny figure crosses a vast space choked with orange dust. ComicBook.com reads parts of the trailer as taking the action off Earth. No location is labeled on screen, and that may be the point, because a limited series has no reason to explain its whole map in a trailer.
The ending slows down. Cora turns to look back in cold blue light, and Olwen stands watching in the dark. “So, you’ve been watching us.” “Isn’t that what I’m supposed to be doing?” Cora’s eyes are wet in her close-up. The last line plays over a long, unbroken close-up of Olwen: “I don’t know what you’re doing. Do you?” Then the title card lands, followed by “New Limited Series November 25.” ComicBook.com read that final line as a sign Cora “might not know what her mission actually is.” The trailer ends on doubt instead of a gunshot, and for this franchise that is exactly the right note.
The panel filled in what the footage holds back. Yeoh, Schafer, Dimitri Abold, Lewis Gribben and Matthew Needham took the stage with Luisa and executive producers Andrew Kosove and Broderick Johnson. Luisa laid out the stakes plainly. “The replicant uprising that has been bubbling up in the films has taken place, and humans have lost,” she said, as quoted by The Hollywood Reporter. Gizmodo carried the same remark. She described Olwen as a Blade Runner “supposed to be looking for human insurgents, humans that continue to fight back,” who is really hunting a missing colleague named Merrick. “The mystery is asking why Merrick, someone who fought and sacrificed for all this power, is now turning his back and walking away from it,” Luisa said. That makes Merrick the best bet for the “he” who knows the cure, even though nobody on stage said so.
Schafer called Cora “more or less a fugitive in hiding from LAPD Blade Runners.” In her telling, Cora has to protect her little brother before she goes undercover with the LAPD. Yeoh said of Olwen, “She knows the time is running out, and she’s a character that doesn’t like to leave things unfinished.” The Hollywood Reporter says one of the room-only clips showed Olwen’s nail beds turning blue. Luisa said the detail was borrowed from Roy Batty’s hands in the original and tracks her decline. Forbes reported that the room saw four never-before-seen clips plus the trailer. It also reported that Johnson pitched the show as “Departed in the world of Blade Runner.” Needham called his character a “junior partner” stuck in Olwen’s shadow and promised “a really exciting, beautiful mystery at the heart of it.”
The supporting cast is deep. Abold and Gribben are series regulars. Katelyn Rose Downey, Daniel Rigby, Johnny Harris, Amy Lennox, Sheila Atim, Needham, Tom Burke and Maurizio Lombardi are recurring guest stars. None of their characters is named in the trailer, so the faces in the montage stay anonymous for now. One date detail is worth noting: November 25th is the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, which hands a binge-drop series the longest holiday weekend of the fall. Prime Video says it will stream in more than 240 countries and territories. For a show about a woman racing her own expiration date, the release plan asks nothing of its audience except a free weekend.
What Do You Think? Is Merrick the man who knows the cure for all Replicants, or is the trailer steering everyone toward the wrong suspect? Whose face is on the Marian Jessup file, and is that Cora’s old identity? Can a series about the end of humanity hold up when its strongest scenes are two women quietly sizing each other up?
See you on the next binge!
