Android Dreams: Blade Runner and the Facsimile of Humanity

In this episode, new guest Derek Power and host Cindy Collins Smith geek out over Blade Runner’s place in cinema and examine the Frankensteinian questions it raises about what it means to be human and what it means to be a facsimile. To what extent can the two become like the other and where is God in all of this? The episode title (“Android Dreams”) of course calls back to “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” - the Philip K. Dick novel that Ridley Scott adapted for this film. But more than that, it suggests that replicants might unpredictably have aspirations beyond those they were programmed to have.