Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner casts a long shadow. In some ways, literally.

It defined what noir sci-fi would look like for years to come: the rain, the dramatic lighting, the trenchcoats. Denis Villeneuve delivered a worthy sequel in 2017 with Blade Runner 2049, but for some fans nothing will ever touch the original.

Silka Luisa tries not to think about these things. “If I didn’t love Blade Runner this would’ve been way too hard,” the showrunner of Prime Video’s limited series Blade Runner 2099 said Wednesday during the WIRED World Fair.

Luisa’s show differs quite a bit from its forebears. It still has the humanoids known as replicants, but in 2099’s future, they’re the ones calling the shots, giving humans the grunt work they used to do. Set 80 years after Blade Runner and 50 years after 2049, it focuses on a replicant Blade Runner, Olwen (Michelle Yeoh), on the search for rogue agents. Along the way she gets teamed up with Cora, played by Hunter Schafer, a human pretending to be a replicant to survive. (We’d say more but the show doesn’t premiere until November 25, and, you know, spoilers.)

If this vision of dystopia sounds too familiar for comfort, Luisa hears you. When asked about how she chose to tackle the franchise she noted that in the last couple decades “the present caught up to the films” as megacorporations and environmental collapse became realities in ways they weren’t in 1982.

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