ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the replicant love in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Replicants' empathic or emotional responses to the scenarios Voight-Kampff deploys are sincere. There is a level of response, however, indicated by blushing, fluctuation of the pupil, involuntary dilation of the iris, that lies deeper than not just their capacity to simulate, but than anything that they could possibly have in their emotional repertoire, given their short lives and emotional inexperience. The designers reckoned that after a few years, they might develop their own emotional responses such as hate, love, fear, anger and envy. So they built in a fail-safe device named four-year lifespan. There they are, then, these short-lived Replicants, impassively and slavishly doing the degrading and violent dirty work far away in space. In the business of hunting Replicants, by coming to love one he has made himself prey to their hunters.
