This arc stats with a six-month jump in time, which surprised me. But Johnson uses it to great effect to show how the LAPD, the Underground, and Yotun's movement are all struggling against each other to get to the Replicants.
Issue #9 opens with Ambrose, a beloved care-facility nurse, fleeing the facility after his employer brought in a Blade Runner to run a Voight-Kampff test on him. His employer informed Ambrose that they found "inconsistencies" in his hiring in 2025 and made it clear that all employers are under pressure to root out Replicants.
When Ambrose appears at the now-closed Diamant, Ash and Freysa bring him into the Underground. But Pekka, one of Yotun's disciples, arrives to take in Ambrose for Yotun's movement. She didn't come alone: four diseased-looking Replicants attack Ash and Freysa. Ash shoots two of them, but Pekka hustles Ambrose from the scene before Ash and Freysa can stop her. Ash hypothesizes that the disease is a side effect of Yotun draining life from his followers. At the movement's hideout, a deteriorating Yotun is clearly sucking all the life from his followers now: Ambrose awakens trapped in one of the "donation" chairs.
Later, Ash's boss informs her that he's going to pair her with a Blade Runner named Marlowe. Ash refuses, and her boss gives her one week to find a lead on Yotun before he forces Marlowe on her. That said, her boss clearly knows that she's helping the Underground and separately dispatches Marlowe to get confirmation. He implicitly authorizes Marlowe to kill Ash if she is.
Johnson kicks it up a notch in issue #10. Ambrose is now catatonic after rejeuvenating Yotun. Pekka expresses surprise, since the other Replicants haven't fared that way, and Yotun vaguely pins it on the other Replicants benefitting from his "Awakening."
Meanwhile, Ash arrives at a clock tower to meet a man who reported that a Replicant broke into a vault there and escaped. Ash exposits that Yotun has tapped the LAPD's communications system, so she's on a race to get to the Replicant before the movement can. She offers to help the Replicant as she chases them, which is weird since the Replicant killed the vault's guards and thus doesn't really fit with Ash's "save the good ones" approach. Before she can get to the Replicant, she runs into Pekka. In a shocking moment, Pekka is shot before she and Ash finish their confrontation. Ash turns and finds Marlowe holding the gun.
Marlowe "reminds" Ash that she's supposed to retire Replicants "on sight," but Ash isn't wrong when she screams at Marlowe that Pekka was her best link to Yotun. Ash notices that Pekka has the same signs of disintegration as the Replicants she faced in the alley and goes after the Replicant who accompanied Pekka, though they manage to escape.
Later, we learn that the vault's owner was a woman named Alice Leopold. Her will pays for the vault and orders it to remain closed for another century. Kalia gives Yotun what the Replicant stole from the vault: one of Alice's journals. To Kalia's surprise, Yotun tells her that he remembers writing in the diary. He then surprises us even further: the memory comes from Eldon Tyrell. "Alice Leopold" was Tyrell's younger sister, Alice Tyrell. Dun-dun-DUN!
Issue #11 is straight to the point as Johnson moves us to the end game. Ash responds to a tip about Replicant activity in the industrial sector. It turns out they were trying to sabotage a plant (for reasons that aren't made clear, other than possibly Yotun's ongoing war against Los Angeles) but all died on the spot. Ash recognizes the degeneration symptoms and goes to find the Replicants' spinner. As she examines it, Kalia appears on the screen. She assumes Ash has killed the Replicants, but Ash informs her that they all died of the degenerative disease. Ash realizes in time that Kalia intends to detonate the spinner and barely escapes.
Meanwhile, Marlowe uses a little girl he hired to trick his way into Freysa's apartment, where he demands the serial numbers and location of every Replicant that she's helped. When she refuses, he threatens Ash. Freysa manages to kill Marlowe before he kills her, but Marlowe tells her it's too late to save Ash.
At Yotun's hideout, Kalia tells him that Ash said the Replicants died of the "weakness." Yotun informs her that salvation is at hand, as Tyrell's journal shows him how to create new Replicants, a secret that Tyrell took to the grave. The journal also confirms that Yotun is special as Tyrell did implant his memories in him. (Last issue, we saw a dead owl was one of Yotun's earliest memories.)
Ash managed to get Yotun's coordinates from the spinner before Kalia detonated it and arrives at the temporary LAPD headquarters to gather up a posse. But her boss strips her of her badge and gun and arrests her for working with the Underground.
And then it all coms crashing down.
Ash makes Wojciech her call, and Wojciech in turn calls Freysa. Wojciech distracts the cops transferring Ash to a new facility so Freysa can take out the cops. Ash then takes Freysa with her to Yotun's headquarters in an upscale downtown building. (She exposits how the wealthy have fled the city since Yotun's attack.) As they arrive, Ash's spine continues to deteriorate, but she hangs in there. They find a disintegrating Kalia, who tells them that Yotun is Tyrell.
Ash exposits that every schoolkid learns that Tyrell was born poor in the mountains, so Ash takes Freysa there. Seeing the police markings on the spinner that she and Freysa swiped, Yotun takes out the spinner, leaving Freysa unconscious. Ash's back gives out entirely, but Yotun helps her to the spot where his memories tell him to dig. He says that he doesn't know what's there, but he knows why it's there: to provide answers on Replicants' creation.
Johnson's genius is that Yotun is right but not in the way he expected: the grave contains owl bones. Yotun realizes that the grave doesn't hold the answer but the original question: could he (Tyrell) beat death? It's this childish question that puts Tyrell on the path to creating the Replicants and changing the future. Disappointed, Yotun is still hopeful that others will keep the fire that he started burning. Freysa kills him before he can say more. Freysa than carries Ash and tells her that there's a story she needs to tell her about "a miracle," with the post-script telling us that the story will conclude in "Blade Runner 2039."
Final Thoughts: Johnson subverts a lot of tropes with this series, which is what makes it so gripping. First, Yotun's revolution fails not because the authorities (or "good guys") stop it but because he isn't able to keep himself and his followers alive long enough to keep it going. His hubris is that he could've kept it going if he had allowed himself to die (since he wouldn't have drained all his followers' lives). But he believed himself to be Tyrell reborn, the Replicants' Messiah, and needed to see that become a reality by finding Tyrell's secrets.
Meanwhile, I only realized with the concluding scene that Freysa is the Replicant Underground leader from "Blade Runner 2049." (Yes, I'm slow.) I'm stoked that Ash's trilogy will interact definitively with the movie and can't wait to see where it all goes. As all the critics say about this series, if you're a fan of "Blade Runner," you should definitely be reading Johnson's work.
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