Blade Runner: Black Lotus: Episodes, Story & Art

Blade Runner: Black Lotus is a thirteen-episode anime series that aired on Adult Swim's Toonami block and streamed on Crunchyroll from 14 November 2021 to 6 February 2022. Shinji Aramaki and Kenji Kamiyama directed it at Sola Digital Arts in Tokyo for Alcon Television Group, with Shinichirō Watanabe as creative producer. It was set in Los Angeles in 2032, thirteen years after Blade Runner and seventeen years before Blade Runner 2049. The series followed Elle, a replicant who woke with no memory and hunted the rich men and women who had used her as prey in a secret Doll Hunt.

Episodes

Episode 1: City Of Angels

In October 2032, ten years after the Blackout, Elle woke in the back of a transport truck on a desert road outside Los Angeles. She remembered almost nothing except her name, and she carried a black lotus tattoo on her shoulder and an encrypted data device she could not open. In the city she asked strangers for directions to Fountain Avenue, a street she remembered as lined with trees, with a restaurant that had an angel painted on its yellow wall. The neighborhood had changed beyond recognition, and a local gang noticed her expensive device and followed her through the rain.

When the gang cornered her in an alley, Elle fought back with skills she did not remember learning, beat several of the men, and got away. The address she had been looking for now held a junk shop. Its owner, Doc Badger, saw that she had lost her memory and showed her an artificial cat before the gang leader came in asking about the girl with the tech. Doc denied having seen her. Afterward he told Elle that the device needed a special key held only by its original owner, and that his help would cost money she did not have.

Elle offered Doc a different payment and promised that the gang would never bother his shop again. Doc agreed and offered her an old sword from his stock if she succeeded. She went after the gang alone, killed their leader, and warned the survivors to leave Doc Badger alone, which they agreed to do. During the fight a memory surfaced of killing a man who had attacked her in the desert. She also kept hearing a man's voice from her past asking her not to forget him, although she could not remember who he was or where she had known him.

An advertising blimp promising a new life in the Off-world colonies passed over the city while Elle returned to the shop. Doc kept his side of the deal and gave her the sword, but he still could not decrypt the device. He took her to the top floor of the same building to meet a neighbor he called J, a man who was good with that kind of technology. They found Joseph passed out drunk on his couch in a dim, smoky apartment, a bottle against his chest, and Doc shook him to wake him up and introduce a new customer.

Episode 2: All We Are Not

Joseph, a junk dealer and repairman who disliked new gadgets, refused at first to look at the device. Doc talked him into it, and Joseph agreed to recover the data, warning that the decryption would take time and that the device could only work as a camera until then. On his television a news report showed Senator Bannister meeting Niander Wallace Sr., founder of the Wallace Corporation. Elle recognized Bannister and asked where she could find him. Joseph told her that politicians like him did not meet ordinary people, but Elle left the apartment anyway.

Rookie officer Alani Davis was eating at the White Dragon noodle bar when she spotted Marko, a suspect in a vehicle theft, and chased him through the streets until she arrested him. Elle followed Bannister across the city to an unlicensed replicant boxing club, where he watched the fights from a private box. She talked her way past the door staff and dealt with his guards. Inside, Bannister was annoyed that his friend Hooper, a journalist, had missed the main event. When Elle walked in, he asked whether they had met before, and she answered that they might have met in the desert.

Bannister realized who she was and told her that she was not human but a replicant, built the week before and fresh off the assembly line. Elle refused to believe him and attacked. While two replicant boxers fought in the ring below, Elle and Bannister fought in the private box above, and the crowd kept cheering for the bout downstairs. Bannister called her a skin job and a product from a factory. Elle broke his neck and threw him from the balcony, and his bodyguard reported the killing to the LAPD.

At Wallace Corporation headquarters, Wallace Sr. and his son, Niander Wallace Jr., played go while the father criticized his son's slow progress on replicant memories. A call then told him that Bannister was dead. Davis reached the club and shouted at a young woman with a lotus tattoo who was hurrying away, then went inside to the crime scene. Another officer chased the woman through the streets and lost her heading west on Walnut. Hiding in an alley, Elle remembered hunters shouting at a group of replicants to run across the desert. A moment later a stun shot hit her and knocked her down.

Episode 3: The Human Condition

Elle woke in Joseph's apartment and learned that he had shot her with a stun gun. He had followed police radio traffic about the Bannister murder, guessed where to find her, and promised not to turn her in. He explained the Blackout of 2022, a total data wipe that had changed the world, and said that coffee had never tasted right since. Elsewhere, Alani Davis tracked down Drove, a gang member in Silver Lake, and roughed him up until he described the girl with the samurai sword and the tech his gang had tried to take from her.

News broadcasts praised Bannister as a patriot and a defender of human rights, and Joseph dismissed him with contempt. Elle asked what a replicant was. Joseph explained that a corporation had made artificial people twenty years earlier to do hard labor, and he checked her eye for the serial number carried by Nexus-8 models. He found none. To settle the question he brought out a Voight-Kampff machine, which measured emotional responses, because feelings revealed more than memories and a replicant's emotions would show contradictions.

Joseph asked about a mother who did not love her child and a kitten left beside a dumpster, and then asked whether Elle remembered being in love. She recalled a vacation by a pool with a man who tattooed the lotus on her back and told her it stood for purity, a gift to mark her new beginning. Joseph ended the test, told her that her emotions showed no contradictions, and said she was a human with amnesia. At Wallace Tower, Wallace Jr. warned his father that Bannister's death would make it harder to lift the ban on replicants.

Davis questioned Doc Badger about the woman with the lotus tattoo, but he closed his shop and sent her away. While Joseph was out, the decryption finished, and Elle watched the recording stored on the device. It showed Hooper filming a hunt in the desert with Bannister and others who fired rifles at fleeing people. One hunter complained that shooting from far away was too easy and suggested hunting up close, and another explained that the targets were hardwired to submit to humans. Elle understood that the prey had been replicants like her.

Episode 4: The Doll Hunt

The full memory returned. After the tattoo by the pool, Elle had woken alone in a ruined building in the Nevada desert, unable to remember her boyfriend's name. Outside she found a group of strangers in the same state, each sure of a life somewhere else, such as a family waiting in a hotel room or a trip to buy groceries. A fair-haired girl named Miu admired Elle's tattoo and gave her a coat against the cold. One man organized the group to find a way into the building, where he hoped they would get answers.

The hunters arrived and opened fire, shouting at the replicants to run. The party was Senator Bannister, the journalist Hooper, Police Chief Earl Grant, and his wife Josephine, who called their targets dolls. Elle and Miu hid among the rocks and then stole one of the hunters' buggies with two other replicants. The hunters chased them across the sand until the buggy crashed. Elle and Miu survived the wreck, but most of the other replicants in the group were shot dead around them.

Hooper told the others to go on ahead because he had a theory to test about how much the replicants could take. He held out his knife and dared Elle to stab him, and she could not do it. He then killed Miu in front of her and kicked Elle repeatedly while he filmed. Something changed in her, and her eyes began to glow. Elle took the knife and stabbed Hooper to death, then took his camera and escaped on a transport vehicle. The camera was the encrypted device she later carried into Los Angeles.

In the present, Elle understood that she had been made as a plaything for the hunters. She told Joseph that she would kill them all and asked him to help her identify and find them. At the LAPD, Davis told Chief Grant that Bannister's neck had been broken with superhuman strength and that the killer was a replicant. Grant mocked her for failing the blade runner program, insisted that there were no replicants left in the city, and ordered her to drop the matter. Alone, he looked at her sketch of the lotus tattoo and swore.

Episode 5: Pressure

On a night bus, the blade runner Marlowe confronted a replicant who had survived a cage fight the night before, retired him, and called in the cleanup with his badge number. Elsewhere, Chief Grant told Wallace Sr. that one of the replicants had survived the hunt. Hooper had been the last hunter left in the desert and had not been heard from since, and Bannister was dead. Wallace Sr. reminded Grant that he was one of the people meant to handle such problems, and Grant promised that no one would ever hear about the Doll Hunt.

Joseph told Elle that replicants ate, drank, and felt like humans, and that her memories had been given to her to cushion her emotions. Unlike human memories, hers would never fade. He agreed to keep helping, although he advised her to walk away. Using an ESPER machine, he enhanced frames of Hooper's recording until he had clear faces of the two remaining hunters, a police officer and a blonde woman who was probably his wife. Doc Badger took the images to Joseph's apartment to print them.

Grant gathered his officers, reminded them that the senator had once been a police officer, and ordered the whole force to hunt down and eliminate Black Lotus, the name the department gave the killer. Davis asked him to warn the officers that they might be facing a replicant. Grant refused, insisted that the killer was human, and took her evidence. In private he called Marlowe and told him that the killer was linked to the replicant from the cage fights, which the other officers were not told. Officers swept the city and questioned people about the girl with the tattoo but found nothing.

Davis's evidence mentioned that Black Lotus had warned the Silver Lake gang away from Doc Badger, so Grant ordered a raid on the junk shop. Marlowe arrived, saw forty officers in position, and left, telling Grant to call him if he found another replicant. The officers stormed the building but found only Joseph, while Doc printed the photographs upstairs. Josephine Grant called her husband to demand more guards at their home, and he said he could not send more without people asking questions. By then Elle had the faces she needed and was on her way to the Grants' penthouse in Los Angeles.

Episode 6: The Persistence Of Memory

Josephine Grant complained to her husband that two guards outside the door were not enough protection from a replicant who had killed a senator. When she saw someone outside the penthouse window, Chief Grant told her to lock herself in the bedroom and rushed home. Davis noticed him leave headquarters in a hurry during the manhunt and followed him. Officers had taken Joseph back to his apartment, where Marlowe greeted him as an old acquaintance and had him released, telling them the search would turn up nothing.

Elle got past the guards and held Josephine at gunpoint in the study. Josephine begged for her life and claimed that she had gone along only as a spectator to please her husband. She also argued that replicant memories were built or stolen, so Elle could not be sure the Doll Hunt had happened. Under pressure she named the other guests as Bannister, Hooper, and a friend of her husband's known as Dr. M. She did not know where to find him, but she believed her husband did.

Grant arrived and found Elle holding the gun on his wife. He admitted that he had taken part because he wanted to hunt. His wife's family had been hunters for generations before the animals died out, artificial animals were too expensive to shoot, and to him the victims were replicants rather than people. He raised his hands and told Elle that she did not really want to hurt anyone. Then Grant attacked her, and in the struggle she stabbed him. His gun went off as he fell and hit Josephine, who told Elle as she died that her feelings were not real.

Alani Davis reached the penthouse and found Elle with a sword over the bodies. Elle told her that she was done being hunted like an animal and that she had not started the killing. Before Davis could take her in, Marlowe crashed through the window, called Elle his target, and fought her through the apartment. A blast from his shotgun broke a gas line, and Elle set off an explosion that threw her out of the building. Afterward she wondered why revenge still hurt if her love and grief were only illusions.

Episode 7: Reality

Joseph treated Elle's wounds and explained that a blade runner was someone who retired replicants. He tried to talk her out of going after Dr. M, the last hunter, and refused to help her. Alani Davis then came to his apartment after spotting his name in the report from the raid, and Elle hid in the next room. She knew him as Officer Joseph, badge B-4-63-6-7, a blade runner who had once held the record for retirements. She asked what Black Lotus wanted and what the police were facing, but Joseph claimed to be a local junk dealer and told her nothing. By then Elle had slipped out through a window.

At Wallace Tower, Wallace Jr. complained that he had been locked out of his lab. His father told him that the company was selling off the old Tyrell Corporation assets, including the replicant program, because one of his son's replicants had committed four murders, the police chief among them. Wallace Sr. said that his son had promised him obedient, disposable labor and had instead kept making the replicants more human. Wallace Jr. insisted that his replicants were flawless and told his father not to strain his heart.

Elle tricked a receptionist into giving her the address of Dr. Murphy, the man the hunters called Dr. M, and broke into his laboratory at Victory and Sepulveda. M stunned her and strapped her into a memory pod. With his assistant Goodman, he extracted her memories to find out why his prototype had gone wrong. M had given her more happy memories than an average human, as a cushion, hoping to prove that replicants would stay submissive even under the stress of the Doll Hunt. The desert memory was real.

M found memories that he had not made, including a perfectly sharp image of one specific place, and Goodman judged that the pool memory did not look artificial. Someone highly skilled had added to her mind after M finished. Elle broke free, and M shot Goodman in the shoulder while firing at her. With her blade at his throat, Dr. M told her that Niander Wallace Sr. had organized the Doll Hunt and that the Wallace Corporation had supplied the replicants to test obedient new models. Elle cut him down. Goodman told her that her memories were artificial but still hers, and that the pool memory was real.

Episode 8: The Davis Report

Investigator Alan Chen interviewed Alani Davis for the civilian police oversight commission, because she had been close to both the Bannister and Grant killings. Davis had already sent her report up the chain, claiming that the two murders were connected and that a replicant called Black Lotus was responsible. She described her first sight of the suspect outside the boxing club, the crushed windpipe that showed replicant strength, and the Silver Lake gang members who had watched the same woman beat their crew and kill their leader.

Chen doubted the testimony of a street gang. Davis explained that Chief Grant had dismissed her theory and taken her off the case, and that she had washed out of the blade runner program on the first day, like 99.4 percent of candidates, because of her intuition. Chen suggested that she resented Grant and was involved in his death. Davis answered that she had followed Grant home during the manhunt and met Black Lotus face to face, and that records showed Grant had called in a blade runner after telling her there was no replicant.

Davis argued that Black Lotus was nothing like the surviving Nexus-8 models, who kept a low profile, and that replicant production had been banned since 2023, so someone might be making new ones. She had traced Hooper's chartered flight to coordinates in the off-limits Nevada desert and found that the Grants had left on vacation the same day. Chen flew out with her, and they found bodies buried in the sand at the site of the hunt. He called in a dig team and promised to report the discovery to his superiors.

Back at headquarters, Davis was told that the investigation had found her to have delusional tendencies and that she was on leave for at least three months. She went home angry. In a newspaper she found a report that the Wallace Corporation was rumored to be selling the intellectual property of the Tyrell Corporation, and she decided that everything was connected. The rumored sale fit her theory that someone had restarted replicant production, and it pointed at the company that owned the old replicant designs. Davis resolved to find Black Lotus herself.

Episode 9: Free Will

Elle told Joseph that she meant to kill Wallace Sr., because the Doll Hunt had been a test run for making more replicants. Joseph called the plan suicide and urged her to leave Los Angeles, but she was determined to go alone. After she left, he made a secret call and asked whether she would be free once it was done. Elle got into Wallace Tower hidden aboard a freight truck, took out two guards, and shot out the camera in freight elevator 44, which drew the attention of tower security.

The broken camera led security chief Hignight to lock every door and elevator, sealing Wallace Sr. in his penthouse. Earlier that night the old man had blamed his son for the replicant killings and compared him to Eldon Tyrell, whose creations had killed him. Wallace Jr. answered that replicants were meant to be the next phase of human evolution and that his father had wasted his power by organizing the hunt. He called him a short-sighted deity, like Saturn eating his children, and said goodbye before leaving.

Elle escaped the locked elevator and fought her way through the guards, with Joseph firing on them through a sniper scope from outside the tower. Security tracked her to the aviary, an indoor garden, where Marlowe was waiting because he had guessed she was behind the trouble. Marlowe beat and wounded her and told her that everyone had an expiration date. A shot from Joseph hit him in the shoulder and gave Elle the chance to get away from him and head for the penthouse.

A hand scanner at the penthouse door identified Elle as Niander Wallace Jr., and Wallace Sr. shot her several times as she came in. He called her a defect, said that the desert testing had gone better than he had hoped, and told her that replicants only had the appearance of free will and did not matter. Elle answered that they felt pain as much as any human. She killed him with his own gun. As guards forced the doors, she jumped from the window, and Joseph caught her on his flying motorbike.

Episode 10: Clair De Lune

Back at the apartment, Elle told Joseph that killing the hunters had not removed them from her head. Joseph answered that some memories lingered even in humans, and he told her about his last assignment as a blade runner. Years earlier he had been sent to retire ten replicants and had tracked down the last one, Selene, a singer who performed every night at a bar. Joseph came back to the same seat each night and drank only soda water, and Selene soon guessed that he was a detective.

Selene knew he had come to retire her and did not run. She told him that replicants lived short lives and that she wanted to see what happened next. Joseph could not bring himself to kill her and kept coming back for her performances. His partner, Marlowe, learned that the target had been located a week earlier, saw her on stage, and told Joseph to retire her that night or he would do it himself. He warned that a blade runner caught protecting a replicant would end up in prison.

Selene sang her last number and said goodbye to her audience. Outside the bar, she and Joseph kissed, and then she was shot. Joseph told Elle that he had dreamed about the bar every night since. Elle then returned to her own memory of the pool, where the hooded man who had given her the tattoo asked why she had not found him and suggested that she was the one who had to look. She decided to find him, although she did not know his name and had no picture of him.

Joseph borrowed a memory machine from Doc Badger without explaining what it was for. Elle put on its goggles and concentrated on the man in her memory until the machine produced his face, and she confirmed that it was him. Joseph then called the man, Niander Wallace Jr. Joseph had believed all along that Wallace Jr. wanted him to help Elle, but Wallace Jr. corrected him and said he had hired Joseph to help Wallace Jr. himself. Joseph called him twisted, and Wallace Jr. only asked what would happen next.

Episode 11: All The Best Memories

Joseph told Wallace Jr. that he had done what was asked, but Wallace Jr. ordered him to retire Black Lotus. News broadcasts mourned Wallace Sr. as the man who had solved the food crisis, and his son was named chief executive of the Wallace Corporation. In private, Wallace Jr. said that his father's death left him unshackled and free to dream of a perfect world filled with his own replicants. He also spoke of loose threads in his plans that had to be tied up or cut.

Joseph suggested that Elle have Goodman, the memory maker she had spared, erase her bad memories so that she could leave the city behind. Goodman now worked under guard with several clients funding his research. He explained that replicant memories could be wiped safely, but only all at once, since selective erasing could cause aneurysms and death, and that her personality would remain. Elle feared losing the man in her memory, one of the few that was not a nightmare, but she agreed after Joseph promised to be there when she woke.

Once she was in the pod, Joseph told her the truth. The man in her memory was Niander Wallace Jr., who had created her to kill his father, and Wallace Jr. had hired Joseph to make sure it happened. He apologized and told her it would be better if she forgot him. Joseph then reported to Wallace Jr. that he had retired Black Lotus. Wallace Jr. confirmed Joseph's off-world travel arrangements but did not trust him, and he decided to take Elle off the board himself, as in a game of go.

Joseph called Alani Davis, told her she would find Black Lotus at the laboratory, and asked her to arrest Elle without hurting her and keep her safe. Before the police arrived, Water Lily, a newer replicant sent by Wallace Jr., cut through the laboratory guards with a sword and killed Goodman, who shut down the machine before he died. Joseph went back to his apartment and called Marlowe to talk to him about Black Lotus, and Goodman's guards lay dead in the corridors outside the lab.

Episode 12: Artificial Souls

Elle woke to find Water Lily, a replicant with her own face, calling herself the superior model. Water Lily explained that the previous generation had to die before new, obedient replicants could replace it, and the two fought through the laboratory until LAPD officers burst in and both escaped. In an alley, Alani Davis caught up with Elle and told her she had seen the replicant bodies in the desert. She offered protection if Elle would testify about Wallace, but Elle refused and ran.

Davis called the acting chief to report who was behind the Black Lotus case, but Water Lily stabbed her before she could finish the name. Water Lily reported to Wallace Jr. that the police had interrupted her attack, and he recalled her to the old Tyrell Corporation building, certain that Elle would come to him on her own. Meanwhile, Joseph waited in his apartment, drinking and remembering his first days with Elle and Selene's last song, until his old partner arrived at his door.

Marlowe knew that Joseph had fallen for another replicant and demanded to know where she was hidden. Joseph refused and opened fire, and the gunfight spread from the apartment through the building's atrium and up to the roof. Marlowe said that emotions made a poor blade runner and that Joseph had not been able to handle them in the time of Selene. He told Joseph that replicants had no life and no soul, and Joseph answered that perhaps humans were no different. Badly wounded, Joseph grabbed Marlowe's shotgun on the roof and shot him, and the last blast threw Marlowe through a skylight to the atrium floor.

Elle found Joseph unconscious on the roof and woke him. She had not gone through with the memory wipe, because Goodman had shut down the machine, and she remembered everything, including Joseph's confession. She told him that people faced tragedy and kept going and that she could do the same. Joseph told her that Wallace Jr. believed she was dead and that she could leave the city safely. Elle refused, because as long as Wallace Jr. was alive, neither of them would be safe.

Episode 13: Time To Die

Elle entered the old Tyrell Corporation pyramid and found Wallace Jr. waiting for her in its sanctum. He welcomed her as his angel and told her she was everything he had wanted. He had made her to clear a path for him as an angel of death, and he had spent two years studying the old Tyrell archives. Elle insisted that her memories belonged to her alone. When she tried to strike him, she could not, because her design prevented her from hurting her creator.

Water Lily attacked, and the two replicants fought with swords across the sanctum while Wallace Jr. watched. He spoke of a future in which humanity would die out and his replicants would reproduce and spread across the Earth and then the stars. Meanwhile, Joseph, still badly wounded, entered the replicant production hall beneath the pyramid, where rows of green-lit tanks held new replicants, to plant explosives. He collapsed, and Wallace Jr. took from him what he believed was the detonator.

Elle defeated Water Lily. Wallace Jr. embraced his water lily and praised her loyalty, then called her flawed and killed her with her own sword. He offered Elle a place at his side and her creator's love. Elle told him that she would be the last thing he ever saw and cut across his eyes with her sword, blinding him. She went to Joseph, who apologized for hurting her, and she told him she had only good memories of him. He told her she had a soul and was more human than he was, and at his request she took the real trigger from his case.

Joseph pushed Elle out of the production hall, sealed himself inside, and set off the explosives, destroying the hall and dying in the blast. One month later, Alani Davis returned to the LAPD in a wheelchair after being shot and stabbed during her suspension. A blind Wallace Jr. told his board that he remained in charge despite his recent health issue. At Joseph's apartment, Doc Badger found Elle's sword, and Elle rode out of Los Angeles into the desert on Joseph's motorbike.

Characters

The series was produced with separate English and Japanese voice casts, announced together in July 2021, and Crunchyroll streamed the Japanese version with English subtitles.

• Elle (English: Jessica Henwick; Japanese: Arisa Shida) was a new-model replicant who woke with no memory and a lotus tattoo, then hunted the people behind the Doll Hunt.
• Joseph (English: Will Yun Lee; Japanese: Shinshu Fuji) was a former blade runner turned junk dealer who helped Elle while secretly working for Wallace Jr., and died destroying the replicant production hall.
• Alani Davis (English: Samira Wiley; Japanese: Takako Honda) was a rookie LAPD officer who tracked the Black Lotus killings back to the Doll Hunt in the Nevada desert.
• Marlowe (English: Josh Duhamel; Japanese: Taiten Kusunoki) was a veteran blade runner who fought Elle twice and was killed by Joseph.
• Niander Wallace Jr. (English: Wes Bentley; Japanese: Takehito Koyasu) was the scientist who built Elle and Water Lily and used Elle to kill his father. Elle blinded him.
• Niander Wallace Sr. (English: Brian Cox; Japanese: Takaya Hashi) was the founder of the Wallace Corporation who organized the Doll Hunt. Elle killed him in his penthouse.
• Doc Badger (English: Barkhad Abdi; Japanese: Takayuki Kinba) was the black-market dealer who sheltered Elle and gave her a sword.
• Earl Grant (English: Stephen Root; Japanese: Hōchū Ōtsuka) was the LAPD chief of police and one of the hunters.
• Josephine Grant (English: Peyton List; Japanese: Yoshiko Sakakibara) was the chief's wife, who hunted beside him and died in their apartment.
• Senator Bannister (English: Gregg Henry; Japanese: Masane Tsukayama) was a politician and hunter, and Elle's first victim.
• Hooper (English: Jason Spisak; Japanese: Kazuki Yao) was a journalist who filmed the Doll Hunt and died when Elle fought back.
• Dr. M (English: Henry Czerny; Japanese: Akio Nojima), whose office was listed as Dr. Murphy's, was the memory designer who wrote Elle's memories and was the friend of Chief Grant who invited the Grants to the hunt.
• Selene (English: Alessia Cara; Japanese: Yoko Honna) was the replicant nightclub singer from Joseph's past.
• Water Lily (English: Jessica Henwick; Japanese: Arisa Shida) was Wallace Jr.'s loyal replicant enforcer and Elle's double.
• Miu (English: Charlet Chung; Japanese: Yurie Kozakai) was a young replicant who befriended Elle in the desert and was killed by Hooper during the Doll Hunt.
• Goodman (English: Ely Henry; Japanese: Minoru Shiraishi) was Dr. M's assistant, who read Elle's memories, was spared by her, and was later killed by Water Lily.
• Alan Chen (English: Greg Chun; Japanese: Yuya Uchida) was the oversight commission investigator who questioned Davis and found the bodies in the Nevada desert with her.
• Hignight (English: Maury Sterling; Japanese: Kazuhiro Nakaya) was the Wallace Corporation security chief who sealed Wallace Sr. in his penthouse during Elle's attack.
• Drove (English: Elias Toufexis; Japanese: Akihiro Sakata) was the Silver Lake gang member who chased Elle and later described her to Davis.
• Marko (English: Ray Chase; Japanese: Chihiro Nishimori) was the vehicle-theft suspect whom Davis chased and arrested at the noodle bar.

Behind The Scenes

Much of the production history of the series is recorded in The Art of Blade Runner: Black Lotus, a 2022 Titan Books art book by the Tokyo-based writer Roland Kelts. Kelts visited the Sola Digital Arts studio during the COVID-19 pandemic and watched creative meetings in which the amount of steam rising off a Los Angeles rooftop was replayed and argued over on large monitors. The book collects concept art, 3D models, storyboards, and interviews with the directors, the writers, the lighting director, the voice director, the audio team at Alcon Sleeping Giant, and three of the lead actors.

Development

According to Alcon Entertainment co-CEO Broderick Johnson, the idea for a Blade Runner anime came from producer Joseph Chou of Sola Digital Arts. When Chou learned that Alcon was making a new film, he lobbied Alcon executive Al Cuenca, who in turn persuaded Johnson and his co-CEO Andrew Kosove. Sola's work on the anime short Black Out 2022 convinced Alcon to back a continuing story. Chou told Kelts that he had been trying to make the project for fifteen years. The series was announced in November 2018 as a co-production of Adult Swim and Crunchyroll with Alcon Television Group.

Shinji Aramaki, the mecha designer and director of Appleseed, co-directed the series with Kenji Kamiyama, who had worked with Sola on its Ghost in the Shell series for Netflix. Shinichirō Watanabe, the director of Black Out 2022, served as creative producer. Kamiyama said that when the offer first came, the team proposed two different directions, and both had a female lead. The directors developed the screenplay with American writers and explained each original character to the Hollywood staff along the way. Kelts described the result as an international team of two Japanese directors, a Korean producer, and voice actors in five countries.

Writing Elle

Head writer Eugene Son described Elle as a blank slate to the audience and to herself, an amnesiac in a world where memories could be made and copied, although she did not even have those. She was the first female lead in a Blade Runner story, and Son said the team wanted female writers to strengthen her point of view. Episodes were credited to Son, Alex de Campi, Brandon Auman, Margaret Dunlap, and Kamiyama. Kamiyama said that Elle was around twenty years old and that the team hoped viewers of that age would form the audience.

The pool room where the hooded man tattooed Elle was designed as an airy hall under a glass dome, with a turquoise pool and a sky that looked slightly artificial, and storyboards in the book show the recurring tattoo memory panel by panel. Lighting director Manuel Alberto Rojas, who lived in Tokyo for sixteen years and worked on Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Transformers: Prime, wanted the opening desert road to have pockets of cloud shadow and drifting sand rather than the dusty haze of Blade Runner 2049. Time limits forced him to keep the clouds static, which gave the scene a subtle time-lapse look.

Voice Cast

Jessica Henwick voiced Elle and her double Water Lily in English, recording in England while voice director Wes Gleason worked from Los Angeles and the directors followed from Japan, sometimes until five in the morning. Will Yun Lee voiced Joseph and said that he liked that the character had always been conceived as Asian. Samira Wiley played Alani Davis, Josh Duhamel played Marlowe, Wes Bentley played Niander Wallace Jr., and Brian Cox played Wallace Sr. Gleason noted that Bentley and Cox never met because of the pandemic, although the team was surprised by their chemistry as father and son.

Barkhad Abdi returned as Doc Badger, the dealer he had played in Blade Runner 2049, seventeen years younger in this story. Kamiyama explained that the team wanted at least one character viewers would remember, to show that the story was ongoing. Singer Alessia Cara voiced Selene and sang her jazz numbers in Episode 10, as well as the opening theme, Feel You Now, part of which she recorded on her phone during the pandemic. Stephen Root voiced Chief Grant, Peyton List voiced Josephine, Gregg Henry voiced Bannister, and Henry Czerny voiced Dr. M.

City And Vehicle Design

The design team modeled Los Angeles on the Shinjuku district of Tokyo, according to Rojas, and made the city dark, rainy, and smoky, full of hovering aircraft and neon. Executive producer Joseph Chou said the team deliberately made some bad Japanese signs, because garbled signage was part of the original film's look. Aramaki said that the main character of Blade Runner was the city, and that the story could grow from there. The White Dragon noodle bar from the 1982 film returned as a busy restaurant rather than a humble street stall.

The vehicles followed the designs of Syd Mead, the visual futurist of the 1982 film. Aramaki said the team tried to stay true to Mead's work, so the cars, buses, and trucks looked retro but futuristic and still ran on wheels. Bannister's spinner limousine was modeled on a Volkswagen Beetle mixed with a pontoon. The Voight-Kampff machine was revised from Mead's original, but the producers treated it as the main mecha of the series, and the directors paid close attention to its boot-up sequence and sound effects. The advertising blimp was drawn to resemble a giant spiny insect.

Wallace And Tyrell Sets

The directors said that the three towers of the Wallace Corporation in Blade Runner 2049 had left a strong impression, and the art team drew Wallace Tower as three black triangular buildings with rooftop atriums and a greenhouse, lit like computer circuitry against the haze. Its atrium was an artificial garden, because natural objects were the ultimate status symbol in that world. The directors also chose black for Wallace Jr. and white for Wallace Sr. to match the stones in the game of go, which father and son played in Episode 2.

The Tyrell Corporation pyramid from the 1982 film returned in several scenes, because Aramaki and Kamiyama, as fans of the movie, loved the building. Its inner sanctum, where Elle confronted Wallace Jr. in the finale, was designed to show both the grandeur and the decay of Eldon Tyrell's former empire. The junkyard rooftop where Joseph took his sniper positions was another homage to the original film, with a cracked skylight, heavy rain, billowing smoke, and a Romanesque facade with a gargoyle.

Joseph And Marlowe

Kamiyama told Kelts that Joseph was written as a Japanese-style hero who kept his motives to himself and acted out of loyalty and self-sacrifice, an idea he linked to the characters Toshiro Mifune played for Akira Kurosawa. Alcon's producers had wanted a more active lead and questioned a scene in which Joseph lied to Elle after the Voight-Kampff test. Kamiyama explained that the lie was a kindness, because by hiding her nature, Joseph shielded her from the hatred that replicants faced. Chou added influences from samurai films, Ken Takakura's yakuza films, and Hong Kong noir.

Marlowe was designed as the opposite, a broad-faced American with a strong build, a long coat, and a big gun. Aramaki said the American staff liked Marlowe more and asked the directors to push the character, while the Japanese team found Joseph's quiet sacrifice more appealing, and Chou called it the cowboy idea. The directors also had dropped plans for Alani Davis, including a marriage to a woman that was heading toward divorce. Aramaki said that the detective Shakima Greggs from The Wire had been a reference for her.

Sound And Music

The score was composed by Michael Hodges and Gerald Trottman at Alcon Sleeping Giant, the team that had also worked on Blade Runner 2049 trailers, Black Out 2022, and video games. Hodges explained that anime gave them no natural street sounds to work with, so the team built the city's rain, crowds, and traffic from scratch. Sound designer Sammy Isaza added details such as clothing folds to fight scenes so that repeated punches would not sound the same, and he designed the blaster sounds. Kelts wrote that the team modernized the music without losing the classic Vangelis score.

For the boxing club sequence in Episode 2, Hodges described a back-and-forth mix between Elle's fight with Bannister in the private box and the replicant boxers in the ring below. The sound cut quickly between the two fights so that viewers could hear each punch, while the music playing in the club and the score ran separately until the climax, where the two merged into one. Lighting on the boxers used a single strong spotlight from above to make them look more threatening and aggressive, according to Rojas.

Release And Reception

Adult Swim aired the first two episodes on its Toonami block at midnight on 14 November 2021, with the English dub airing at the same time in Canada and Crunchyroll streaming the Japanese version with English subtitles. A seven-minute documentary, Benefit or Hazard, had aired a week earlier. The final episode aired on 6 February 2022. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes lists a 71 percent rating based on seven reviews. In September 2022, Adult Swim removed the series from its website after Warner Bros. Discovery wrote it off, the same month the Titan art book was published.

Titan Comics continued the story in two four-issue comic series written by Nancy Collins. Leaving L.A. ran from August to November 2022, and Las Vegas ran from September 2025 to March 2026, following Elle after she left the city. The first series was later collected as a single volume under the same title. The series and the comics share one continuity with the films, the short films, and Prime Video's Blade Runner 2099. On the Blade Runner timeline, Black Lotus falls in 2032, the year before Annapurna's unreleased Blade Runner 2033: Labyrinth.

Comic Sequels

Black Lotus: Leaving L.A.

Blade Runner Black Lotus: Leaving L.A. was the first Titan Comics continuation, a four-issue series that ran from 10 August to 2 November 2022 under the title Blade Runner: Black Lotus. Nancy A. Collins wrote it, Enid Balam drew it, and Marco Lesko colored it, and Titan collected the issues in February 2023. Set just after the anime, it followed Elle as she fled Los Angeles on a homebuilt spinner bike. Bandits stranded her in the desert settlement of Fracktown, where she was caught between the town's boss and a restorationist colony led by Miguel, a former blade runner, while Wallace's people closed in.

Black Lotus: Las Vegas

Blade Runner Black Lotus: Las Vegas was the second four-issue series, again written by Nancy A. Collins, with art by Jesús Hervás and colors by Marco Lesko. The first issue went on sale on 17 September 2025, and the fourth followed on 4 March 2026. Elle travelled to the irradiated ruins of Las Vegas, the city later seen in Blade Runner 2049, where she found a community of abandoned casino hospitality replicants living as ancient Egyptian and Roman royalty. Niander Wallace Jr., still smarting from their last encounter, assembled a seasoned kill team and sent it into the desert to bring her back dead.

Season 2

No second season of Black Lotus was announced. The anime was made as a single thirteen-episode season, and neither Adult Swim nor Crunchyroll announced a renewal after the finale aired on 6 February 2022. In September 2022, Jason DeMarco, the Warner Bros. Discovery executive in charge of action and anime programming, confirmed that the company had written the series off after it was removed from the Adult Swim website. Entertainment sites such as ComingSoon later described a second season as unlikely, noting that the finale did not set up a new storyline. Elle's story continued in print instead, through the two Titan comic series, rather than in new episodes.

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Conclusion

Blade Runner: Black Lotus is the 2021 anime series from Sola Digital Arts, Alcon Television Group, Adult Swim, and Crunchyroll, directed by Shinji Aramaki and Kenji Kamiyama. Across thirteen episodes it followed Elle from her escape from the Doll Hunt to the deaths of the hunters, Wallace Sr., and Joseph in Los Angeles in 2032. It ended with Niander Wallace Jr. blinded but still in charge of his father's company and its new replicants, while Elle left the city on Joseph's motorbike.

External Sources

• Variety: Blade Runner Anime Series Set at Adult Swim, Crunchyroll
• Anime News Network: Black Lotus Reveals English and Japanese Casts
• Anime News Network: Black Lotus Premiere Date
• Rotten Tomatoes: Blade Runner: Black Lotus Season 1
• Anime News Network: Adult Swim Stops Streaming Black Lotus

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Tag Categories: Blade Runner Tv Series | Blade Runner Lore