Joseph was a legendary Los Angeles blade runner, later a junk dealer, in the anime series Blade Runner: Black Lotus, voiced by Will Yun Lee in English and Shinshu Fuji in Japanese. After he fell in love with a replicant singer named Selene, he retired her under pressure from his partner Marlowe and left the job behind. In October 2032, Doc Badger brought him an amnesiac replicant named Elle and asked him to recover the data on her camera. Joseph helped her hunt the people who had used her as prey, then died detonating charges in a Wallace production hall so that she could escape.
Biography
Earlier Life
Joseph served the Los Angeles police as a blade runner and set a record for the number of replicants he retired, a total later guessed at 100 or even 200. Fellow officers came to treat him as a legend. On one assignment he was told to retire ten targets, and he identified the last of them as Selene, a singer in a local bar. He reported the find to his precinct, then followed her to her dressing room.
Retiring Selene
Selene already knew he was a policeman, and told him she had not run because a replicant's life is short and she wanted to see what would happen next. Joseph went back the next night, and the night after that, and could not bring himself to retire her. Marlowe, a fellow blade runner, was waiting at the bar and saw that Joseph had fallen for her. He told Joseph to finish the job that night, or he would do it himself. After Selene sang a farewell, Joseph met her outside and they kissed. Joseph shot her, and she died in his arms saying she could almost hear something beyond reach.
Meeting Elle
By October 2032 Joseph was living as a junk dealer in a Los Angeles apartment above the shop of Doc Badger. He had already entered into a secret arrangement with Niander Wallace Jr., who wanted a rogue replicant named Elle to assassinate his father. One evening Badger brought Elle upstairs and found Joseph passed out on his couch. Elle woke him by pouring a bottle of liquor over him, and Badger asked him to salvage the data on an encrypted camera she carried. Joseph disliked new gadgets and tried to refuse, then agreed when Badger pressed him, warning that the decryption would take time.
Joseph examined the camera, found the data locked, and started the decryption. While they waited, a news broadcast showed two men leaving a meeting. Doc identified them as Niander Wallace, Sr. and Senator Arthur Bannister, and Elle recognized Bannister from a desert memory. Joseph told her that politicians like Bannister did not meet ordinary people, but she left with the device anyway. He later followed police radio traffic about Bannister's murder, found Elle in an alley, and brought her back with a stun shot. At the apartment he offered her a drink and said it had not tasted right since the Blackout of 2022.
The Voight-Kampff Test
Elle asked what a replicant was, because Bannister had told her she was one. Joseph explained that a corporation had made artificial people twenty years earlier, then checked her eye for the serial number carried by Nexus-8 and later replicant models and found none. He told her she was not a replicant, and that a Nexus-6 would already have died of old age. He then ran a Voight-Kampff test, asking about a mother who did not love her child and a kitten left beside a dumpster, then whether she remembered being in love. Elle described a man who had given her a black lotus tattoo by a pool.
Joseph ended the test and told her she was a human with amnesia. While he was out, the decryption finished, and the recording showed a desert hunt in which Senator Bannister, the journalist Hooper, Police Chief Earl Grant, and Grant's wife Josephine shot at people who had been hardwired to submit. Elle understood that the prey had been replicants like her, told Joseph she would kill everyone involved, and asked him to help her find them. He warned her that replicant memories never fade and advised her to walk away. Joseph then agreed to help and used an ESPER machine to enhance the hunters' faces.
The Hunt For The Hunters
Chief Earl Grant ordered a city-wide hunt for the killer the department named Black Lotus and sent officers to raid Doc Badger's shop. They found only Joseph, who had stayed behind as bait while Badger printed photographs of the remaining hunters upstairs. Elle reached the Grants' penthouse, and in the struggle Grant's wife Josephine was killed along with the chief. Joseph later found Elle wounded, took her back to the apartment, and treated her injuries, warning her that she could not keep doing this to herself. When she asked what a blade runner was, he told her it was someone who retires replicants and urged her to walk away.
Officer Alani Davis arrived at the apartment the same night, asking about Black Lotus and the sweep that had detained Joseph by mistake. She recognized his name and badge number, B-4-63-6-7, and called him a legend in the blade runner business who had held the record for retirements. Joseph denied it and said he was just a local junk dealer. Davis left her card and asked him to call if anything occurred to him. When Joseph went to look for Elle, she had already gone, having heard enough to know that the man helping her had once been a blade runner.
The Attack On Wallace Tower
Elle later returned and told Joseph she was going to kill Niander Wallace, Sr., because he had organized the Doll Hunt as a test for new replicants. Joseph said it could not be done and told her to forget Wallace and get out of Los Angeles. She said she was not asking for his help and planned to do it herself. During a private call about the plan, Joseph was told that when the work was done, she would be free. He went with her anyway and covered her from the tower with a rifle, later wounding Marlowe in the shoulder when the blade runner caught her in the aviary.
Elle reached the penthouse, where a scanner identified her as Wallace Jr., and she killed Wallace Sr. with his own gun. As security forced the doors, she jumped from the window, and Joseph caught her on his flying motorbike. Back at the apartment she could not stop the hunt from replaying in her head. Joseph told her that even human memories sometimes linger, then, over a drink, told her about Selene and the bar he still saw every night.
The Arrangement Revealed
After hearing the story of Selene, Elle decided she needed to find the man from her pool memory. Joseph borrowed a memory machine from Doc Badger's shop in the middle of the night and used it to draw a sketch of the face in her mind. The finished drawing was Niander Wallace Jr. Joseph called him, saying that all this time he had thought Wallace wanted him to help her. Wallace told him the truth, that he had hired Joseph to help himself, not her, and later ordered Joseph to retire Black Lotus.
Joseph suggested that Elle have the memory maker Goodman erase her bad memories so she could leave the city. Goodman warned that replicant memories could be wiped only all at once. Elle agreed once Joseph promised to be there when she woke. While she lay in the pod, Joseph confessed that Wallace Jr. had created her to kill his father and had hired Joseph to make sure it happened. He then told Wallace he had retired Black Lotus, and called Officer Davis to take her into protective custody. Wallace did not trust him, said his Off-world arrangements were complete, and sent Water Lily to finish the job.
The Fight With Marlowe
Water Lily killed Goodman and cut the memory wipe short, and Elle escaped before the police arrived. Marlowe came to Joseph's apartment, saying Joseph had found a new replicant to protect, and demanded to know where she was. Joseph opened fire, and the fight moved from the apartment into the building's atrium and up to the roof. Marlowe told him that emotions made a poor blade runner, and that he had not been able to handle the job then or now. Joseph answered that Marlowe was more machine than the replicants, and that a man who could not love anything was no better than they were.
On the roof the two men kept firing until Joseph was hit and dragged himself to the edge. He hid, ambushed Marlowe, took Marlowe's shotgun, and shot him through a skylight into the atrium below. As he lay wounded, an Off-world colonies blimp passed over the building, and Joseph imagined himself with Elle in a grassy field. Elle reached him and woke him, and he learned that the memory wipe had not taken. He told her Wallace thought she was dead and that she could leave the city, but she said they would not be safe as long as Wallace lived. They then looked toward the Tyrell Corporation building.
Death At The Production Hall
Joseph went with Elle into the old Tyrell building, where Wallace was waiting with Water Lily. While Elle faced her maker, Joseph reached the replicant manufacture wing with a case of explosives and planted charges on a row of tanks, then collapsed in pain. Wallace found him and talked of a future in which his creations would replace humanity after people were gone, spreading his glory across the earth and then the stars. Joseph pretended to hold the detonator and asked whether Wallace wanted to play God, but Wallace saw through the bluff, took the dummy trigger, and threw it aside.
The fight between Elle and Water Lily spilled into the room, and Wallace stabbed Water Lily before Elle slashed his eyes. Elle went to Joseph, who apologized for the pain he had caused her. She told him that none of that mattered and that all she had were good memories of him. Joseph told her that she had a soul and was more human than he was, then asked her to get the real trigger from the case. As they tried to leave, Joseph pushed her out of the hall, sealed himself inside, and detonated the charges. Joseph died in the explosion, giving his life so that Elle could escape the production hall.
Personality
Joseph kept his motives to himself and often answered with a dry remark, telling Elle that memories were overrated. He drank more than he should, passed out on his couch, and tried to refuse work he did not want, then finished the jobs he took. Fellow officers remembered him as the best of the blade runners, and he spent years trying to leave that record behind. When Marlowe accused him of forming another bond with a replicant, Joseph did not deny it. He lied after the Voight-Kampff test and told Elle she was human, then later confessed that he had been a replicant killer all along.
Loyalty mattered more to him than self-preservation. He covered Elle from the tower, caught her when she jumped, and finally locked himself in with the explosives so that she could live. In the moment before the blast he told her she had a soul, a word Marlowe had said replicants did not possess. The Off-world blimp over the roof filled his last quiet moment with a vision of open grass and sky, a life he had not had with Selene and would not have with her. What he could still give her was a way out, and he took it.
Behind The Scenes
Will Yun Lee voiced Joseph in English, and Shinshu Fuji voiced him in Japanese. Director Kenji Kamiyama said 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 replicants faced. Joseph Chou added influences from samurai films, Ken Takakura's yakuza films, and Hong Kong noir.
Shinji Aramaki designed Joseph's opposite, Marlowe, as 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 series ran for 13 episodes on Adult Swim and Crunchyroll from November 2021 to February 2022. Joseph appears only in that series, though Elle later collected her sword from his apartment and left Los Angeles on his bike in the comics that followed.
Famous Quotes
- "Memories are overrated. If you lost yours, quit while you're ahead."
- "I always finish a job."
- "Feelings can tell more than memories. They're deeper."
- "I'm just a local junk dealer."
- "Maybe we're no different. But we just keep hoping."
- "You have a soul. You're more human than I am."
- "So you wanna play God?"
Conclusion
Joseph spent his last years trying to leave the blade runner record behind and still could not stay away from a replicant who needed help. He guided Elle through Los Angeles, hid the truth of her making until it was too late to do it cleanly, and then told her everything in the only way he could, by getting her out of the hall and staying behind. The charges that destroyed the production tanks also ended the life of the man who had once held the record for retiring replicants. Elle left the city on his bike with the memory of him intact.
Appearances
- Blade Runner: Black Lotus (2021-2022)
External Sources
Tag Categories: Blade Runner Lore | Blade Runner Characters | Blade Runner Detectives
