“Blade Runner 2019: Volume 2 – Off-World” (2019-20, collecting Issues 5-8) marks many readers’ first experience of the colony worlds of the proper Philip K. Dick/Ridley Scott universe. “Soldier” (1998) is merely a sidequel, and “Blade Runner 4: Eye and Talon” (2000) was underpublished, so most fans couldn’t read it if they wanted to.
Seeing the galaxy
We don’t exactly get attack ships off the shoulder of Orion or C-beams glittering near the Tannhauser Gate. But that’s probably for the best. Nothing could top what our mind’s eye comes up with when we hear Roy Batty’s words.
Still, space doesn’t provide many new delights here. When ex-blade runner Ash says “I have to remind myself I’m not back home” at the start of Issue 7, we turn to a splash page of Andres Guinaldo’s and Marco Lesko’s art and see why: The colony world of Ramanuja in 2026 looks exactly Los Angeles in 2019!
“Blade Runner 2019” Issues 5-8 (2019-20)
Subtitle: “Volume 2: Off-World”
Writers: Michael Green and Mike Johnson
Art: Andres Guinaldo
Colors: Marco Lesko
It’s a record-scratch moment that almost had me chuckling. (It’s worth noting that “Blade Runner 3: Replicant Night” also ventures to a false Los Angeles, on a movie set on a space station orbiting Earth. Ramanuja isn’t a deliberate replication, though.)
In the “Blade Runner” universe – as with “Firefly,” of which people are probably more familiar with the colony worlds – there are no aliens. Colony worlds reflect human architecture. So of course Ramanuja looks like L.A.
The replicant experience
Before that, though, we do get a visceral understanding of why replicants want to escape their enslavement. Although we meet worker models rather than military models like Batty, the experience is similarly hellish. A mining field calls to mind the training exercises in Joe Haldeman’s “The Forever War.”
The replicant Padraic keeps a journal, knowing that slaves’ experiences are not always reliably recorded by those who write the history books. For a day in which a replicant gets torn in half by a geothermal explosion, he writes: “Nothing unusual occurred.”
I wanted writers Michael Green (“Blade Runner 2049”) and Mike Johnson to do a little more with the Padraic-Cleo relationship. It’s an undistinguished story of replicant-human connection compared to, say, Sebastian-Pris and Deckard-Rachael.
Still, we do see that Cleo (now a young girl, but posing as a young boy for the sake of hiding from the spy state) and Ash (posing as her mother) are miserable in their lives on the mining planet’s administration settlement. They’re successfully hiding, but at what price?
Pursuit-based page-turner
Cleo’s dreams of escaping to Arcadia – which come from Ash’s bedtime stories, based on a brochure – call to mind “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”/“Total Recall,” tapping into that universal dream of something better. Cleo was a baby in “Volume 1: Los Angeles,” yet deep in her soul she knows there must be a better life than this.
(Interestingly, Arcadia 234 is the refuge/refuse planet of pacifists in “Soldier,” something I’ll keep in the back of my mind entering “Volume 3: Home Again, Home Again.”)
“Off-World” is a pursuit-based page-turner, as Ash (hiding her personal interests) and blade runner Hythe pursue Cleo and Padraic. Green and Johnson do a lot of “one week later” and “one week before” indicators, I guess to simultaneously show that space is big and that the pursuit is nonetheless (relatively) close.
Ultimately, to paraphrase Padraic, nothing unusual occurs in this second “2019” volume, which features a simple plot compared to the first volume. But it’s a sturdy, character-driven bridge between the meaty “Los Angeles” and what I expect to be a strong conclusion in “Home Again, Home Again.”
The writers widen the universe beyond Earth yet keep Ash and Cleo in necessarily claustrophobic positions. Our child and adult protagonists are now thoroughly hardened by life, an essential trait of “Blade Runner” heroines.