Okay, nerds. I've got the results
to your Voight-Kampff test right here, and I'm Doctor Jordan
Breeding aka Officer J, and I'm a little worried about your diet. Gross. Anyway you're participating
in another episode of Your Brain On Cracked the show where a bloodblack nothingness
began to spin... A system of cells interlinked
within cells interlinked within cells interlinked within one
stem... And dreadfully distinct
against the dark, a tall white fountain played. Have you ever been in an
institution? Cells. Cells. Do they keep you in a cell? Cells. Cells. When you're not performing your
duties do they keep you in a little box? Cells. Cells. Interlinked. Interlinked. We're done... Phew... now that that's over... Today, I diagnose! Through two Running Blade movies,
we still don’t definitively know if Rick Deckard is a human or a robot
Replicant. The debate has raged for
longer than I’ve been alive, and the most popular internet theory
seems to be that Deckard's roguish good looks are, in fact,
artificially built in a lab somewhere. As proof, endless
articles and videos point to small moments like Deckard’s eyes
flashing, or that origami unicorn scene, or director Ridley Scott
flat-out “revealing” Deckard is a Replicant like some sort of anti-Christopher
Nolan hack. But Scott is not only wrong about
his own character, he’s retroactively made his film—and
indeed the entire series—worse. But
good news, androids are among my many, many actual doctor
specializations, and I’ve decided to use my considerable knowledge to
save Blade Runner for all of us. You’re welcome. I accept cash. When we first meet Deckard, he’s
divorced, his dad is dead, and he’s retired from blade running because
he found the Nexus-3 Replicants to be "too smooth, too human" and he
didn't enjoy murdering creatures so alive and so… velvety? Already, we’ve got a huge problem. If Deckard is a Replicant built
solely to kill other Replicants, why was he allowed to quit his job? At the beginning of Blade Runner,
he’s dragged out of retirement to hunt down Nexus-6s meaning he's
been retired for three generations of robots, but Replicants are
illegal on Earth. Even if the
government originally made an exception for Deckard, surely that
would be rescinded as soon as Deckard retired, right? The only
reason they'd let him stay would be if he's single-handedly keeping
their scotch and noodle industries afloat. But, okay, so he un-retires and
becomes barely legal once again, and Deckard is sent to Tyrell
Corporation to unknowingly test whether or not their hot, new
Nexus-7 Replicant Prototype, Rachael, could pass a Turing test. In this universe, that means
passing a Voight-Kampff test which measures a subject’s empathy. Whereas humans feel bad watching a turtle
slowly cook to death in the desert, Replicants really don’t
mind. Although to be fair this
could be just because robots aren't allowed to watch TMNT. But even in a crazy scenario like
the movie Ex Machina where the true test is whether Deckard would fall
in love with what he knows is a robot—and thereby prove its
humanness—it still makes no freaking sense to assess the
humanity of a robot with how human they seem… to another robot. Even
Ex Machina uses a human tester. A
robot proves essentially nothing, and either way all the test really
achieves is confusing Deckard and causing him to steal their only
Nexus-7 prototype and… uh… violating it. Maybe now I’m hoping Deckard is a
robot, because it'd be pretty messed up for a human to do that. Fast forward 30 years, and Deckard
is very clearly still alive and deliciously aged. Except, even the
most advanced Replicants in 2019 only had four-year lifespans. At
the end of Blade Runner, Deckard tells us via voice-over that he
thinks Rachel is special and has an extended lifespan, but it’s never
proven, because Rachael dies in childbirth only two years after
Blade Runner—meaning either way she was likely still within that
original four year cycle. Alright, let's get super nerdy on
some robot shit. Given what we know
about Replicant generations, it wouldn’t make sense to give Rachael an extended
lifespan. Nexus-7s like
Rachael were given implanted memories to solve how Nexus-6s
never lived long enough to accumulate enough experiences and
memories to form an identity and become emotionally stable. Thanks to her “memories” Rachael
possesses a sense of self right off the assembly line. The generation
after Rachael’s, Nexus-8s like Drax, don’t appear to have memory
implants, because they're given full lifetimes to develop memories
and identities more or less naturally. Wallace, for his part,
reintroduces implanted memories in Nexus-9s like Officer K
specifically to make them more compliant. There’s no generation of Tyrell-era
Replicant Deckard could be that would logically make sense. If he’s
a 7 or earlier, he couldn’t live that long, and 8s weren’t even out
yet. And even if he was magically a
7 with a long lifespan, he’d be only the second ever created which
makes Rachael's Turing test even more pointless. That’s like doing a
Soda Taste Test but everybody's drinking Mellow Yellow. Sure it's
fun, but what are we really gaining besides Type-II diabetes? Even super-blind-super-genius
Wallace doesn’t think Deckard is a Replicant. After Wallace captures
Deckard, he causes Deckard to doubt his humanity for fun, but
ultimately Wallace tries to gain information by simple coercion. If
Deckard was a Replicant, Wallace would open him up and poke around until he
discovered what was special about Deckard’s penis
design that allowed him to procreate with Rachael. But if
Deckard’s the owner of a normal, boring human dong, there’s nothing
Decakard offers Wallace besides potentially the locations of
Deckard’s daughter or the Replicant resistance. What Wallace needs is
either the miracle Replicant who gave birth or the miracle Replicant
who was born. Deckard’s just the
useless human idiot who banged a magical robot. But what about that danged origami
unicorn? The gist of the scene is
Deckard dreams about unicorns, and the next day Gaff (another Blade
Runner who is presumably human) leaves a little origami unicorn
outside Deckard’s door. The
implication is Gaff must know about Deckard’s dreams because Deckard is
a Replicant with implanted memories Gaff has accessed—just like how
Officer K’s memories aren’t his own in 2049 and therefore it’s not his
fault if he sometimes daydreams about spreading Princess Buttercup
over a bed of Maruchan. Except, again, the only Replicant
ever given implanted memories by Tyrell are the Nexus-7s that never
made it past the prototype stage. Even if Deckard does have implanted
memories for some completely unexplained, plot-breaking reason,
why would those memories be of being a divorced, former Blade Runner, who
doesn’t want to kill robots? That’s the most unhelpful
backstory since learning the shared name of Batman and Superman’s moms. Deckard's origin story should be
“Replicants murdered my wife. I
hate Replicants. I will now kill
Replicants. Quick, show me a
Replicant so that I may kill it.” Deckard’s memories actually make
him less stable and presumably worse at his job. Either Tyrell has
no idea what constitutes a positive or constructive backstory, or they
somehow thought moral conflict would make Deckard better at
remorseless murder, which I haven’t found to be true in my career. Also, by the time of the origami
unicorn, Deckard has already learned about implanted memories,
and explains to Rachael how her memories are false and adapted from
Tyrell’s niece. It’s entirely
plausible when Deckard dreams about the unicorn, he’s just dreaming
about something he’d seen earlier in the day I mean, how did Gaff learn about
the unicorn? Presumably the two of
them learned about these implanted memories at the same time when
visiting Tyrell’s headquarters. Neither of them had any prior
reason to learn what is essentially a trade secret before that visit. Gaff could just be making a joke
about that funny unicorn memory he and Deckard saw yesterday. And even if none of that convinces
you, remember the unicorn scene is only snuck into the Director’s Cut
by Scott well after the initial release. The scene isn’t even in
the original screenplay. If anything, that scene hints humans and robots are just more similar than we know but again it goes against a
sensible plot to have Deckard explicitly confirmed as a Replicant just because
Scott decided sci-fi movies need a certain amount of
twists to be taken seriously. Literally, nobody agrees with Ridley Scott. I
don’t mean your pot-head college roommate, I mean Harrison Ford
played the character as human, the original screenwriters like Fancher
claim Deckard’s written as human, and how in the freaking book the
whole thing is based on Deckard is explicitly human. Most of the
people who worked on the film agreed the story needs a “human
center.” Because here’s the thing,
without Deckard, the list of important human characters is
incredibly short. It’s basically
just Tyrell, Wallace, Gaff, and Princess Buttercup. That’s it. Everybody else like Rachael, K,
Ana, Joi, Luv, Sapper, Mariette, Leon, Zhora, Roy, and Priss are
artificial. If the most important
human character is secretly a robot, Blade Runner devolves into
some crappy filler episode of Westworld where the twist every
couple of scenes is surprise, yet another character is actually a
robot who DOUBLE SURPRISE looks pretty good naked. If Deckard isn’t human, then how
can the audience really assess questions about what defines
humanity? That’s like asking, “What is being a professional
football player all about?” in a movie
exclusively starring Philadelphia Eagles fans beating each other to
death with battery socks. This is what makes the novella Do
Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? so fascinating and comparatively
clear. The issue isn’t so much
whether or not the Voight-Kampff test can detect a robot, but
whether it’s too good and might spit out false positives for actual
humans with a lower-than-normal amount of empathy. Deckard is
clearly human, but because of the test, he struggles with where the
line is between robot and human— especially when it comes to people
with mental or emotional issues. This mirrors some of the best
themes presented by the movies. Deckard appears to fall in love
with Rachael, but can it be true love if she’s not human? Does his
love for her make her human somehow? Or is what Deckard does
more akin to sleeping with a body pillow? 2049 attacks this question
from an alternate angle. K and Joi
love each other, but neither are human. Do they share anything real? Does their love provide some sort
of heightened existence? These two
relationships are natural extensions of each other. But if
both K and Deckard’s romances are just robots loving robots... ...then we're
retreading the ground of the first movie. Everybody’s
still drinking Mellow Yellow. If there’s no distinction between
human and robot characters—or if the sneaky director wants to keep
us guessing—then there's no comparisons to be made. But if
Deckard is a human struggling with his own identity amongst eerily human-like
robots, the audience is given an opportunity to compare
similarities and differences between Deckard and Rachael and
Officer K and Joi and consider what makes for “life.” This is what Blade Runner explores. Is our ability to empathize with
turtles and wasps or experience love or make babies enough? Or is
there something even deeper that makes us truly human? That’s so
much more compelling than 5 hours of, “Oooooh, is he, like, a
robot?!” Alright, so it looks like you
passed the part about Mellow Yellow tasting like sugar-spiked piss, the
section on best LGN diet for robots, and agreed that Ridley
Scott's filmography is pretty hit or miss. You can go, but be sure to
see Cathy on your way out for your... bonus.
