Warning: SPOILERS ahead for Blade Runner 2049

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Replicants were first introduced to the world with the release of Blade Runner in 1982, and now that Blade Runner 2049 is in theaters, fans of the original movie can see just how much they have evolved since 2019. Replicants don’t contain any circuits or wiring, but instead are biogenetic androids made of entirely organic substances, originally created by the fictional Tyrell Corporation. They look nearly identical to adult humans, with extra features dependent on the model, but are (supposedly) incapable of experiencing emotions. They can only be differentiated from humans with the Voight-Kampff test, in which the suspected replicants are asked a series of questions to provoke an emotional reaction.

The first replicants (also known in derogatory terms as “skin-jobs”) that director Ridley Scott introduced were the Nexus 6 series which benefitted from increased strength, speed, resilience and varying intelligence but were fitted with a safety mechanism that meant they only had a four-year life span. This is so they couldn’t develop an immunity to the Voight-Kampff test by improving their emphatic responses to be more like a human’s. A normal replicant’s genetic status can usually be identified after 20-30 questions. These replicants were used as a form of slave labor on Earth, as well as the off-world colonies located in Planet Earth’s Orbital Space and planets such as Mars and Arcadia 234. However, after a gang of Nexus 6 models caused a bloody mutiny off-world they were banned from Earth.

This is where the blade runners come in, as their job is to kill (“retire”) the rogue replicants still running around on the planet. Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) was one of the best in the business and in Blade Runner he is forced to do one more job after six Nexus 6 replicants kill 23 people off-world and commandeer a space shuttle back to Earth, in order to find a way to extend their lives past the four-year mark. Sadly, they soon find out that any sort of tampering with that aspect of their biogenetic make-up would kill them.

These six were created for various purposes. The leader, Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), had the highest intelligence (Mental-A) and was a self-sufficient combat model used for colonization defence, while Leon Kowalski (Brion James) was Mental-C class and a loader for nuclear fissure material. Pris (Darryl Hannah) was a “pleasure model” for use by the military, while Zhora (Joanna Cassidy) was “trained for an off-world kick murder squad,” and both were classed as Mental-B. The two other replicants were killed before they reached Earth, and the sixth replicant is mysteriously never heard from again.

Though it is never explicitly said in the movie, Ridley Scott has confirmed that Deckard was a replicant. He said in the Channel 4 documentary, On the Edge of Blade Runner, that “Deckard is a Nexus 7, he probably has an unknown life span and therefore is starting to get awfully human.” Screenwriter, Hampton Fancher, said in 1999 that he never wrote the blade runner as a replicant but in later drafts he toyed with the idea:

Rachael (Sean Young) was a more advanced replicant, a prototype created by Dr. Eldon Tyrell (Joe Turkel) after he noticed that the Nexus 6 were developing “strange obsessions that began to show emotional issues because they lacked the experience to understand what they were. Because of this, they became hard to control so with Rachael, he implanted false memories - originated from his own daughter - into her mind which made her more controllable but unaware of the fact that she was not human. It’s only after meeting Deckard that her suspicions are confirmed when he conducts the Voight-Kampff test on her and, unlike older models, it takes about 100 questions for him to confirm she is a replicant. Blade Runner 2049 delivers far more information about her bioengineering and abilities, but before we get to that let’s take a look at the evolved replicants Denis Villeneuve’s movie introduces.

“He was less human than the people he was after, because they were machines. He was more of a machine. And he becomes less of a machine through the ordeal of falling in love with [Rachael]. She’s smarter than he is and she’s better than he is, and at the end, he kills her. And it’s not an outright execution. It’s elliptical. But you hear the shot, and you see where it took place, and you saw her face, and she wanted it, and it was an act of love.”

In the Black Out 2022 animated short from Cowboy Bebop creator Shinichiro Watanabe, we learn that three years after the events of Blade Runner, there are Nexus 8 models who seem to have unlimited life spans, but are now being tracked by a Replicant Registration Database. Dave Bautista’s Sapper Morton is one of these replicants and appears far more human than any previous Nexus model. It’s only when he takes out a few baddies, in Luke Scott’s 2048: Nowhere to Run short, that his replicant nature is revealed by his superior strength and ability. Later, in Blade Runner 2049, we learn that he was previously a combat medic before going off the grid to pretend to be a human farmer.

The Nexus 8s are the last replicants to be created by the Tyrell Corporation. This is because they caused a Black Out that led to major power outages and a mass loss of data, which triggered the decision to ban the production of replicants for good, ending the reign of the Tyrell Corporation. Enter Niander Wallace (Jared Leto), who - after buying up all the Tyrell assets - presents a case for reopening the manufacture of replicants so they could once again be used for slave labor in order to rebuild Earth’s ecosystem and continue off-world colonization. He was given the go-ahead to create the next line of replicants, the Nexus 9 models, after proving with his assistant (in Luke Scott’s 2036: Nexus Down short) that they would never rebel and would rather die than kill a human.

Ryan Gosling’s K is one of these Nexus 9 replicants, and is being used by the LAPD as a blade runner to hunt the remaining Tyrell Corporation Nexus models. Like Rachael, these models have been implanted with false memories, though K is fully aware that he is a replicant. It’s unclear if the Nexus 7 and 8 models were also implanted with false memories, but clearly Wallace was a fan of Tyrell’s work with Rachael and kept this aspect of her bioengineering for his brand of replicants.

In 2049, they no longer seem to use the Voight-Kampff test rather a retinal scan which can tell if a being is human or artificial. As a replicant blade runner, K is also tested after each mission to ensure that he is not showing any sort of rebellious intentions. This comes in the form a call and response exam for which he must repeat certain words while his body is examined for any chemical changes. K believes that the man difference between humans and replicants is that the former has a soul and the latter does not because it was never born, though his boss Lieutenant Joshi (Robin Wright) says that sometimes she thinks he does have one. Replicants aren’t limited to blade runners though and others do similar jobs to what the older models did in the original movie, like Mariette (Mackenzie Davis) who is a prostitute. Though Wallace has his own special replicant called Luv (Sylvia Hoeks) who he’s designed to be able to kill humans and do his sordid bidding.

There’s a final type of replicant which was not created by Tyrell or Wallace, but through procreation and this is where we go back to Rachael. It turns out that Tyrell had designed her to be able to reproduce and she gets pregnant by Deckard not long after the events of Blade Runner. The baby - who grows up to become memory designer Dr. Ana Stelline - inspires an underground replicant freedom movement that has been fighting against their slavery since it’s birth. Ana believes she has an auto-immune condition that means she has to stay in a vacuum-sealed room away from other people, which goes against the principle of a replicant as they are built to be superior to humans.

With Blade Runner 2049 leaving some narrative threads that could lead to another movie we may well get more answers about Ana and see the evolution of the replicants go even further.

Next: BLADE RUNNER 2049’S ENDING EXPLAINED

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