Blade Runner 2099 Is About a Future Where Replicants Hunt Humans

4 min readImagine a society in which powerful, artificial intelligence rules and humans are second-class citizens. Now, that might sound like Q1 2027, but it’s also the basic gist for Blade Runner 2099, the upcoming sequel series to the Blade Runner franchise. Yes, there’s a new Blade Runner television series (it was inevitable), and it will stream on Prime Video on November 25. Which means you’ll have hours of Blade Runner to binge during your Thanksgiving food coma.Set fifty years after Blade Runner 2049 and eighty-two years after Ridley Scott’s original classic, Blade Runner 2099 follows Olwen, a Replicant Blade Runner, played by Michelle Yeoh, at the end of her lifespan. (The panel highlighted her blue nails, which is a major tell for Replicants approaching obsolescence.) Tasked with hunting down an individual named “Marek,” Olwen teams up with Cora (Hunter Schafer), a human who pretends to be a Replicant.At New York Comic Con, series creator Silka Luisa, producers Andrew Kosove and Broderick Johnson, and stars Michelle Yeoh, Hunter Schafer, Dimitri Abold, Lewis Gribben, and Matthew Needham appeared live to promote the series at their dedicated Saturday panel at Empire Stage in the Javits Center. It was the show’s second major convention appearance of the year, after San Diego Comic-Con in July. For the New York crowd, the team screened a new trailer and a few clips—which mostly consisted of characters speaking in cryptic dialogue without helpful context—and held a discussion that probed the show’s posthuman dystopia.During the panel, Luisa explained that “Replicants are in control” of future Los Angeles. “They have agency. But they are made in our likeness. So they still have desires, and still want more than what they’ve been given,” she said.After screening a clip set a red-light district, Luisa said Replicants go to seedy black markets to pay for stolen human experiences. “It’s very bizarre,” she joked. “Replicants can’t get pregnant, they can’t get old. They want more than what they’ve been given. They see these humans have a life they still can’t have. So the mystery is asking Marek, someone who fought and sacrificed for all this power, is now turning his back and walking away from it. And the question is: for what?”While Comic Con attendees had to wait until the very end of the panel to watch the trailer, you can watch it right here, right now, below.As for the leads of Blade Runner 2099, the show is poised to be another unlikely buddy cop mystery—not dissimilar to the recent HBO hit Lanterns—but don’t expect dry wit and clever quips between Olwen and Cora. They’re not just racing against the clock, but Cora’s deception is sure to be a major source of conflict.At the panel, Yeoh described Olwen as someone who knows her time is running out, “and she’s a character who doesn’t like to leave things unfinished,” she said. “So in the end, she has to fight back. Fortunately she has this sidekick ... to do the job with.”Luisa said that Olwen is usually tasked with hunting down human insurgents who continue fighting back against their new oppressors. “But the surprise [in the screened clip] is that she’s actually looking for a Blade Runner who’s gone missing, Marek, one of her colleagues. And that’s the first time that that’s happened.”Schafer said Cora is “more or less a fugitive” who “goes on the run to protect her little brother.” Ironically, her way of hiding means going undercover at the LAPD.Though the hourlong panel, moderated by Amelia Emberwing, revolved around questions about the characters (which left the actors struggling to say too much without spoiling anything), Yeoh spent a few minutes talking about the unique facets of playing a Replicant. It is Blade Runner canon that Replicants are far stronger than humans, which was a challenge for Yeoh who has years of experience in martial arts cinema. “I think the most interesting thing is, ‘What is a Replicant?’ How do they actually work? They’re so human-like, but there’s something about the Replicants—they’re actually quite wicked. They’re like toying with their food. Because humans are so weak next to them.”Yeoh recalled shooting her first fight scene, which pitted her against a larger, physically imposing human whom Olwen quickly gets rid of. “I was like, ‘Can I get more into the fight?’ [The choreographers] were like, ‘Sorry, nope. He’s human.’ Even though he’s a big guy, not even with a flick, he’s gone.”All the same, Yeoh said she didn’t want her role to be reduced to a cool coat and badass fight scenes. “I didn’t want her to just be dominating, walking in with a coat and look mean and evil. It’s almost like you don’t know what she’s actually thinking. It’s like you’re faced with a snake or a dragon. And it’s just looking at you. So it gets kind of creepy, and more scary that way.”Prime VideoMichelle Yeoh (left) and Hunter Schafer (right) star in Blade Runner 2099, which hits Prime Video on November 25. Yeoh stars as a Replicant, while Schafer plays a human who poses as one and becomes Yeoh’s partner in tracking down a missing Replicant.While both Blade Runner films cemented the look of the universe, Luisa felt the movies actually have differing aesthetics. “And so 2099, we needed to have a third aesthetic,” she said. “We needed to honor what came before it, but it needed to introduce audiences to something that was original and still felt foreign. In thinking about the show, the show is really about birth. It’s about the birth of a city, of a society, of our characters, and it’s really the dawn of this new era.”She added, “When I think of a birth, I think of hot, sticky, bright, chaotic—and that’s where the environment came from.”Will Blade Runner 2099 live up to the high expectations set by the films? We’ll find out in just over a month, when the show premieres on Prime Video in November.