I’d be remiss if I didn’t share Zizek’s astute bit on it:
The image at the top feels right, but does the analysis work? It’s not like the pro-AI messages are subtext, hidden behind a screen: they’re right there on the billboards in front of you.
The ideology hidden behind those Pro-AI ads is something different entirely. (And don’t forget that the glasses are “ideology” too.)
We’ve talked a little bit about these ideologies before, both the Pro-AI camp in our California episode, and the anti-camp that intersects with the Mauve Pill. Looks like we might need to revisit those soon; and bring that episode to you.
We continue with our look at the WYCU, stopping at the Bladerunners, and figuring out how they fit within the timeline? Let’s journey to the dark… future(?) of 2019 and find out what happened on those off-world colonies, as we look at Blade Runner (1982), iRobot (2004), Soldier (1998), and Blade Runner 2049 (2017).
(Also, a spoiler warning: we cover a lot in these 4 films).
We’re doing something different in our (re)watch: we’ve been watching the titles chronologically. Not by release, but by where they fit within the timeline.
Let’s take a look at the future of Los Angeles 27 years from now in 2019. Hmm. Perhaps it’s the recent past. We’re looking for someone or something. More human than human. We’re looking for the baddest blade runner of them all. Welcome to the WYCU, the Weyland Yutani Cinematic Universe. It’s past time to take a look at one of the most enduring science fiction franchises.
Meta franchise and shared cinematic universe. Over the course of these four episodes of the ImplausiPod, we’re watching all 19 movies and one series in the WYCU, but we’re watching them with a twist. We’re not watching them in release order. We’re watching them chronologically as they appear in the timeline in universe, as they appear from historical times to the near and far future.
This is part two where we look at the Blade Runner universe, as well as a few titles that are tangentially connected to both Blade Runner and the WYCU, and try and figure out how it all fits together in this episode of the ImplausiPod.
Welcome to the ImplausiPod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. So if we’ve been exploring the WYCU, the Weyland Yutani Cinematic Universe, what are we doing over in the Blade Runner extended universe? How did we get here If the Weyland Yutani Corp introduced in the first Alien movie in 1979 and an integral part of the series and Retconned as part of the Predator franchise in 1990s, Predator Two isn’t even explicitly mentioned in the two official Blade Runner films.
I think it goes without saying the beyond. Here. Be spoilers. Buckle in. Sometimes these points of connection are needle sharp, just a tiny little fish hook to hang a thread on, but a single thread is all we need. If we look at the original point of connection, the franchisal intersection between the aliens and predator continuity, it was simply the.
Prop of an alien skull included in the set dressing of the spaceship in Predator two. Just something to fill out the background, but there was enough thread on that story hook to tie together two franchises and weave together multiple stories into a fascinating meta franchise. And while the Xenomorph skull serves as a quilting point there to the Predator franchise, we can now link another thread to the alien universe to earth’s distant past back to.
2019, well, maybe not that far distant, but close enough to draw in the Blade Runner franchise, which includes both the original 1982 film as well as 2017s Blade Runner 2049, and a few tangentially related films. Let’s say. Given all that, what exactly are we talking about here when it comes to the Blade Runner films and where would it fit within the timeline of the WICU?
Let’s see how they’re all interlinked. Yes, interlink,
interlink. Blade Runner is perhaps best described as a neo noir proto cyberpunk film set in the Los Angeles of the distant future of 2019. That’s a lot of adjectives to describe what is essentially a sci-fi detective story directed by Ridley Scott off an adaptation of Philip K Dick’s 1968 novel Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep, and a screenplay written by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples.
The movie was originally released in 1982. And subsequently re-released multiple times after in slightly different versions, though we’ll get to more on that later. Starring Harrison Ford, who was well on his way to becoming a household name after the first two Star Wars picks, as well as Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Darrell Hanna, and her brother Larry, and Edward James Almos in his pre-Adama phase.
Blade Runner is a story of a near future earth that has developed some artificial persons called Replicants and uses them as slave labor in hazardous locations like off world colonies. Several of them escape and make their way back to earth where they blend in and try and get more life. When a police detective is wounded, while interviewing one, a retired officer named Deckard is brought back to track down the remaining replicants.
So I guess we could say it’s really a story about immigration. Current events, so to speak. I’ll leave it to the lister’s imagination, what that makes. Deckard. The replicants are bio-engineered, but with a fatal flaw that they only have four year lifespan, so they set to work hunting down a means to extend this, we get dueling detectives as both Deckard and the replicants are chasing different targets through the cyberpunk city of a future Los Angeles.
The street level adventure takes place in and around the vendors, merchants, shops, and patrons of the near future that Just passed. Deckard follows the official channels and meets with the manufacturer of the Replicants, the Tyrell Corporation, and ends up talking with the founder, Eldon Tyrell. This takes place sometime after he had been a mentor to Peter Weyland, but we’ll have to talk about that in a later episode.
Though it does look like there’s a strong thread tied to that hook, Deckard tests, a young woman named Rachel, who he finds it very difficult to determine is actually a replicant due to Tyrell implanting memories in her so that her reactions are more genuine. They meet a bit later after a nightclub visit and interview goes poorly.
We also soon meet Roy Batty, the leader of the Nexus six, who pursues his own investigation on the street and connects with another Nexus six named Pris, who has ingratiated herself with one of Tyrell’s chief engineers. Sebastian, though he doesn’t have his brothers, Darrell and Darrell living with him,
Unless they’re actually puppets. Batty gets Sebastian to take him to Tyrell, where he literally meets his maker and is informed that unfortunately, any attempt to extend his four year lifespan would result in catastrophic mutations and or painful death. Given this news, I think he takes it rather well.
Deckard catches up to Batty back at Sebastian’s recently vacated home apartment complex and attempts to complete his assignment. He’s nearly slain by Pris, but turns the tables and then engages in a wall smashing fight, ending on the rainy rooftop, one of the all time great soliloquy in cinema. It is really a great one.
I’d like to read the quote in full quote. I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watch sea beams glitter in the dark near the Atan Hauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die. End quote. I know I don’t even do it justice, but that’s just epic.
Blade Runner is ultimately a story about humanity, about what it is that makes us human, about what we do with more life we have and how it is finite and precious. What would happen if you come face to face with your maker and learn that you are the way you are due to decisions made by a company? Would you react any differently?
There are questions we’d each have to ask ourselves when it comes to Blade Runner, the movie. A fun thing for me personally was that I quote unquote saw the movie shortly after release, but didn’t actually watch the movie until around three years later, when I was in my teens. I picked up the single issue, Marvel Comics adaptation of the movie that was released around the same time in
1982 if what is left of the search on the internet is still to be believed. And I read the heck outta that, just like any kid. Blade Runner is a seminal work in cyberpunk cinema it defines so much of the Neo Noire feel that many of the works in the genre emulated in the much the same way that the movie Tron from the same year defines so much about cyberspace.
We talked about Tron recently in a episode, if you want to track that down. So. Well, it might not be an influential work in something like the Appendix W on War Hammer 40 K. Aside from the Tyrell archeology showing up in things like the hive planets of Necromunda. Blade Runner is most definitely an influence on Appendix C or the cyber pedia or cyberpunk bookshelf or whatever we end up calling it.
Much like other works we’ve talked about. Both in the WYCU and the Appendix W. There’s a lot of ancillary tech in the Blade Runner universe, throwaway shots and effects that have as much or more impact than the tech. The movie is ostensibly about in honor of how much there is here in this two hour movie.
Let’s run through some of them. First off, the spinners, the iconic flying cars. Some days it feels like they’re the most fanciful piece of tech in the flick. And then the next day you see a video of someone modifying a drone for single person carrying capacity, and maybe you feel like they’re right around the corner.
Even the ground-based cars in Blade Runner had a near future vibe over-engineered and heavy and well driving on the heavily trucked streets of a modern city. You wouldn’t be shocked to see something right over a blade under there too. The digital image processor the Deckard uses to hunt for clues seems to be beyond us, but the hyper scaled enhancement of modern photo software isn’t that far off.
The cyber eyes seem to be inching closer to reality too, but these are closer to genetically designed than constructed the way we think about it. They have more in common with the bio-engineered animals. Even those seem to be more likely ever since Dolly was cloned and with de-extinction programs like that of the group working on the woolly mammoth fitting right in. The voight-kampff test used by Decker to test Rachel.
Basically an embodied turning test made real. Seems like we’ll need one right around the corner as well. AI detectors built into our desktops and, uh, phones at every moment. And the vast building of the Tyrell Corporation shows up later in cyberpunk fiction and gaming as an arcology, a massive self-contained building, housing, people, offices, factories, and often food production, retail and entertainment.
We don’t have them here really, but. There are some proposals and we might see them in our near future. The giant video to billboards adorning the sides of skyscrapers have finally become a reality. Thanks to cheap LEDs powering everything from Times Square, the sphere in Las Vegas and Shinkasen in Tokyo.
Even the all around hairdryer thing that Zhora uses can be found online for purchase, though it hasn’t become quite as institutionalized as we saw there. One of the things that may have contributed to the amount of ancillary tech that we see is that often it is actually just that tech devices things, not just software on a screen, but the imaginative ways of thinking about our electronic interactions within a near future material world.
The others that the movie has had one of the longest Timeframes for its influence to be felt and that tech to be developed. It’s a lot easier for throwaway tech to show up in the real world if you have a 40 plus year development cycle. Returning to the film, as we alluded to earlier, there are several different versions of the Blade Runner movie in existence.
The original theatrical cut, a director’s cut released at the start of the home video era, and an ultimate cut, which came out. The main difference is the removal of Deckard’s narration, which is a studio mandated edition before the movie was sent to theaters and put in there against Ridley Scott’s wishes.
There’s also an added scene with Deckard and Rachel making their way to the countryside, again, narrated by voiceover. The director’s cut makes it more ambiguous That Decker himself may be a replicant, but for me, I think the theatrical version was burned into my brain at a young age, and that it seems normal to me, but the director’s cut is an enjoyable watch as well, and not at all hard to follow without the narration.
Perhaps. We as audiences have gotten a little bit more savvy to sci-fi themes and tropes in the decades since the release of the film. It might be hard to prove, but one of the things that the various reissues and adaptations did was keep the single film franchise available and accessible for new audiences to find, whether it was from comic books like the one I read, or from the New Cuts, or for it always being available early on in new media cycles, which may be.
Aprocryphal, of course, but I recall it being available on DVD earlier than a lot of the other 20-year-old titles. There’s always been a version of Blade Runner available, and the audience interest has driven a growth in transmedia storytelling in much the same way that we’ve seen before, both within the WYCU as.
With the Predator titles and outside with Tron and other titles as well. Blade Runner made the leap quite well. The video games with the number of games set within the universe, tasking you with using your detective skills to solve them. Much of the WYCU is driven by those transmedia connections, which sometimes fill in the gaps between the films and sometimes expand the scopes of the stories being told.
But beyond those transmedia connections, here’s where it gets wild with how the Blade Runner franchise connects to the larger WYCU. Blade Runner is the first in the Blade Runner franchise Natch and the ninth movie overall in the expanded continuity. Even though we covered predator badlands in the previous podcast episode, we’re not quite sure where that one pops up.
It is definitely after this, we’ve got a definitive connection and interlink.
Interlink. We jumped forward from 2019 to 2035 where Chicago seems to be somehow cleaner and less rainy than la, but still kind of a mess. After a top scientist takes the express exit from a high story corner office, detective Spooner is brought in to investigate the potential homicide by request from the deceased, despite it being ruled to suicide.
Impressive. Like I said, top science. The investigation points towards one of the latest model robots as a suspect, despite them having been installed with the three laws of robotics at the factory. We’ll put a pin in those laws for a second and get back to them. Spooner is a cyborg, built stronger, better, and faster after a near fatal accidental run-in with a robot that led to the death of a young girl.
So he’s got some robo beef and doesn’t believe the marketing hype is a new line of robots is being rolled out across the country. This soon leads to an all out war against the robots, as the central AI that connects to all of them is using the bots to take control of humanity and stop the self-destructive course they’re on.
I mean. The AI isn’t necessarily wrong here, to be perfectly honest. Like the saying goes, every good villain should kind of have a point. Spooner and some others able to fight through the AI controlled robot hive mind to the central core inject it with some Nanite goop that was all the rage back in the 1990s
Comic books, which immediately ends the control of all the robots who are then decommissioned. It’s here where our diegetic interlink appears: a, weyland yutAni logo was stenciled on a case. iRobot is a 2004 film starring Will Smith. That is loosely and I mean very loosely based on the 1950 novel by Isaac Asimov.
That is to say it’s Asimov flavored in the same way that naturally flavored orange water may have passed within a few yards of an orange at some point. It’s Naturopathic Asimov is what I’m saying. Directed by Alex Poya. Off a screenplay ostensibly by Jeff Vinter and Akiva Goldsman. The movie also stars, Bridget Moynihan, Alan Tudyk, Chi McBride, and a Returning Nowhere Man is the CEO of the corporation.
We’re including iRobot in the chronology because of that Diegetic interlink that we just mentioned. Though it’s a singleton and we’re not included it in the Blade Runner franchise, it’s just slots in here during our chronological rewatch sitting as the 10th movie overall in the WYCU.
I’ll admit, I came to see iRobot late as I didn’t get a chance to watch it in the theaters and ended up seeing it on DVD. I was getting a better sense of movies based on the trailers, and this one didn’t really appeal to me despite the subject matter and My having read the Asimov novel when I was young and impressionable. Of course, one of the big takeaways from Asimov’s writing was the three laws of robotics, A set of rules that were supposedly hardwired in the positronic brains of the robots.
They are as follows. One, a robot may not injure a human being or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Two. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders with conflict with the first law. And three, a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with first or second law.
This gives us a framework for the robots to act in and functions as a plot device for stories to be based off of. Within Asimov’s works, the laws are also pretty sticky Memes and variations of them show up in stories by other sci-fi authors as well. The laws have been tweaked a bit, and a zero-eth law was added later.
The basis of which allowed Viki the AI in the movie to attempt to protect humanity from its own self-destructive tendencies. But we will hold off on this for a bit. I mean, we talk about it when we visit the foundation series sometime in 2026.
Like a lot of the sci-fi of the early two thousands. One of the things the movie does have going forward is the amount of ancillary tech that we see, including badge scanners, funky printouts, and display surfaces and the automobiles.
Often sci-fi vehicles look like something from a designer’s prototype lab, which is funny ’cause it’s true, but here it isn’t just Will Smith’s elite Personal coupe, but also the massive autonomously driven delivery vehicles with rolling slat sides that deliver the robots right to you, like an oversized Necron troop carrier.
Sorry, that last preference might be a bit obscure, but I’ll let you, the listener, bing that up. Most notably, however, among the ancillary tech is US robotics itself. US robots and mechanical men Was the company responsible for building the robots in the original novel by Asimov in line with the Tyrell Corp and Blade Runner, or Weyland Yutani themselves, but one that ended up becoming a real company?
As the firm, US Robotics, the famous makers of early computer modems and networking hardware was named as an homage to the original novel, and now operates under the name USR as a division of a larger corporation. Overall, the hooks and threads here, tying this into the WYCU, are thin and given how the whole larger Asimovian robots and foundation universe connects together.
Perhaps we don’t want to draw too tight of a connection, but what we’re seeing here with the development of both cyborg humans and synthetic forms of life finds us with a degree of consilience and overlap with the other entries, and not just the sequence here, but also the broader WYCU. However, there was more going on in 2035 than we expected.
Interlink.
Interlink
and I say there’s more going on in 2035 because in 2036 the off world colonies are getting a little bit restless, much like they were back in 2019, but we might be getting a bit ahead of ourselves. In 1996, a secret government military program begins training children to become ruthless soldiers, not universal ones, mind you, but close enough.
After countless battles on multiple planets, a new program of genetically engineered soldiers promises troops that are better, stronger, and faster than the ones that came before. After an internal contest. The old models are reduced to KP duty and the defeated Kurt Russell, Todd, 3, 4, 6, 5, is dumped on a trash planet.
Yes. Much like Star Wars planets can only be one thing in this universe too. Turns out there are survivors of a crashed colonist vessel there, and Todd slowly ends up getting accepted by the village. When the genetically engineered soldiers end up at the planet on a recon mission, their commander orders ’em to assault the planet to gain some combat experience, and Todd goes full Rambo on them.
With Rambo mode activated. This isn’t a close contest, obviously, and the MO movie ends with Todd and the surviving colonists and other soldiers making their way to the colonists’ original destination. I don’t mean to gloss over the details of the movie or give it short shrift, but the phrase, it’s not that deep serves us well here.
It is mostly an action movie with little dialogue uttered by the protagonist. Soldier starred Kurt Russell in the lead role and was released in 1998. Directed by Paul Anderson and written by David Webb Peeples. The cast also included Connie Nielsen, Jason Scott Lee, and Gary Busey returning to the WYCU after his gonzo turn in Predator two.
Maybe it was a distant relative though, given the movie is set in 2036, not that distant from 1997 of Predator two. Hmm. Underneath the surface, Soldier asks us similar questions to Blade Runner, wondering what makes us human. With the older model soldiers potentially being replaced by the newer quote unquote model that has been genetically engineered.
This engineering isn’t quite to the level of the replicants in Blade Runner, or at least not explicitly mentioned as such, but it could be, if we look at it ascance, we can see that there might be some overlap. Soldier doesn’t quite give us the level of detail on the genetic engineering going on for us to really make a determination one way or the other.
But that’s just one way to link it back to the WYCU. Soldier was described as existing within the Blade Runner universe by the writer David Webb Peoples a sidequel or spinoff. And aside from the aforementioned spinner on the junk planet, we see that Kurt Russell fought in some of the same battles as Roy Batty.
The TannHauser Gate and such, so that and the existence of the off world colonies themselves seem to be enough to connect them together. Even if the new model army soldiers might not be necessarily replicants, this would also put it second within our micro franchise and 11th within the larger WYCU.
Given the timeframe, it kind of does slot nicely in within the chronology though. We’ll explore that a bit more in depth near the end of this episode. I don’t think soldier really influenced much in terms of Appendix W, though the ridiculously oversized guns and the APCs do seem to draw a direct line between the real world and what we eventually see there, as does the genetically engineered soldiers.
Other than that, we’re not seeing a lot of instances of ancillary tech, either other than some of the weapons tech, and it’s almost kind of low tech in some instances, but it still fits within our timeline where those genetically engineered life forms are getting more prevalent back on earth. This is our last interlink.
Interlink
Looks like a lot has happened in 30 years. We begin with some expository text letting us know that replicants still exist, but the Tyrell Corporation is no more having gone bankrupt after several rebellions, it has been succeeded by the Wallace Corporation, which has kept the Nexus product label for some reason.
Maybe this is like Lenovo buying the ThinkPad rights off of IBM, but you think that after your quote unquote product revolts, a couple times, someone in corporate might have put together a pitch deck for a new name. So maybe not that much has changed. After all, we’re treated to a car flying over a desaturated landscape, past solar power collectors and blasted farmland where hydroponics reign supreme, like we’re passing over the cucumber farms of Medicine Hat.
I’ll admit that might be a niche reference, so you can bing that up yourself. The car lands by a blasted and desiccated tree, and the pilot gets out to meet the farmer whose hands deep in his aquaculture business of algae and mealworms. Turns out he’s an escaped replicant who’s been hiding under the radar and he has soon retired, but not without a wall busting fight worthy of Roy Batty and Deckard from 30 years earlier.
But there’s more to the farm than expected. A LIDAR scan shows a chest that ends up containing human remains, humanoid at least. And this sets off our mystery for our detective, who we learned goes by Kay back at the police station without the escort needed for Deckard, we find out that Kay is a replicant, so nothing left ambiguity there.
Kay is shunned by the other officers and also needs to keep taking quote unquote baseline tests to make sure he is on the straight and narrow. I guess this is how they prevent the replicants from revolting it. Unsure. Kay lives alone in a small apartment with a holo girlfriend named Joy that he is clearly infatuated with.
She’s kinda like the virtual opposite of Robert Ricardo’s Doctor, but more along the lines of Cyborg Betty. So we have a relationship between two post-human characters, a genetically engineered human, and a virtual companion. It’s wild stuff if you think about it, but maybe that’s what it’s all about, post-human relationships, because that’s kind of what the first movie was about too,
when you get right down to it. Kay visits the Wallace Corporation as part of his investigation and we the audience meet with Wallace, the presumably Trillionaire, CEO, and designer of the company making replicants who has cyber eyes and a complete disregard for replicant life and is just as alien and post-human as the replicants and holograms.
Wallace also wants to find the secret for what was in the box, which contained the bones of Rachel from the first movie, who has apparently given birth, which means that Replicants may be able to reproduce. For Wallace, this would mean a massive expansion of his ability to produce colonists and labor for the off world colonies, as he wouldn’t have to continue with the presumably slow process of creating
Full-grown replicants and could just let nature take its course. So much like the first film, we get that duality, that mirrors the structure of the detective looking for something that others want to find for their own ends. This might be a trope that is endemic to detective fiction, to be honest, but I don’t consume or analyze a lot of detective stories.
It’s worth looking into though. Kay’s pursuit leads him to the memory of a specific date, 6 10 21, which would’ve been about two years after the first film, long enough time for the birth of a child if it was Rachel’s. This leads him further on the hunt for the mystery through an orphanage and his own memories where he thinks that he might be the actual child.
A memory crafter trapped in an isolation bubble lets him know the memory’s real, though. Real for who is the question. He finds Deckard in the radiated wasteland of Las Vegas, which doesn’t look that different now that the tourists have stopped going. However, they’re both ambushed by Wallace’s Pursuit team who kidnaps Deckard and takes him back to L.A. Wallace offers Deckard a recreated Rachel in exchange for the information, looking as she did 30 years ago.
Except the dev team botches her eye color and Deckard refuses. As he is escorted out. Kay manages to force the spinner he is being transported into the ocean, and a fist fight with the other replicant ensues, with Kay narrowly winning. Kay takes Deckard to meet his and Rachel’s daughter, the memory crafter in the bubble, and then lays down on the steps in the snow in LA
Directed by Denis Villeneuve and released in 2017. Blade Runner 2049 moves the timeline ahead by 30 years. Natch. The screenplay was written by Hampton Fancher and Michael Green and stars Ryan Gosling, as well as Anna D arma, Jared Leto and Harrison Ford and Edward James Olmos in a post Adama appearance.
2049 is the 12th film in the WYCU chronology and the third film in the Blade Runner meta franchise. Though by the time of its release, there were so many transmedia releases, tie in novels, shorts, and other pieces of content that it’s hard to really pin down a number, like a lot of Denis Villenuve movies. I had to watch this at home as I run the risk of passing out halfway through the movie.
It is visually stunning though, and deserves to be seen on the big screen. Much like the first movie, there are a number of interesting ancillary tech pieces that feel like might be decent candidates to see some real world invention, like the personal home holograph companion, along with subscription plan and upgrade packages.
Natch, as well as the holographic costume overlay and the memory sculptor as an Etsy artist, but for a lot of the tech, the movie feels too recent to be to say for sure. While Blade Runner 2049 has strong ties to the original Blade Runner film, it doesn’t really connect out from there to the larger WYCU.
That doesn’t mean it isn’t there as the more advanced models of replicant have more in common with the later synths that appear in Alien Earth and the Aliens franchise, though we’ll get to those connections when we come across them.
Ultimately, there are two questions we have to ask about these films in the franchise. One, does it fit with the technology? And two, does it work within the chronology? I think the answer is yes to both, but with a big asterisk in both cases as well. Tech-wise, the films work. There’s an interesting overlap between the diversity of approaches to transhumanism within the films, whether it is through life extension, artificial life cybernetics, genetic
Modification or psychological training. We see all of these throughout the films, and I believe we’ll see more of these forms of life in the later films as well. So we’ll stay tuned for how they connect in the next episode of the WYCU when we look at Alien Earth. The more challenging connection is the timeline.
Obviously Blade Runner now exists in our past with 2019 in the rear view mirror and the 2035 and 2036 of iRobot and Soldier coming up surprisingly quickly, and while humanoid robots are starting to feel like they’re just around the corner, off world colonies are more than a little way off, despite what some techno optimists might have you believe.
I think the solution here might just be to move the entire mini franchise or a section of the WYCU ahead 30 years, though granted iRobot could stay where it is. This would put Blade Runner, the original Blade Runner at 2049 instead of 2019, like the original movie with soldier taking place in 2066 and Blade Runner 2049 in 2079.
This also keeps this entire chain ahead of all the Alien films because the earliest alien film Prometheus is about 2093 in terms of the chronology. So let’s just give it a 30 year time jump, and that’ll get us to the third challenge introduced by the films with the off world colonies of Blade Runner, and Soldier, particularly.
These are also meant to imply extra-solar, not just planets within the solar system, but outside of it. While the Predator films obviously had extraterrestrials capable of interstellar travel visiting Earth on a surprisingly frequent basis, human-driven off world travel doesn’t appear to be in the cards
based on our current understanding of physics. It’s the one big lie behind most science fiction stories that if you get past that or find a way to hand wave it to your satisfaction, well then you have a whole galaxy to explore. But who knows what horrors, lurk in interstellar space. We will step away from the WYCU to visit the Fallout Universe prior to the release of the second season with perhaps a few other holiday stops along the way.
But then we’ll be back to pick up the final two parts of the WYCU early in 2026 with a look at Alien Earth and the Aliens Franchise. I hope you’ll join us for those.
Once again, thank you for joining us on the ImplausiPod. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. You can reach me at Dr implausible at implausipod.com and you can also find the show archives and transcripts of all our previous shows at implausipod.com as well. I’m responsible for all elements of the show, including research, writing, mixing, mastering, and music, and the show is licensed under a Creative Commons 4.0 ShareAlike license.
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Welcome to the Implausipod, where we are looking at one of the more influential franchises in both cyberpunk and science fiction, as we use the recent release of Tron:Ares (2025) to look at the impact of the franchise as a whole – including Tron (1982) and Tron: Legacy (2010) – on the ideas and development of our virtual worlds.
Welcome to the grid player. No, Teddy Long is a guest hosting this week. No one is going one-on-one with the Undertaker. But we are going back to the early history of computing to one of the most famous ways in which it was visualized through to current conceptions of what the interaction between the real and virtual worlds might be like.
Long before the Matrix, a decade before the Metaverse, at a time when cyberspace was still being formed, audiences were introduced to Tron and its quest to understand what it’d be like inside the machine. With the recent release of Tron areas, let’s take a look inside the machine and see what the grid looks like now on this episode of the ImplausiPod.
Welcome to the ImplausiPod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. In 1980, video games were rising in popularity with the Atari VCS selling in the neighborhood of millions per year. And while the standup machines in the arcades weren’t awful per se, the graphics on the home systems were pretty rough.
They didn’t have the capacity for allowing full motion video of animation in any meaningful way. So when a hot media company like Disney wanted to be cool and jump on the trend, the games themselves weren’t the best way to give that authentic Disney experience. Now, this would change in later years, but not for a while yet.
Lucky for them, a creator had been working on a property that might fit the bill. Stephen Lisberger had been inspired by the release of Pong in 1972. And in 1976 opened an animation studio to work on various projects. The story pitch that would become Tron was rejected by much of Hollywood, but Lisberger’s Alice in Wonderland-inspired story resonated with Disney.
The end result of the decision to produce and ultimately release that film ended up introducing an early idea of virtual reality to millions of people far more than were reading the sci-fi novels at the time, and created an enduring legacy, no pun intended, that has inspired countless other creators for over four decades. Let’s take a look at how that all came to be through the various Trons
Tron was released in July of 1982 to a large amount of fanfare, typical of a Disney movie, and it resonated with audiences. It presented a fantastic version of what life would be like inside a computer, and even if not everybody was grabbing a home PC just then. The early video game consoles like the Atari 2600 and Intellevision, and the soon to be released ColecoVision had captured the imagination of consumers and kids everywhere in North America at least.
Just don’t ask about what happened to the consoles in 1983.
As the reviews here on the ImplausiPod are more about impressions, we don’t really wanna spend much time rehashing the plot, but we’ll cover it quickly here for completeness. Flynn is a programmer or software engineer who used to work at a company called Encom, and in the process of hacking into the system ends up getting digitized and transported into the company’s main server within the system called the Grid.
Programs look like human beings and interaction within the system takes place on a symbolic level. Other creatures exist within the grid too, various subprograms and routines and utilities can look like vehicles or other features. Within the virtual environment, Flynn gets conscripted and forced to fight in some gladiatorial contests within the grid, and works alongside some fellow conscripts, one of whom is named Tron.
Lucky for Flynn, he designed some of the games that he was forced to play, so he has got a bit of insider knowledge, if not the cheat codes per se. Not that cheat codes were that big of a thing in 1982, but we’d start seeing more of them soon. He and others break outta the controlled areas of the grid and start finding their way into the underground where they attempt to fight the system.
Literally turns out that the master control program for Encom, the MCP has achieved a limited degree of sentience and is now diverting resources to furthering its own development. This echoes a lot of the current fears We now have about AGI in the media in 2025, and along with Terminator in 1984, and Battlestar Galactica of a few years earlier.
We have a general distrust of AI occurring in popular culture at the time. Of course, we talked a bit about that back in episode 29. Why is it always a war on robots? If you want to go check out that show in the archives, they’re still available for free. But, uh, back in the grid, MCP is talking with a version of Dillinger the corporate exec who stole Flynn’s work and ousted him, doing his bidding as a rather scary Vader esque figure named Sark.
He directs the more militant aspects within the system to hunt Flynn down, but he and Tron are able to eventually defeat MCP and return Flynn to the real world to be reassembled with only a blink of time passing. It created with multiple film techniques, including backlighting, rotoscoping, and using very innovative set design.
Tron is a very interesting film to watch. Even now over 40 years later, the story gets a little slow in spots, and I’ll admit that teenage me kind of falls asleep in the final third where we get a bit heavy on the exposition. Still, it’s an amazing visual trip and continue to influence generations of future creators.
Tron ended up making about $50 million on its $17 million budget. A modest hit at the time, despite some common misconceptions now that it was a flop. The film was lauded for its technical achievements, nominated for Oscars for costume and sound. But the most amazing thing is that it was denied an opportunity to compete for visualist effects Oscar.
The limited computer generated imagery included in the film was considered Cheating. It almost seems laughable now considering how basic the CGI was at the time. And almost every film available uses something similar to that effect. But, uh, after release at the beginning of the home video era, the primary way to continue participating with the Tron universe was to engage with the video games.
The various scenes and mini games within the movie had an enduring appeal, easily translating to the video game arcades. The disc battle got its own standup, but the first Tron standup provided a selection of many games, each of which the player would have to defeat to progress, working through the cycles, tanks, the weird spider level thing, and eventually up to facing MCP in a version of Breakout.
I recall the game being frustrating because of the controls more than the game itself. Struggling with interface issues. Still it had always got a few of my quarters before I went back to playing Galaga and BattleZone for the afternoon.
Audiences re-entered the grid almost 30 years later in 2010, where Tron Legacy reappeared almost from nowhere almost because as a property, it seemed oddly untouched for the twin eras of dot coms and Matrix movies. But between those and the rise of smartphones and social media plans to revisit the franchise finally got underway, and this motion started surprisingly with a large number of players from the original movie still on board.
Steve Lisberger, the script writer and producer of the original came back as producer and Bridges and Boxleitner revise their roles as Flynn and Tron respectively. Filming got underway in 2009 and in late 2010, Disney released a modern version of Tron where the visuals could finally match the creator’s vision, buoyed by the very developments of tech that they inspired three decades prior, and the visuals truly did match.
Though in line with the state of the art of 2010 where we have reached the point with digital production that anything dreamed of can be brought to life on screen through special effects. In the story of Tron legacy, the audience is introduced to Sam Flynn, a young impetuous daredevil and hacker, an heir to the Encom Corporation, occupying a board seat he chafes at.
Flynn the younger visits his father’s old arcade and finds his body digitized in much the same way his father was decades earlier, and soon needs to compete within the the Grid and uncover the larger plot going on. The visuals in the movie are amazing, as CGI has massively improved in the intervening decades,
so the film didn’t need to engage in all the filmic techniques or animation of the original in order to bring the vision to screen. There’s some places where the CGI falters, like in the de-aging and face-mapping of Jeff Bridges onto Clu, but even here it represents a point in time and gave graphics capabilities that link it to the first movie.
And Clu introduces us to one of the more unique ideas in Tron Legacy, that of a digital double, an autonomous version of oneself within cyberspace, or in this case, the Grid. Of course, unlike the digital doubles created by the likes of Facebook and Google, for the purposes of more effective marketing and commodification, Clu has an agenda, wanting to destroy the ISOs, the naturally occurring isomorphic algorithm life forms of the grid.
He has also brought Flynn the younger to the grid so that he can escape to the real world and continue his quest for domination there. Perhaps it’s in the ideas where Tron Legacy falls a bit short, with the war between Clu and the ISOs, these ideas of digital natives different than the way the term is used for Millennials and Gen Z have been around for a while, showing up in mid eighties cyberpunk and ShadowRun source books long before they appeared in the Matrix and elsewhere.
There’s been a long association that creepy pasta exists on the fringes of the frontier and the digital frontier is no different. Tron Legacy is true to the title, repeating many scenes and story beats from the original, albeit in shinier high-definition forms, from the entry into the grid to the game arena, to the light cycles and subsequent, uh, escape into the frontiers of the grid to the sail, ship, escape, and recognizer.
The story beats hold much in common with the original. In addition to the visuals, though, the music is fantastic provided by Daft Punk to great effect. I gave the film a rewatch while working on this episode, as I hadn’t seen it since its release, and I was kind of left flat while watching it. Not 2D Flat, I’m still fully 3D rendered, but you know, I wasn’t as excited by it.
I think perhaps that’s part of the problem with Tron Legacy. It links to the story of the original, but it looks like any number of other sci-fi films of the early 2010s. The iconic elements of Tron still shine through the action in the grid, feels somehow weightless and transitory much like the Sprites themselves.
And in 2025, we returned to the grid once more as Tron Ares was released in early October of that year. With Tron Legacy doing reasonably well in the box office, grossing 409 million on a budget of one 70. It seemed a little odd that it took 15 years to get another sequel released, but there were production issues, which led to a reworking of the franchise, and then external impacts including both COVID and union related job action.
Tron Ares represents a bit of a shift as the software corporations of the earlier films are now in full competition to bring the digital realm into the material world, to merge cyberspace and meatspace, as it were. And much of the film revolves around this while following some of the story beats of the first two flicks.
I recorded some quick thoughts after viewing the film in IMAX, as I was starting to see that the internet film community was telling me it’s a bad movie in ways that I clearly don’t agree with, so let’s talk about what I liked about the film. The graphics were hyper-stylized in a way that felt was an homage to some of the sci-fi of the seventies and eighties and in that way had a much stronger connection to the original Tron film.
A lot of the work in that film used costuming and odd camera angles and set design to imagine the insides of the computer, and this was a return to form. The ladder sequence during Dillinger’s hack was wild to me, a conceptual view of cyberspace agents and IC in choosing countermeasures that felt straight out of a cyberpunk novel in the late eighties or nineties.
It’s hard for me to express how much I love this bit and the style that it had. Similar was the return to the set pieces of the original Tron, which are recognizable and felt, for lack of a better term, low res, despite being rendered on the IMAX screen along with the rest of the movie, simpler, fewer things going on in the background, feeling like an early 3D rendered video game.
As for the tech, it took me a minute to come around as I originally thought the constructs bursting out of the familiar black carbon supports was a little goofy perhaps, but I came to like it, and it definitely had an aesthetic to them. It left a bit to the imagination of what constitutes the objects.
Are they holograms or built out of raw carbon? In other elements, it was left undefined, and that’s okay. Really, we were allowed to hand wave some stuff in a sci-fi to prevent it from bogging down the story. That being said, I found this approach to addressing the question of digital materiality really interesting.
Digital materiality is that point where the virtual crosses over to the real world. If cyberspace happens at the point of connection where a telephone conversation takes place in the wires, then digital materiality is where our 3D construct will cross over into real space or meat space, or objective reality, or however you wanna frame it of the characters.
Athena was very effective in the film. I really liked her as a character, echoing our fears of current real world implementations of AI, taking a command too far. She quotes “by any means necessary” to disastrous consequences for Dillinger. The character of Ares is an AI gaining emotional intelligence, by doing the deep learning on the target of Eve Kim presents a different way.
This EQ was what triggered his malfunction, but also pointed towards an avenue for growth for the AIs. Regarding Ares as a construct in the real world. It’s interesting as he’s clearly quote unquote, not human, despite having a human form, he’s a construct of whatever underlying form that takes that doesn’t just decompose.
We’re not given any indication that it is actually modeled after a human aside from its outward appearances. This provides a nice contrast with the various forms of post humanity seen in the recent Alien Earth Series, for example, where we had synthetic cyborgs and hybrids in various shapes and forms.
Ares represent an AI embodied within a synthetic body, more akin to the synths of Ash, Bishop and Kirsch, but with significantly enhanced capability. Ares in the real world is different in this way than the scanned and reassembled Eve Kim, whose reconstituted body theoretically does not have this problem of permanence.
Though it’s interesting to ask, why not? But one can follow that her rebuilt body is her being reconstructed cell by cell. It’s much like the Teletransportation paradox from philosophy, but also from Star Trek as to whether the original body is destroyed and then rebuilt here. The movie answers it with a clear yes, though with more intervening time in between.
The ending leaves open the possibility for further exploring what it’s like for an AI to experience the world materially in a way that is just hinted at in the postcard sequence from Ares. There’s room for some growth here. And finally, I like how they portray the uses for 3D printing technology with the permanence code enabled, combating climate change, medical advancements, et cetera.
A really hopeful version of the future, and less dystopian than similar films like The Matrix and Terminator. And overall I enjoyed the film. There was no prior knowledge of the franchise that was really necessary, and it seems odd that the most fantastic thing in a movie about AI, virtual reality and transhumanism is that one can get across Vancouver in under 29 minutes.
That’s just the films though. There’s more out there, more transmedia that fills in the storyline, including other video games and animated series and appearances and references in other pop culture. But we’re only digging into the films here on rewatching the movies. The three films done in three different eras with different kinds of technology have shifting takes on what it means to interact with computers despite similar scenes and story beats in all three films.
Difference and repetition, separated by decades. Of the three, I think I enjoyed Legacy the least as it felt of an age embodied within the dotcom and social media era, rather than looking forward with a fantastical view at stuff that does not exist, which both the original with virtual reality, Ares with digital materiality enabled via the permanence tech both did.
Legacy was inward looking, more about what happened within cyberspace, and it turns out that in 2025 that is less interesting than what happens in the real world. The films dealing more with the real world had a bigger impact. And the impact is huge. There’s a meme going around that the Tron movies were always boxed off as bombs, that Disney keeps coming back to it every 20 to 30 years to make fetch happen once again.
But the fact is that the meme just isn’t true. The series has always been a success, albeit a modest one compared to today’s billion dollar blockbusters. As we noted earlier, both the original Tron and Tron legacy profitably exceeded their production budgets and Tron Ares has made about 130 million after a few weeks of release on $180 million production.
So it’s a little bit low right now. These are pre-marketing figures, but it’s far from bombing though. Time will tell on Tron Ares final result, and the franchise has been ever present since its release, occupying space in arcades and on consoles since the 1980s and continue to being referred to in Geek Culture.
It’s inspired generations of computer programmers, graphics designers, and musicians interested in synthesizers, including Daft Punk who performed the soundtrack for the second movie. Will there be more Tron films in the future? Perhaps not. There might not be a fourth, but who knows what the future may hold.
The other question to ask is, does a movie still have the capacity to inspire us? If the monoculture is dead, fractured into thousands of shards, like a derezzing program in Legacy or Aries, then can a film take hold the same way, or does it even have to?
Tron was a modest success, but it found its audience. It became a classic within that niche. Perhaps that’s the real permanence code that we all seek to aspire to, to leave a lasting impact on the world.
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Some quick thoughts after viewing the film in IMAX, as I’m starting to see that the IFC are telling me it’s a bad movie, in ways that I clearly don’t agree with. So let’s talk about what I liked about the film.
The graphics were hyper-stylized, in a way that felt was an homage to some of the sci-fi of the 70s and 80s, and in that way have a much stronger connection to the original Tron film. A lot of the work in that film used costuming and odd camera angles and set design to imagine the insides of the computer, and this was a return to form.
The ladder sequence during Dillinger’s hack was wild to me , a conceptual view of cyberspace, agents, and IC, that felt straight out of a cyberpunk novel in the late 80s or 90s. It’s hard for me to express how much I loved this bit, and the style that it had.
Similar was the return to the set pieces of the original Tron, which were recognizable and felt for lack of a better term “Lo Rez” despite being rendered on the IMAX screen along with the rest of the movie. Simpler, fewer things going on in the background, feeling like an early 3D rendered video game.
As for the tech, it took me a minute to come around, as I originally thoughts the constructs bursting out of the familiar black-carbon “supports” was a little… goofy perhaps, but I came to like it, and it definitely had an aesthetic to them. It left a bit to the imagination of what constitutes the objects – are they holograms, or built out of raw carbon and other elements? It was left undefined, and that’s okay, really. We are allowed to handwave some stuff in our sci-fi to prevent it from bogging down the story.
That being said, I found this approach to addressing the question of digital materiality really interesting. DM is that point where the virtual crosses over to the real world. If cyberspace happens at the point of connection where a telephone conversation takes place in the wires, DM is where our 3D constructs cross over into realspace (or meatspace, or objective reality, however you want to frame it).
Athena was effective in the film – I really liked her as a character – echoing our fears of current real world implementations of AI taking a command too far (“by any means necessary”) to disastrous consequences for Dillinger.
Ares, as an AI gaining emotional intelligence by doing the deep learning on the target of Eve Kim presents a different way. This EQ was what triggered his malfunction, but also pointed towards an avenue for growth for the AIs.
Regarding Ares as a construct in the real world, it’s interesting as he’s clearly Not Human, despite having a human form. He’s a construct , of whatever underlying form that takes, that just doesn’t decompose. We’re not given any indication that he is actually modelled after a human aside from in outward appearances. This provides a nice contrast with the various forms of post-humanity seen in the recent Alien: Earth series, where we had synthetics, cyborgs, and hybrids, in various shapes and forms. Ares represents an AI embodied within a synthetic body, more akin to the synths of Ash, Bishop, and Kirsh, but with significantly enhanced capability.
Ares in the real world is different in this way than the scanned and re-assembled Eve Kim, whose reconstituted body theoretically does not have this problem of permanence (though it’s interesting to ask why not?), but one can follow that her rebuilt body is her being reconstructed cell-by-cell. It’s much like the Teletransportation Paradox, from philosophy but also from Star Trek, as to whether the original body is destroyed and then rebuilt. Here the movie answers it with a clear “yes”, though with more intervening time in between.
The ending leaves open the possibility for further exploring what it is like for an AI to experience the world materially, in a way that is just hinted at in the postcard sequence from Ares. There’s room for some growth here.
Finally, I like how they portrayed the uses for the 3D printing technology with the permanence code enabled. Combating climate change, medical advancements, etc. – a really hopefully version of the future, and less dystopian that similar films like the Matrix and Terminator.
Overall, I enjoyed the film – no prior knowledge of the franchise was really necessary – and it seems odd that the most fantastic thing in a movie about AI, Virtual Reality, and Transhumanism, the most fantastic thing is that one can get across Vancouver in under 29 minutes.
Been thinking about this one for a few days*, so I created a page to collect links to stories about positive use cases for AI. I feel like this will be an evergreen document, and something I can refer back to in the future, as well as send a link to someone who denies the existence of potential positive impacts of AI.
Yes, there are some risks, and there is the potential that some of the stories are simply marketing. Part of the challenge will be sifting the hype-rbole from the actual positive uses. And of course, there are more stories out there than I can ever find, so if you come across this blog post in the future, feel free to send me any examples you find.
*: Maybe more than a few; it has kinda been lingering since I did the AI Reflections episode almost a year ago, last August.
