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Most shows make do with a teaser and a trailer. Blade Runner 2099 has now reached its third, a longer cut that Prime Video released on 9 November and is billing as the final one. That leaves sixteen days before all eight episodes land at once on 25 November. Calling anything “final” is brave in this franchise. The original film took twenty-five years and a release actually titled The Final Cut before anyone could agree which version counted.
The set-up hasn’t changed since the July teaser or October’s New York Comic Con trailer. It is fifty years after Blade Runner 2049, and Los Angeles has been rebuilt by its non-human residents. Hunter Schafer plays Cora, a fugitive who has spent her life hiding behind false identities and now takes on the riskiest one available: a Blade Runner. Her partner is Olwen (Michelle Yeoh), a replicant Blade Runner with only days left before her built-in expiry date. Together they are hunting a runaway who is hiding a truth that could bring down the city’s fragile new order. Lewis Gribben (Elias) and Dimitri Abold (Bebeto) round out the regulars.
What is interesting across the three trailers is how the sympathies have shifted. In July, Cora was complaining that the replicants keep taking everything away, while Olwen answered that the old world always fights to come back and that “it’s our time now”. The line doing the rounds from this final trailer is “Cora. Help us take back our city.” So the humans are now the resistance. The species that once ran the Voight-Kampff test is presumably holding meetings in damp basements and wondering whether the new arrival might be a plant. Philip K. Dick would have enjoyed the reversal, and quite possibly suspected he had predicted it.
Dick’s name is still on the paperwork too. His daughter, Isa Dick Hackett, is among the executive producers, alongside Ridley Scott and Michael Green, who co-wrote 2049. Silka Luisa (Shining Girls) is the showrunner, and Jonathan van Tulleken, who did such handsome work on Shōgun, directed the first two episodes. Here at SFcrowsnest we have now covered all three trailers. The next thing worth writing about is the series itself, and no trailer can tell us whether it has the patience of the films. Both were happy to let a scene sit in silence for as long as it liked.
The release date has its own quiet joke. 25 November is the Wednesday before American Thanksgiving, so US viewers can binge eight hours of a city run by people who resent them, then sit down to a family dinner and compare the two. British viewers simply get a dark, wet Wednesday in late November, which is about as close to 2099 Los Angeles as the Met Office can manage. Either way, the pitch is clear. The replicants built a new city and the humans want it back. Anyone who has watched their local high street get redeveloped will know exactly how that feels.
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