We begin this arc with Yotun and his crew escaping the scene of the crime (i.e., blowing up the skyship with the city's elite still on it). Yotun muses about how the humans below their flying vehicle don't know how their lives have changed and their servitude is "inevitable." Guinaldo is on fire in the next sequence as he shows just how brutal and powerful Yotun is. A squadron of five LAPD spinners surround the crew's vehicle and order Yotun to land. Instead, he leaps from spinner to spinner to take out the officers.
Meanwhile, at Yotun's headquarters, Ash disarms the Redhead and flees, though, as Yotun's disciple Kalia observes, Ash doesn't have anywhere to go. Ash realizes as much when she exits the facility and discovers that she's in the middle of an enormous waste-treatment plant. Yotun arrives in one of the police spinners and re-captures Ash after her spine seizes. Quipping that she belongs with the other "products to be disposed of," he carries her back to the facility.
Ash awakens to Yotun's red-robed acolytes arrayed in front of her. Several approach her one by one to reveal that they were Replicants that Ash had previously retired. Yotun reveals that he revived them (somehow), just like he's going to do for Ash: we end the issue with her in one of the Replicant tubes.
Issue #6 is unusual in that it features humor. As we saw last issue, Freysa's friends Dyson and Farhad are helping Freysa locate Ash after one of Yotun's former disciples, Silka, provided them with his location. (Silka appears motivated to help because Freysa helped her when she was initially freed.) Without any explanation about why they're doing so, Dyson, Farhad, and Silka take over a power station and shut down power to five sectors. When one of the operators asks how they got into the station, Dyson quips, "Violently." Ha! I'm glad to see someone has a personality in 2029.
Later, the group presents itself to Yotun and claims that it shut down the station as an act of good faith so its members can join Yotun. The group also provides Freysa to Yotun as another "act of good faith." Dyson, Farhad, and Silka claim they no longer believe in Freysa's preachings that humans and replicants can live together. Uncharacteristically for a comic-book villain, Yotun isn't an idiot and sees through their deception. As such, he brings Freysa with him on his next mission, which he claims is the most important one yet. (I'm not sure why he didn't kill Dyson, Farhad, and Silka, but I'll allow it.)
Back at his HQ, Silka attacks Redhead and brings Dyson and Farhad to the tubes, since Yotun mentioned that Ash would "wake up" at some point. They free Ash, who seems to have spent enough time in the tube to heal. Kalia discovers them and kills Silka as Ash, Dyson, and Farhad escape. They jump into a spinner, and Ash says that she heard Yotun's ramblings while she was in the tube so she knows where he and Freysa are going.
We begin issue #8 with Yotun's army engaging in an assault on police headquarters. Yotun's followers are also rioting throughout the city in the wake of the attack on the skyship, largely emptying out the headquarters as the LAPD struggles to respond. As they watch the assault from the sidelines, Yotun reveals to Freysa that he was one of the "angels" who saved her when she was wounded during the Battle of Mesa Echo Erebus. Is it a stretch? Yes. But Yotun has interpreted them running into one another again - both of them revolutionaries for their people, in their own way - as a sign that she should join him.
As his troops fully seize the headquarters, Yotun takes over the communications system and broadcasts a message to the people of Los Angeles. He informs them that he and his fellow Replicants have taken out the city's elites under whom they've all suffered. (Between the skyship attack and the ongoing rioting, it's hard to argue with his assessment that he's now in control, to the extent anyone is.) He declares that he and the other Replicants will now rule humans as benevolent gods.
Freysa isn't buying it, though. She criticizes Yotun for really believing that he's a god, stressing how he's forcing his followers to give him blood to survive. He isn't pleased when she tells him that he's just as bad as the humans, exploiting Replicants for his own gain. He particularly doesn't like when she cuts his livefeed. I was worried that he was going to kill her but instead he cuts out her right eye.
Ash arrives, and Yotun wisely makes her choose between capturing him and saving Freysa. She manages to get Freysa from the now-burning headquarters as Yotun escapes and is relieved that Dyson and Farhad ignored her instructions last issue not to help when they arrive in a spinner. The group escapes as the building burns.
Final Thoughts: I'll be honest: at this point, I felt like Johnson had lost control of the story's narrative. It's like Yotun's a force that takes over the story as he seems capable of doing anything he wants without any consequences. After all, I get that the the LAPD HQ was nearly empty when Yotun and his forces arrived, but it isn't like the officers couldn't return with overwhelming force once they learned of the attack.
That said, issue #8 makes it clear just how powerful the Nexus 8s are so some of Yotun's "inevitability," to quote Thanos, makes sense. It also makes sense that this power is fueling Yotun's superiority complex. He makes a number of mistakes here, from healing Ash to leaving Freysa alive, that seem to come from his belief that he's invincible. Although both decisions definitely fall in the deus ex machina category, Johnson at least lays the groundwork for why they make sense within the story's context.. Although Yotun's chickens haven't come to roost yet, Johnson makes it clear that they're coming.
Beyond wherever Yotun's own hubris takes us, I wonder if the elites are going to regroup and strike back. I guess we'll see
Also Read: Blade Runner FCBD 2021 (September 27, 2021)
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