Genreless · Darker Hue Studios

802 Blade Runner 2049

·1 hr 49 min·5 clips

A four-hour Blade Runner 2049 cut still left the released film feeling too long.

Chris Spivey and Eddie Webb open on Rachel and a baseline joke. The banter starts right away, with Eddie pausing on a line he meant to say, Chris calling the sheet an elaborate troll, and both of them leaning into the setup instead of reading it straight. The dad jokes keep landing. Chris talks about his daughter wishing he would stop telling jokes, Eddie jokes about the force of her eye-rolls, and the opening drifts into family comedy before the film talk turns serious. Then Blade Runner 2049 takes over. The middle of the conversation stays on replicants, with both hosts saying the movie is trying to make clear that people are still racist against them and that the racism is institutional. The automated tests matter here. They read those tests as abusive tools made specifically for replicants, and that is part of why they keep saying the sequel turns a subtext from the first film into text without really improving on what the first movie did. K becomes the friction point. Chris says the film does not give him enough to care about K's abuse, even while the two of them keep circling the larger enslavement narrative and saying it could support a much longer discussion. The AI character gets the same scrutiny. From the first scene, they see that character as somewhat self-aware, then note that the movie never really addresses that awareness in terms of agency, and by the end they think the film has effectively stripped that agency away. The chemistry note lands too. Chris says the chemistry between K and his wife is fantastic and one of the film's high points, and he calls her wonderful even as the conversation keeps circling back to the movie's bigger structural problems. The sequel baggage keeps stacking up. They keep returning to how this version adds to what the first Blade Runner set up, why that addition changes the argument, and why it still does not make the central move land any cleaner. The end turns into plugs. Chris runs through pugsteady.com, realms of pugmire.com, the Darker Hue Discord, and darkerstudios.com, mentions Gamehole Con, and says he is looking for people to run Haunted West, with a joke about paying a hundred thousand dollars hanging over the ask. Ghost in the Shell comes next. The episode closes by teeing up that future conversation and folding one last allowance joke into the goodbye.

As heard by us

A Blade Runner 2049 discussion that pairs dad jokes with replicant politics.

Chris Spivey and Eddie Webb use Blade Runner 2049 as a clean entry point into replicants, institutional racism, and the film's blunt claim that the abuse is built into the system.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You get a baseline joke, replicant racism, and a conversation that keeps circling Blade Runner 2049's institutional pressure.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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