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Blade Runner 2019 #9 sees Ash head back to earth, but this time she has a purpose. Where before she was a Blade Runner, the best in the business as a matter of fact, now she is a fugitive and a very angry mother out to stop the one person that could take her child away. But like all good revenge stories, things start going awry and begin to get more complicated than they initially seemed.
Earth Post-Blackout
The initial premise of this series was to tell a story that happened alongside the original movie. However, as we moved into the second arc, there was a time jump and the true purpose of this series seems to start showing itself. It is here to fill the gap between Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049, while also telling its own character-driven story.
What is fascinating about this approach is that we get to see the effects of certain events only hinted at in the films or briefly shown in ancillary materials. The blackout of 2022 was something talked about in Blade Runner 2049, even becoming a major plot point when tracing the lineage of a certain replicant, and one of the promotional materials for the film showed the events that led to it. But now we get to see its effects closer to the time frame that it actually happened, and witness the effects of it on the fall of the Tyrell corporation.
What’s so significant about Blade Runner 2019 #9 is the clear level of detail Michael Green, Mike Johnson and Andres Guinaldo have been doing for this series. What started out as an adaptation of a book that changes a lot of the source material has taken on a life of its own and become it’s very own unique thing. Seeing the Tyrell Corporation building in ruins, such an iconic image from the first film is great because we knew it had to have happened sometime.
Eldon Tyrell had no heirs except his creations, and even then they were short-lived. And we know from the sequel that Niander Wallace will rise to power with his own variant of the replicants. Is this the story of how that came to be? I can’t wait to see this expanded upon and find out.
Reliable Sources
In the crumbling remains of the once great monument to progress known as the Tyrell Corporation, Ash meets an unlikely ally and source of information. Fost is a neurophysicist that was locked down in the depths of the building for a special project. But here’s the deal: Fost has gone stir crazy. He doesn’t know that Eldon Tyrell is dead, even though he died seven years prior at the hands of Roy Batty.
And apparently the special project he is working on is called the Isobel Project. Oh, and if that wasn’t enough to sell you on the fact that he is crazy, he talks about that Ash needs to meet the rest of the team on the project and takes her to a board room with the decaying corpses of Replicants, never activated and long since dead.
So the question that has to be on Ash’s mind, as well as the reader’s, is who is Fost? Is he a reliable source of information, the signs point to no, but then again he could be one of the people affected by the radiation on earth. In the book, Do Androids Dreams of Electric Sheep, there were a group of people collectively referred to as the “Chickenheads,” who were people that had developmental problems due to overexposure to radiation.
The character of J.R. Isadore was renamed J.F. Sebastian in the film version and suffered from the same ailment, but it had a slightly different explanation. Is this an attempt to bring that aspect of the novel back into the Blade Runner canon or Fost just crazy. Blade Runner 2019 #9 doesn’t give us the answers but it sure asks some interesting questions.
Blade Runner 2019 Is A Strong Start To A New Arc
Blade Runner 2019 may not be as thematically interesting as the last issue but the world-building aspects along with Ash’s personal journey keep the issue going at a strong pace. With a new version of Hythe showing up at the end, I’m sure this new arc will go to some interesting places.
