Blade Runner Black Out 2022: The Anime Blackout Prequel
Blade Runner Black Out 2022 was an anime short film directed by Shinichiro Watanabe and released in September 2017. It was one of three prequel shorts made for Blade Runner 2049, and it covered the event that later films called the Blackout. Set three years after Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, the short followed two Nexus-8 replicants, the deserter Iggy and Trixie, as they set out to erase the records that let humans hunt their kind. With the help of a human technician named Ren, they set off a nuclear blast above Los Angeles that wiped the city's data and changed the course of the Tyrell Corporation.
Plot
The Nexus-8 Backlash
The short opened in Los Angeles in May 2022, with on-screen text that set up the crisis. As the old Nexus-6 replicants expired in inventory, the Tyrell Corporation pushed its series 8 into the local and Off-world markets. The Nexus-8 were purpose-built with a natural lifespan, and human supremacy movements soon rose against them. These mobs used the Replicant Registration database to identify replicants and kill them. A shadowed figure dropped a glowing eyeball into the mud, and the short then showed crowds hunting, beating and hanging replicants in the streets while shouting "Hang them all!" and "Down with Nexus!"
Iggy And Trixie
In a rainy alley, a gang of thugs cornered Trixie and scanned her face, which identified her as a Nexus 8. One of them sneered, "This is what you're made for," as they closed in on her. Before they could hurt her, Iggy arrived and beat the men with his bare hands. He then shot one of them and answered the earlier taunt with his own line: "And this is what I was made for." The fight showed the gap between the two replicants, since Trixie could not defend herself while Iggy fought with the skill of a trained soldier.
The Fuel Truck
Later, Iggy drove a huge fuel truck through the city, though the short never showed how he got it. Trixie dropped from a flying spinner onto the moving truck and climbed into the cab, holding a small doll. On the road, Iggy explained the plan: once the launch was triggered, the rest was up to Ren, and the explosion would create an EMP. Their own job was to destroy every magnetic backup in the archives, while other cells hit the remaining data centers. After that, he said, they would be almost human, "all except our perfect right eye."
Gaff And The LAPD
Meanwhile, Gaff, the police detective from the first film, reviewed replicant files with another officer. They knew of five Nexus 8 models that had escaped from Calantha, an Off-world battlefield. When told that deserters were the military's job, Gaff answered, "Not our concern," and crushed his cigarette. Someone in the room grumbled, "Damn skin jobs. Isn't that why we branded them?" Edward James Olmos returned to voice Gaff, and his brief scene tied the short to the 1982 film. He did not take part in the events that followed, and the police never caught up with Iggy.
Two Weeks Earlier
A flashback went back two weeks, to Trixie and Ren watching a virtual fish tank together. When Ren asked if it was real, Trixie said, "Of course not. Just like me." Ren told her that humans were selfish, stupid liars, but that replicants were different, so pure that they never betrayed anyone. Trixie replied with the old Tyrell motto, "More human than human." The scene suggested that the two were close, and it explained why Ren, a human, was willing to risk everything for the replicants' plan.
Ren worked as a technician at a military missile command center, far from the streets of Los Angeles. At his console, Ren helped an officer authorize a scheduled missile launch under protocol X-99K15X. To his superiors, it looked like a routine test, and nothing about Ren's work seemed out of place. That launch was the trigger Iggy had talked about in the truck. Once it began, the replicants had no way to stop or change the plan, and every part of it depended on Ren acting at the right moment.
Iggy's War
In the truck, Iggy remembered the war on Calantha, where he had fought as a soldier. After one battle, he pulled the helmet off a dead enemy and checked the eye, only to find a Nexus serial number. Both sides of the war were replicants, "toy soldiers in a sandbox" fighting for humans. Iggy told Trixie, "We may live longer than old Nexus, but life doesn't mean living. I am for living." When Trixie asked if they would go to heaven if they died, he answered, "No heaven or hell for us. This world is all we've got." He spoke as a Nexus-8 who had already decided what to do with his life.
The Attack On The Archive
At the command center, the missile launched, and Ren overrode the controls and locked out his superiors. He retargeted the missile over Los Angeles, and an officer reported, "We've lost control of the missile, sir." Another officer held a gun to Ren's head, but Ren only smiled and said, "It's too late now." The short did not show what happened to him after that. At the same time, the fuel truck smashed through the gates of a data archive, and armed guards rushed out to stop Iggy and Trixie.
Trixie jumped out of the cab to fight the guards so Iggy could get inside. She leaped high into the air, but the guards shot her in mid-air, and she fell dead onto a glass canopy. Iggy stopped to mourn her before he went on alone. He drove the truck deep into the archive, parked it, and walked away. Behind him, the fuel truck exploded and destroyed the magnetic backups the replicants had come for. Trixie never got the answer she wanted about heaven, and her death made the cost of the plan clear to Iggy.
The Blackout
High above the city, the missile detonated in space. The EMP wave rolled down over Los Angeles, and every machine it touched failed at once. Flying spinners lost power and fell from the sky, and the lights of the city went out block by block until Los Angeles was dark. The electronic records that the human mobs had used to find replicants were gone. For the replicants of 2022, this was the moment their plan succeeded, even though it had cost Trixie her life and put Ren at the mercy of his superiors.
The Aftermath
Closing text explained what the attack had done. The Blackout led to the prohibition of replicant production, and that ban sealed the fate of the Tyrell Corporation. It took more than a decade for the Wallace Corporation to win approval to make a new breed of replicants. The final shot revealed that the shadowed figure from the opening was Iggy, holding his plucked-out right eye beside an empty socket. With no records and no serial number left, he had become almost human, just as he planned. The Blade Runner timeline and the 2049 film built on this history.
Characters
- Iggy Cygnus (voiced by Jovan Jackson) was a Nexus-8 combat replicant who deserted after the war on Calantha, where he found that the enemy soldiers were replicants too. He saved Trixie from the thugs in the alley, drove the fuel truck into the data archive and destroyed its magnetic backups. In the final shot, he held his own plucked-out right eye, the last thing that could mark him as a replicant.
- Trixie (voiced by Luci Christian) was a Nexus-8 replicant who joined Iggy's plan after he rescued her. She carried a small doll, asked Iggy whether replicants went to heaven, and had a close bond with Ren. At the archive, she fought the guards so Iggy could get inside and was shot dead in mid-air.
- Ren (voiced by Bryson Baugus) was a human technician at a military missile command center who believed replicants were purer than humans. He helped authorize the launch, then overrode the controls, locked out his superiors and retargeted the missile over Los Angeles. With a gun held to his head, he smiled and said it was too late.
- Gaff (voiced by Edward James Olmos) was the police detective from the 1982 film. He reviewed the files of five Nexus 8 models that had escaped from Calantha. When told that deserters were the military's job, he said it was not his concern and crushed his cigarette.
Connection To Blade Runner 2049
Black Out 2022 was the first of three prequel shorts released before Blade Runner 2049 opened in October 2017. The other two, 2036: Nexus Dawn and 2048: Nowhere to Run, were live-action shorts directed by Luke Scott. Together they filled the thirty-year gap between the two films. In Blade Runner 2049, the Blackout was the reason so few records of older replicants survived, and Sapper Morton had served at Calantha, the same front Iggy fled. The short's ending also explained how the Wallace Corporation came to own what was left of Tyrell.
Behind The Scenes
Shinichiro Watanabe, the director of Cowboy Bebop, wrote and directed the short, and CygamesPictures handled the animation with Alcon Entertainment. Denis Villeneuve, the director of Blade Runner 2049, gave a short introduction at the start of the official upload. The score came from Flying Lotus, and the end credits song "Almost Human" was written and sung by Lauren Daigle. The short ran about 15 minutes and was released online on 26 September 2017, about ten days before Blade Runner 2049 reached cinemas. Watanabe later returned as a creative producer on Blade Runner: Black Lotus, released in 2021.
Conclusion
Blade Runner Black Out 2022 told a short and bleak story, but it carried a lot of weight for the series. In about 15 minutes, it showed why the replicant ban happened, how the Tyrell Corporation fell, and why the world of 2049 had lost so much of its past. Iggy and Trixie were new characters, yet their attack became one of the key events of the Blade Runner timeline. Watanabe's style, Flying Lotus's music and the brief return of Gaff made it one of the strongest of the three prequel shorts.
Tag Categories: Blade Runner Short Films | Blade Runner Lore