YouTube, in its infinite wisdom, decided today to show me a trailer for something called Blade Runner 2099. YouTube is undoubtedly aware that I really liked Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049, so this was a good choice for me, but I immediately had a question.

Is this a real trailer, for a movie which may someday exist, or something generated by artificial intelligence? These days on YouTube it could be either, and the channel name didn’t suggest any connection to a movie studio I’d ever heard of.

So, I googled it, and it turns out that it is real, scheduled, and a television series (not a movie), produced by Amazon Prime. I went to Amazon, and the description (truncated for space) was “Fifty years after the events of Blade Runner 2049, Los Angeles has been reborn, just not by humanity. Cora, a fugitive in a final bid to stop running, takes on one last identity: a Blade Runner. Forced to partner with Olwen, a Replicant days from…”

Oh, boy. Days from retirement? Jeepers, that’s an original idea. (I wasn’t bothered by the trope as much as: This is how you’re selling it? Just putting it out there right up front without giving the film itself a chance to make the cliche work?)

So, I clicked the description, to reveal the rest of the text, and it turned out that the character is “days from dying,” which is at least appropriate for the franchise.

So, maybe I’ll check it out. Here’s the trailer: