Blade Runner 2099 NYCC Trailer Shows a Dying Replicant and Fugitive Hunting Missing Souls

Prime Video unveiled the full trailer for its limited series Blade Runner 2099 at New York Comic Con on Saturday, introducing a Los Angeles rebuilt fifty years after the events of Blade Runner 2049. Replicants have won an uprising that had been building across the films, leaving humans as second-class citizens in a city no longer shaped by their hands. All eight episodes arrive together on the streamer November 25.

Michelle Yeoh plays Olwen, a replicant Blade Runner who knows her final days have arrived, marked by the blue nail beds familiar from Roy Batty in the original film. She teams up with Hunter Schafer, who plays Cora, a human fugitive on the run after her workplace was raided who is now posing as a Blade Runner inside the LAPD while keeping an eye out for her younger brother. Their connection is the focus of a detective thriller reminiscent of old-school Chinatown, but set in the Blade Runner universe.

Olwen is trying to locate down a missing colleague of hers called Merrick and roughly 38 other replicants who just vanished out of the blue over the past 12 months. The pair is hard on the trail of a runaway carrying a secret that would bring down the entire city, including news of a treatment that might basically let all replicants live without the built-in expiry date that they all have.

Clips shown at the panel also revealed a red light district that sells human experiences rather than something shady, catering to beings who still cannot age or bear children. According to showrunner Silka Luisa, the entire series takes place during a point in time when one species is dying and another is rising, and it asks what happens when the clock runs out for humanity and if you can still hold on to being human even when everything is going to be lost.

The world they’re creating is hot, sweaty, bright, and full of mayhem, with large sets that incorporate interactive screens, moving mechanical components, and a plethora of small touches that make it all feel very genuine. Jonathan van Tulleken directed the first few episodes, and Ridley Scott continues to serve as executive producer.

We got a little teaser at San Diego Comic Con in July, and the new trailer is all about surveillance, weird conversations, and replicants trying to figure out if being more human than human is something to strive for or a real burden to bear. By the way, Harrison Ford will not be in this one, according to Silka Luisa. The series continues the franchise’s subject of mortality, but has expanded to embrace the fate of the entire species rather than simply one person’s existence.