Prime Video released the final trailer for “Blade Runner 2099” on Monday, November 9th, and it opens with a question. “Are you a good human?” is the first line spoken. Nine seconds later comes the other half, “Or a bad one?” The cut runs two minutes and 33 seconds on Prime Video’s YouTube channel. All eight episodes of the limited series arrive on Prime Video on Wednesday, November 25th, the day before Thanksgiving. The story is set 50 years after “Blade Runner 2049.” Cora (Hunter Schafer) is a human fugitive who takes on one last identity as a Blade Runner. Olwen (Michelle Yeoh) is the Replicant she is forced to partner with, and Olwen has days left to live.
Prime Video’s YouTube channel now carries three trailers for “Blade Runner 2099”: a July 24th teaser, an October 10th trailer from New York Comic Con and this cut. Set beside the October cut, this one keeps very little. Only a handful of shots come back, and the October trailer’s man who “knows the cure for all replicants” never appears. Most of the footage is new, and none of the October lines return. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Blade Runner 2099” and everything shown in its trailers.
Set beside the October cut, this one keeps very little.”
The footage opens on a spinner drifting between rain-soaked towers, its tail lights glowing red. A vast angular tower burns orange at sunset with the “prime original” tag laid over it. Then the cut drops to street level. Olwen squares off with a man in a beige shirt in a cramped workshop, and someone in a long dark coat drags a man by the ankle. Next comes a man in a beige shirt crawling across the floor and screaming. In the street, a crowd watches from under umbrellas, and “Or a bad one?” lands over a young woman in a yellow raincoat, her hair plastered to her face. Then a red cloth is pulled over someone’s head. The A.V. Club reads the workshop fight as Olwen’s work.
The next stretch builds the world. A flooded skyline glows at dusk. An orange sky fills with the twisted frames of refinery towers as a line reads “I was there when replicants took L.A.” Then “When we gave it to them.” plays over a bearded man under an umbrella. Read together, the two lines blame humans for handing the city over. A run of short, bleak lines follows. “I can’t work.” plays in a locker room where workers stand among the lockers, and “Hey!” appears over a woman with her hair down. A woman in a yellow-and-black jacket is seized as “I can’t move.” appears. “There’s no place else to go.” closes the run. Two people in green coveralls scramble down a concrete stair, and one slides down a wall with arms flung wide. Showrunner Silka Luisa told Entertainment Weekly that Replicants are now “the power brokers of the city.”
The subtitle “Cora.” appears over Cora herself in a teal-lit room, followed by “Help us take back our city.” A young man with a shaved head fills the frame as a line asks, “Who is my sister pretending to be?” The answer is “A Blade Runner.” It plays as Olwen walks out of steam into a workshop yard with a crew behind her. Then the cut settles into its longest scene. For about 20 seconds Cora faces an examination in an amber-lit booth. An operator in a Los Angeles police uniform types at a console, a second officer works a camera, and a lens is aimed at her face. “Stop there!” and “Keep still!” are the only subtitled words. The A.V. Club reads the scene as a scan that seemingly misses that she is human.
A card reads “FROM EXECUTIVE PRODUCER RIDLEY SCOTT”, and then a disc-shaped structure hangs above a field of red embers. A pistol lies on a steel table with a red light glowing beside it. “You’re the new Blade Runner.” appears over Cora seen from behind in a blue-lit corridor. “You’re with me.” follows as she glances back, and the cut lands on Olwen in the same cold light. Two orders follow with no speaker attached. “Whatever she asks, do it.” plays over Olwen watching three figures cross a smoky corridor, then over her in a room hung with coats. “Get her to trust you.” plays over a young man in a red plaid shirt. The pronouns are the trick. “She” could be Olwen or Cora, and the trailer never says which.
Then the pace picks up. “Humans are always the same.” appears over a skyline crowded with signs and a spinner threading between glowing buildings. “Desperate.” lands on Olwen in front of an old monitor. A fighter flips through a cluttered shop, and “Volatile.” plays as Olwen stands on a steel gantry in an industrial yard. The A.V. Club attributes all three lines to Olwen. The overlap with Luisa’s own words is hard to miss. She told Entertainment Weekly that Olwen’s dying carries “a volatility, a danger, and a desperation to it”, a quality she says Yeoh tapped into. If the lines are hers, the insult she aims at humans is also a portrait of herself.
The last stretch stacks images fast. In the foundry, a woman with a ponytail watches two figures in protective suits haul a glowing orange mass, a shot that also ran in October. A gray-haired man, shirtless and eyes nearly shut, sits in green light as “Whatever you can build, you can destroy.” appears, the same line Prime Video put in the video’s description. Three people stand in blue mist, burning wreckage smokes across a frozen sea, and a hologram of a pale-haired woman towers over a packed theater. “What Cora’s doing can make the world ours again.” plays over that crowd. A stepped pyramid glows with a blue beam at its peak. A lone helmeted figure stands on red ash beside a column of light, and “It’s harder to look something in the eye than to kill it.” runs over canyons of embers and a body lying on a slab in green gel.
Cora aims a pistol from a rain-streaked cabin. Dusk settles over a coastline of dark hills, and a red spinner hangs above the bay. Cora and Olwen sit close in a car as “You have to see the lie in front of you.” appears. Cora glances back, and Olwen’s eyes narrow. Then the title card holds for several seconds, followed by a card that reads “NEW LIMITED SERIES NOVEMBER 25”, and one last shot shows a hand sparking a small flame before the Prime logo. Of the shots that return from October, the clearest are Cora and Olwen in the blue corridor, now carrying new lines, and the lone figure on red ash. Everything else the cut shows is either new or borrowed from the July teaser. October’s pregnant woman behind glass, the file on a monitor and the eye filling a screen are gone.
The final cut commits to one idea: humans are the ones in hiding. Prime Video’s synopsis says “Los Angeles has been reborn, just not by humanity.” Luisa told Entertainment Weekly that “the war has happened and the humans have lost.” That flips the 1982 premise. Ridley Scott directed the original film and is one of the executive producers here, and Jonathan van Tulleken directed the first two episodes. Prime Video lists Dimitri Abold and Lewis Gribben as series regulars beside Schafer and Yeoh, with eight recurring guest stars. The trailer names none of them on screen. The cure the October trailer promised is absent here, and the final cut sells the premise instead.
What Do You Think? Does Cora pass the scan, or does someone in that booth see through her? Is the search for a cure still coming in the series, or did October sell a mystery the show never opens? And is “Whatever you can build, you can destroy.” a threat from the Replicants or a warning from the humans?
See you on the next binge!
