The Blade Runner movies focus on replicants, which are artificial beings created for a sad purpose. However, over time, their original purpose has changed so much that they are now being made for something very different from what fans would expect.
The first Blade Runner movie showed fans a dark sci-fi world, where artificial humans called Replicants are made to work as slaves on other planets, and Blade Runners are cops who kill Replicants if they rebel.
Replicants have a hard life, and some of them don’t want to be slaves anymore. They use their intelligence and free will to fight for their freedom, but they always fail.
Now, things have changed in the Blade Runner world. Replicants are not afraid of being killed by Blade Runners anymore. Instead, they have become Blade Runners themselves, and they are hunting down humans.
The film Blade Runner 2039 #2 by Mike Johnson, Mellow Brown, and Andres Guinaldo features Luv, a Replicant Blade Runner who serves the LAPD and Wallace Corp. She is one of the new models of Replicants that Wallace Corp created after they replaced Tyrell Corporation, the first company that made synthetic humans.
Tyrell Corporation collapsed when Replicants were outlawed following the Black Out in 2022, a huge data wipeout event. Wallace Corp persuaded the authorities to allow Replicants again and offered Luv to the LAPD as a gesture of cooperation.
Luv’s task is to locate some old Tyrell data on Replicant creation that was not erased by the Black Out. Regarding this issue, she meets a Replicant from the Tyrell time and identifies him right away. She says that she has a special skill to detect the artificiality of other Replicants.
“I am also a Replicant. I can… detect… a Replicant’s artificiality”. – Luv
Luv’s ability to sense the artificiality of other Replicants suggests that all Replicants have this ability to recognize each other by sight. This may not be true for all models, but it is likely true for those who are similar to Luv.
Luv is Wallace’s most trusted and advanced Replicant, so she is probably the best example of his Replicant creations. This means that any Replicant Blade Runner after Luv should have the same skill to spot another Replicant instantly–which is a huge advantage over human Blade Runners.
Humans have to either check under the right eye of a suspected Replicant to verify it, or use a Voight-Kampff test, which can take a long time to finish.
On the other hand, a Replicant Blade Runner can identify their target in a second. This makes them clearly better option for the job, which is something we see later with the Replicant Blade Runner, K (aka Joe), in Blade Runner 2049.
There are various reasons why Replicants are better Blade Runners than humans. Replicants are usually more powerful and quicker than humans, with the extra benefit of having flawless memory that they can never lose, even if they wanted to.
In general, Replicants are superior, especially when it comes to chasing their own kind–a surprising destiny that the newer-model Replicants are given in the current Blade Runner story.
About Blade Runner
Blade Runner is a science fiction film series. The first film in the series released in 1982 and was directed by Ridley Scott, and written by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples.
The series is set in a dystopian future Los Angeles of 2019, in which synthetic humans known as replicants are bio-engineered by the powerful Tyrell Corporation to work on space colonies.
A sequel, directed by Denis Villeneuve and titled Blade Runner 2049, was released in October 2017 alongside a trilogy of short films covering the thirty-year span between the two films’ settings. The anime series Blade Runner: Black Lotus was released in 2021.
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