Read just today, in an article about the latest (fourth?) Bladerunner release, that
Deckard was a replicant?
I know I’m a little slow, but what hints/clues did I miss?
Some dream about a unicorn. I never got it, either.
The big one is Deckard’s recurring dream about a unicorn, which he never tells anyone about. And yet, when he’s fleeing with the replicant girl he’s fallen in love with, his partner who’s into origami leaves a paper unicorn outside his apartment door, as a way of saying he won’t be hunting them down. How does he know Deckard has dreams about unicorns, unless he knows Deckard was programmed to dream about unicorns? That’s about as blatant as it gets, and as you can see, it’s still pretty subtle. There are other, even more subtle, hints, but I can’t recall them off the top of my head.
I can see how the unicorn “dots” connect together to reveal the he is a replicant but I just still do not buy it. There seems to be too many things throughout that counter the unicorn theory.
I have read quite a few of the anti-replicant cites/sites and it just feels “right” to me. Deckard being a replicant feels “wrong”. Sorry I don’t have time to dig into all of them, but I’m sure many of the more die-hard Blade Runner types can provide information.
How is THAT for an answer! 
MeanJoe
This was touched on in the recent thread on the Blade Runner “Final Cut” a couple days back. (look for Stranger on a Train’s post). There’s a little controversy on whether that alternate plot point “fits”. It sure never did for me.
And FYI: when you put the spoiler text/tags that close to the beginning of the OP it shows up unmasked on the thread preview, at least when using Internet Explorer which gives a longer preview than Firefox.
Here’s something that bugs me about his supposedly being a replicant.
If he is, how come a couple of the replicants he’s chasing could overcome him so easily with their superior strength? Wouldn’t he and they possess comparable strength and endurance? He could just as easily have plunged his hand through the wall to make a grab at Rutger Hauer.
I never really understood this objection. He would have been created weaker so as to pose as a better human if that was the purpose of his construction.
Remember, he wasn’t supposed to be posing as a replicant but rather unknowingly be a replicant, like what’s-her-name/Sean Young.
Maybe. But, remember Hauer’s character is a top-of-the-line combat model replicant - Deckard may well be an older model. Also - it’s possible he could put his hand through the wall, but just doesn’t know it. He doesn’t know he’s a replicant, after all - why would it occur to him to even try punching through the wall?
That said, I do think the movie works better with Deckard as a human (as I think I said in the earlier thread). As a human, Deckard is a deeply flawed and scary guy. As a replicant - well, he does “questionable things”. So what? He’s a replicant, and he was built that way.
But the dream wasn’t in the original release of the film. If that’s what you saw then there wasn’t a clue for you to even get.
The only other hint is when Rachel asks Deckard if he ever took the Voit-Kaumpf test. He does not respond.
I don’t remember Deckard being a replicant in Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? Was the Deckard-as-replicant artistic license for the film, or did I miss it in the book?
He is pretty explicitly not a replicant in the book, as he could use the quasi-religious box thing that replicants can’t use.
The impression I got from the book is that nobody knows what the heck they are.
In the book:
Everybody keeps a pet. It’s part of the the religion. Deckard is obsessed with making enough money to buy a sheep, a real one. Some people have ‘electric’ animals. The animals have machinary inside, cogs and such. Some people have such realist fake animals that nobody really knows, sometimes not even their owner. Deckard is jelous of his nieghbor who has a horse. BTW, the horse is kept on the roof of the apartment build in a 4 x 8 foot pen. (do you think that’s a real horse?) Deckard and everyone else is so cut off from nature they do think that a real horse can live on the roof of an apartment building.
When ever Deckard kills a ‘replicant’, the do a bone marrow test to make sure. Replicants are not machines, like the fake animals.
Deckard comes across another policeman. Another policeman who has never heard of the Voit Kaumph test. Deckard thinks that all the cops there may be replicants.
The religious preacher is one TV 24 hours a day, non stop. Could a human do that?
Rachel and Priss, are the same model.
Deckard does go out to nature and he finds, far from the city a frog. That turns out to be a mechanical frog.
I don’t know if anyone in the book is ‘human’. Is a replicant a clone? A mechanical person, with machine parts inside?
I never heard or read anything about the possibility of Deckard being a replicant at the time of the film’s release, or for YEARS afterwards from anyone, Scott included. (And I was a big fan of SF film, and read the magazines And, as Zebra has noted, the Unicorn dream isn’t in the original release, anyway. There’s virtually nothing in the film as it came out in 1982 that would even hint that Deckard was a replicant, let alone give you a significant push in that direction. * It makes it hard for me to see the whole “Deckard is a replicant!” as anything but a late addition to the mythology of the film.
- Even most of the stuff takemn as indications of Deckard’s replicant status aren’t terribly convincing. He could easily have mentioned his dreams to someone else. The query about him taking the Replicant Personality test is good as a jibe against a persecutor, without any serious implications about his being literally non-human.
I don’t believe Deckard was a replicant and frankly don’t give a fuck what Ridley Scott says about it.
There are different models of replicant. As has already been mentioned, Roy Batty is a combat model, Priss is a pleasure model, and so on. Deckard may not display elevated strength like Batty, but he sure does display some more than human durability during the course of the movie. He not only survives some pretty savage beatings, but is still able to function nearly normally afterward.
Deckard is programmed to believe himself to be human. He is a trained (or more accurately programmed) cop who knows about “skin jobs.” Would he not recognize himself as a replicant if he were as strong as one? That’d pretty neatly defeat programming him to believe himself human.
That’s my way of looking at it. In my mind the point of that scene is not that Deckard is a replicant, but a human who is so jaded that he may as well be.
I agree. It’s better if he’s human.
ETA:
On the other hand, it’s an action film. (Or at least it has action sequences.) The Indestructable Hero, who manages to pull through in spite of his injuries, is a well-established character in this type of film.
Why bother programming him to believe that? So what if he knows he is a replicant? If he’s programmed to be a blade runner he’ll do the job anyway, and do it a heck of a lot better if he has replicant abilities.
Because Tyrell wanted to create people, not robots.
Why create him as a blade runner? Why not create him as something more liable to be successful, and less liable to be killed in the line of duty?
Because then there wouldn’t have been any dramatic tension in the movie.