The Blade Runner universe is coming to TV, and its final trailer suggests this is not a simple retread of Ridley Scott’s 1982 classic. Prime Video released the last trailer for Blade Runner 2099 on Monday, November 9, ahead of the limited series’ premiere later this month.

The big twist, as Slant Magazine put it, is that the replicants are not hiding among humans anymore. They are running the place, and the humans are the ones trying not to get caught.

The story so far

Hunter Schafer stars as Cora, a fugitive who slips into the LAPD as a Blade Runner. Much of the trailer’s tension comes from watching her try to pass the very scanners designed to detect people like her.

Her new partner is Olwen, a ruthless replicant in her final days, played by Michelle Yeoh. Together, the two are assigned to hunt down a runaway who holds a secret that could bring down the city.

That premise flips the moral setup that defined the original film and Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049. Instead of following a hunter who comes to question his job, the series appears to follow a hunted character forced to play the hunter.

A franchise built on one big question

The original Blade Runner, adapted from Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, asked what really separates humans from the artificial beings they create. Each follow-up has returned to that question from a new angle. By putting a replicant inside the police force that hunts her kind, and pairing her with another replicant near the end of her life, the series looks set to push that question further than the films did, and to spend eight hours exploring it instead of two.

Who is behind it

Blade Runner 2099 comes from creator and showrunner Silka Luisa. Jonathan van Tulleken directs the first two episodes, and Ridley Scott, who directed the original Blade Runner, is among the executive producers.

It is the franchise’s first live-action TV series, following the 2017 film Blade Runner 2049. The ensemble cast also includes Dimitri Abold, Lewis Gribben, Sheila Atim, Tom Burke, Johnny Harris, Daniel Rigby, Amy Lennox, Katelyn Rose Downey, Matthew Needham and Maurizio Lombardi.

Why the trailer is getting attention

The final trailer was among the most-viewed videos on YouTube’s U.S. trending chart on November 10, according to TrendReport’s daily chart. Part of the appeal is the pairing at its center. Schafer broke out with Euphoria, while Yeoh is an Oscar winner for Everything Everywhere All at Once, and the two play very different kinds of outsiders.

The visual style also leans hard into what fans expect from the franchise: rain-slicked streets, neon, and a city where it is never quite clear who, or what, anyone really is.

When and where to watch

All eight episodes of Blade Runner 2099 premiere at once on Prime Video on Wednesday, November 25, just in time for the long Thanksgiving weekend in the U.S. That makes it one of the bigger streaming releases of the holiday season, and a likely binge for sci-fi fans.

What we still don’t know

Prime Video has kept the details of the runaway’s secret under wraps, and it is not yet clear how directly the series will connect to the characters from the films. The 2099 setting puts the story decades after Blade Runner 2049, leaving room for new characters and a changed world.

The bottom line

Blade Runner 2099 looks like it is trying to do something new with a beloved world: turn the cat-and-mouse story inside out. With a strong cast, Ridley Scott’s involvement and a full-season drop on November 25, it is one of the TV events to circle on the calendar this month.

Image: Сold march evening by Sergey Tchernykov via Flickr, CC0 1.0