The visual style of Blade Runner: Black Lotus captures the ambiguity between human and replicant first seen in Deckard in the original Blade Runner. The new animated series takes place in 2032, halfway between Blade Runner and its sequel, Blade Runner 2049. However, despite the new setting, the series still deals with many of the same themes and issues raised by the movies.
The original films follow Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), an LAPD detective and Blade Runner, tasked with hunting down and terminating escaped “replicants”, biologically engineered super-humans used as slave labor to build space-colonies for humanity. Deckard falls in love with a replicant, Rachael, who was designed with false memories to make her believe she was human. When Rachael is scheduled for termination, Deckard goes rogue, escaping Los Angeles with her in the movie’s famous cliffhanger ending. But before they escape, Deckard’s old partner gives him a parting gift of an origami unicorn, just like the unicorn Deckard saw every night in his dreams. Both Deckard and audiences are left to wonder if Deckard’s own memories are real, blurring the line separating human and machine.
Blade Runner: Black Lotus takes this trick to the next level with its sleek 3D-animated style. The characters’ smooth and seamless skin textures make them all look almost artificial. Imperfections that viewers would recognize as naturally human are missing. To the naked eye, it’s impossible to know which character is a natural-born human and which is a replicant. Dedicated fans might get a thrill theorizing which Black Lotus characters are secretly machines. Themes of suspicion, paranoia, and self-doubt, which were embodied by the protagonist Deckard, can be explored across an animated Blade Runner universe.
Blade Runner director Ridley Scott has always said that Deckard is definitively a replicant and that the movie is not ambiguous. The suggestion that memories might not be authentic, but designed by powerful forces as a means of control is frightening. For Deckard, the further implication that he has unwittingly been hunting down his own kind would be almost too much to bear. The sequel, Blade Runner 2049, inverted the crisis of consciousness with the story of Agent K (Ryan Gosling), a replicant who begins to suspect that his implanted memories might actually have been real all along. It’s anyone’s guess what kinds of stories Blade Runner: Black Lotus will tell about memory, but the synthetic-looking animation suggests that the creative team understands the core theme behind the source material.
At its best, the Blade Runner franchise toys with the idea that the difference between real and engineered memories might not matter all that much. What exists in the mind is not as important as the actions a person takes in his or her life. The impact of action is what survives after death, not thoughts. Rick Deckard’s response to questioning his mind is to change his actions, proving his free will by choosing to stop hunting replicants. As the world of Blade Runner expands with Blade Runner: Black Lotus, it will be exciting to watch the new characters make choices of their own, regardless of how their minds and bodies were made.