Blade Runner 2029 (2020) #9-#12: "Redemption"

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.

Blade Runner 2029 (2020) #5-#8: "Echoes" (HERE BE SPOILERS!)

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)

Blade Runner 2029 (2020) #1-#4: "Reunion" (HERE BE SPOILERS!)

Johnson does a great job continuing Ash's story from "Blade Runner 2019 (2019)."  In this first arc, it's almost exclusively Ash's story.  I was glad to see that Ash is still with Freysa, but Johnson keeps his focus tightly on Ash here.

Since returning to Earth, Ash has rejoined the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) as a Blade Runner.  That said, "the brass" is unaware that she only retires Replicants whom she believes "deserve" it.  As we see in the first issue, she helps all other Replicants she encounters transition to a new life.  

After Ash helps a pleasure model escape a john, Ash's sergeant dispatches her to the Seawall to investigate a tip that a Replicant is working there.  Given how high profile the project is, the Powers that Be are concerned that news could leak that a Replicant is involved in its construction.  (Los Angeles is building the Seawall after a devastating tsunami in 2025.)  Ash finds the Replicant, but he commits suicide before Ash can arrest him.  Troublingly, his last words are "Yotun redeems," reminding Ash of a Nexus 6 she failed to catch in 2017.  

(As a sidebar, Johnson makes sure we understand that the Replicants are invaluable to the Seawall's construction, given the strength required to build it.  In so doing, he underlines the extent to which Replicants' contributions to society are completely ignored, lest society face uncomfortable truths.  This theme runs throughout the mini-series.)

Later, at the morgue, Ash is surprised when the mortician tells her that the dead Replicant doesn't have the telltale digits under the eyelids.  Ash exposits that Nexus 8s are the only Replicants still alive and they all have digits.  The mortician suggests that someone may be making bootleg Replicants.  Ash goes to the dead Replicant's last known address, but the trail goes cold.  

She then heads to the Diamant, a swinging, Roaring Twenties-themed bar for freed Replicants who decided to stay in Los Angeles.  (It's exactly the sort of place that I want to see in a Blade Runner story.)  A redheaded patron overhears Ash asking the bartender about Yotun and bolts.  Ash follows her, but the Redhead escapes.  However, she drops her purse, and Ash is able to find her place.

In issue #3, we learn Yotun has outlived his use-by date via Nexus 8s donating blood to him.  Before Ash can track down Yotun, though, her sergeant puts her on a different case.  He wants her to investigate the murder of a Blade Runner named Ruskin.  He himself was investigating the murder of a prominent banker, Hyman Bask (which we saw happen in issue #2), at the time of his own murder.  After searching Ruskin's and finding nothing, Ash heads home.  On the way, the Redhead knocks her unconscious and brings her to Yotun's base, at his request.  

Yotun himself is indisposed at the moment, though:  using the eye that Bask's Replicant servant brought him, Yotun and his crew enter the Mayor's skyship where the elites are holding a reception christening the Seawall.  He informs them that the Replicants they all hypocritically and illegally keep as servants are throwing off their yokes.  He detonates explosives that his Replicants (including the dead one that started the mini-series' action) implanted in the Seawall and departs the skyship with his team before destroying that, too. 

At Yotun's base, a Replicant whom Ash previously helped frees her and shows her that Yotun isn't bootlegging Replicants:  he's activating the Nexus 8s that corporations never activated.  He's concerned about Yotun's vision, but before he can elaborate the Redhead shoots him.  Yotun's disciple, Kalia, then informs Ash that Yotun will answer all her questions when he returns.  I'm sure it'll be a pleasant conversation.