English Dub Review: Blade Runner – Black Lotus “Pressure”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Joseph helps Elle identify her three remaining targets, Chief Earl Grant, his wife Josephine, and possibly Niander Wallace Sr, and sends her back to Doc Badger to arm herself. At the LAPD, Chief Grant has connected the dots to who Elle is, reassures his wife that she’s safe, and discusses this with Wallace Sr before pulling the police together under the guise that the black lotus tattoo is a symbol for a terrorist group that targeted Senator Bannister, and since Bannister was apparently a former officer, Grant rallies his men to avenge him. He also calls in a Blade Runner named Marlowe, but he bails after learning he isn’t really needed along with all of Grant’s men. Using Officer Davis’ intel, they start with trying to find Doc Badger but end up arresting Joseph instead.

OUR TAKE

As Toonami desperately waits to run out the clock on 2021 so they can afford to get some new shows, Blade Runner: Black Lotus keeps going strong. Or rather it’s their only show since Food Wars has run out of dubbed episodes, Yashahime is using up its remaining three episodes of its first season this weekend to pad things out, and for some reason playing double episodes of Naruto Shippuden is off the table despite it having over a hundred episodes left. Basically, Toonami is in a real weird spot right now, one that will apparently subside next year but is still concerning for longtime fans like me. One of the ways they’re making do is by running a Blade Runner marathon with all of the episodes of Black Lotus they have so far. This is not to be confused with the previous Blade Runner marathon they had on Black Friday, which was mainly airing Blade Runner 2049 and the first three episodes. Unfortunately, even after that, they only have five episodes of the season, which doesn’t even get them to the reruns, so they had to air this fifth episode twice to get there. It honestly reminds me of times when I was down to my last mile of gas and had to pray I would get to a gas station before my car quit on me.

Anyway, as for this episode, I think it reinforces my thoughts last week that we should have been starting this series with Elle already on her manhunt, fully aware of her memories and past, and knowing her mission. We could start with her tracking down Bannister at the cage match, grilling him and prodding him about the “doll hunt” before going in for the kill, the impact of that reverberating out to the other hunters, specifically with Grant sending his cops after her. And let’s say she’s further along in learning to fight by this point and, along with Joseph, takes out all the cops, forcing Grant to call in Marlowe, a proper Blade Runner, to track her down. Then we have something like the plot of the first movie with Deckard and Roy Batty, but flipped by having the rogue Replicant being more sympathetic and our protagonist seeking understandable revenge. The fact that Wallace Sr, another big CEO who wants to make more Replicants, is one of her targets (I think? Apologies if I missed this last week) would add to the parallels. Roy Batty was somewhat sympathetic in that he was literally about to die and wanted to find a way to live, but Elle’s motivations are a lot easier to get behind, especially since she’s going after people who were hunting her and other replicants down like animals. And we’ve never had a Blade Runner be an antagonist before in one of these stories, so that would be a neat twist.

I’m descending down the rabbit hole of liking this version of the story that we’re probably not going to get, but it does seem that we ARE getting Marlowe as an antagonist starting next episode, though it’s about halfway through the series. And this is also having an increasingly negative effect on Elle’s development as I’m sure I’ll be able to get into next week. Essentially, I’m seeing some similar mistakes here that I saw with Fena in Pirate Princess, but I’ll save that for then. All told, this episode feels like it’s finally tripping into the potential that this series and further Blade Runner media could have right now, but I have this unshakeable worry that Black Lotus is going to squander them. I really hope I’m wrong.