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Blade Runner 2019 #8 sees mother reunite with daughter in more ways than one. With Cleo attempting to escape with another replicant to an off-world colony known as Arcadia and Ash having to track down her surrogate daughter practically under gunpoint only to find out Hythe’s employer is Isobel Selwyn, the drama of the situation is at an all-time high. Things get tense and throughout the issue, we see how love and familiarity can help find one a new direction.
Ash As The Mother
I have talked about in previous reviews of this series that the main through-line theme is motherhood. Michael Green and Mike Johnson make that come full circle with the handling of the two mothers in Blade Runner 2019 #8. With Ash, we have a woman who was abandoned by her mother and wanted nothing more than to see her again one day. She dreamt of going to the stars, getting off-world, to see the paradise she was denied in her youth. Her disability was used as a crutch to force her to stay in the horrid conditions of Earth.
But now, having spent several years off-world protecting a little girl that she has had to become a surrogate mother too, she realizes the falsity of what was advertised. There is no great haven, a blissful paradise where she and her mother can live happily ever after. Just as there is no place that will prevent people from finding Cleo and Ash and so they must run, their running puts them in even worse conditions than before.
But regardless of what is around her, she has been filled with a new purpose: to protect Cleo. She has had to raise her practically as her own for years. Cleo may not be her biological daughter, but she is her daughter in a way. We even see Ash’s motherly instinct kick in when she guesses that Cleo would head to Arcadia because that brochure was the only thing she could read to her at night.
And now that is all taken from her once again. This time, however, it was a choice, not something forced upon her. She has accepted her role as the mother and therefore the protector of Cleo. But Cleo needs a better role model than her and she knows it. So, she let Cleo go with Isobel and proceeds to journey back to the place she once saw as a shackle. Not to put the shackles back on, but to destroy them so they never harm Cleo again. Alexander Selwyn is about to find out why you never ever want to anger the mother bear.
Isobel As The Mother
We know from the previous arc that the real Isobel Selwyn died. She was replaced by a replicant as a gift to Alexander Selwyn by the Tyrell Corporation. The Isobel that we encounter in Blade Runner 2019 #8 is yet another copy of Isobel. The question then becomes: Is Isobel capable of feelings towards Cleo? As she puts it in this issue, she may be a new model, but she has the same memories from the previous ones.
The classic idea of the Blade Runner franchise is to delve deep into the definition of what it means to be human and analyze it. Blade Runner 2019 #8 attaches the motherhood theme to it. Can Isobel still love Cleo the same way considering the fact that her feelings for Cleo are just a series of copied memories moved from one model to the next? The thing is, what is a human except for the sum of their memories? Love is both a chemical reaction from our body and a mental reaction to the memories associated with the person.
If a replicant can copy the bodily functions of a human so well it’s hard to tell them apart, then why not the mental? It’s a fascinating concept to explore and with the splitting of the core characters at the end of the issue hopefully means we will get more explorations of this idea.
Blade Runner 2019 #8 Properly Brings Its Themes Into Play
Blade Runner 2019 #8 is quite an intense and thought-provoking issue. It does have problems, for instance new characters in this arc being quickly killed off without proper development. But the focus on the meaning of motherhood and attaching it to the replicants makes it so interesting it makes up for its shortcomings.