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I was just wondering how Deckard knew that Rachael was a replicant after the Voight-Kamph test. I believe that in the end he just guessed. What do you guys think?

its a test designed to provoke an emotional respones primarily dealing with the so called blush response and involentary dialations of the iris

replicants dont register either at all or as well as humans when asked the questions rachel was different because she was an experiment and had been made to be more human than human or at least as much as was possible

deckard didnt guess he was good

"welcome the forums!"

The last question was about animals.

"You're watching a stage play, a banquet is in progress.
The guests are enjoying an appetizer of raw oysters.
The entreee consists of boiled dog."

The real animals were scarce in these day's, so eating them up would be horrible.
i thought Racheal schould reacted shoked, if she was a human, but it didn't touch her.

I thought that she did react to the question. She sort of looked awkward - as if it struck a nerve for her.

Or was it all just to do with her eyes glowing red?

p.s. sorry I've not spoken for awhile, been a bit preoccupied.

Rachel was asked two other animal questions...the calf skin wallet and the wasp. She said she would kill the wasp and not accept the calf skin wallet. But the last question involves eating animals.....raw oysters and boiled dog. I got the feeling that she didn't have taste sensory. Or perhaps if it is food, no matter what it is, eat it. Replicants do eat as Pris showed us at Sebastians home. They eat but it does not matter what it is.

Also remember that Leon was asked about an animal question too. Holden asked him about the tortoise baking in the hot sun. He didn't answer well at all, but Rachel I think would have answered this question.

mike81859

I just got the impression that it took Deckard a lot more questions than normal to be sure, as pointed out by Tyrells question as to how many it normally took.
There was one question directly lifted from the novel but it wasn't asked in full. Deckard mentions coming across a full page picture of a nude woman in a magazine which, in the book, is followed by ''lying on a bearskin'' or similiar. She replies as Rachel does in the film i.e. are you testing if I'm a human or a lesbian? which is a giveaway because she's missed the main point of the question. The bearskin part of the question is not present in the film (as far as I know) which is a shame because it showed what he was looking for with the VK test.

One other item: Deckard said, "One more question" before he asked the stage play question where raw oysters and the boiled dog is served to the banquent guests. Rachel just about got by without being detected!

mike81859

I have to go back and look at DADoES and read it again...because if I remember correctly there is an explenation there that makes alot of sense. If I remember correctly it has to do with learned responses as opposed to natural ones...

The learned response item is interesting. Replicants have to learn behavior to mimic it. If they have no chance to learn "something" then they could very well just let the moment go by doing nothing and feeling nothing. No reaction in other words. I remembered that Holden tells Leon that reaction time is a factor in the VK test. If a replicant does not react to a particular question...that probably is a red falg right there.

The way I see it, Rachel does not react well enough to the stage play banquet question and seems a bit humiliated and/or embarrased.

mike81859

ridleynoir is correct, I remember there was an explanation about this in DADoES

It is known that testing can be influenced by the inner individual variables present in the test giver at the moment, and that includes attitudes or prejudices towards the subject. In Blade Runner, Tyrell explicitly says before the test that Rachael is human. (I want to see a negative, etc.) Bryant had told Deckard him there was a Nexus 6 at the Corp., but nothing else. So, we can assume he starts the test based on the premise of Rachael's humanity, but when he starts to get not so human readings from the machine, he starts to doubt. However, those deviations are so small that he must keep asking additional questions (at the end of the test he's asked more than three times the usual number of items) until he decides that the consistency of those little anomalies throughout the whole test should be enough proof to classify Rachael as a replicant. That's how I see the situation, and therefore I don't think Deckard just guessed out. He was the best, and that only came to be with long time experience with the VK machine.

In DADOES, Rick went to the Rosen Association to test nine Nexus-6 subjects, but Eldon tells him that Rachael has been selected as his first subject, but that she may be an android or not. The test goes like this:

Question 1 (Calfskin wallet): Stong and quick reaction, i.e., human.

Q2 (Butterfly Collection): Weaker response, within human limits.

Q3 (The wasp): Despite she says she'd kill it, the gauges barely move. The book says "he noted that and hunted cautiously for the next question." This suggests that Rick might be considering two possibilties: either the subject is artificial, or she has developed a phobia, due past unpleasant experiences with insects, which makes her despise the life of those animals. (Off topic - Something I just tought: To hold the second hypothesis valid, as Rick seems to do, we must know how much time has passed since war, and how long did it last. The novel doesn't says anything about it, but since Rachael is eighteen years old, she must had been able to have unpleasant experiences with real animals in her childhood... That could be another trace of info about the World War Terminus. I guess that she could have had those experiences with artificial insects, but... enough, I won't elaborate on that here)

Q4 (Nude Girl/Bearskin Rug). Now he moves to mammals again (Q2 and Q3 involved insects) but wisely chooses a question in which the animal theme is beneath a sexual layer, and the subject shows no response at all. Rick thinks: an android response. He pretty much knows it by now.

Q5 (Lobster into boiling water): Strong verbal reaction, but no movement of the gauges. Another android response, but note that now the animal theme was direct and graphic.

Q6 (Mountain cabin/Deer head): Now there's a reaction, but not strong enough. Third android reaction in a row.

Q7 (Abortion): The human life issue provokes now a strong, violent reaction.

Q8 (Sedution/Bullfight Posters): Again the animal theme as lateral to a sex related situation. Tough Rick has to explicitly mention the bulls death because of Rachael's ignorance, the machine shows no response.

Q9/9b: (Movie/Banquet of oysters and dog): Weak reaction for the oysters, even weaker for the dog. Rick decides this is enough, and dictaminates Rachael is an android. She has shown android responses in six out of ten questions, and the ambiguity of Q3 is eliminated by the subsequent reactions, so it would be 7 android reactions.

So, Rick didn't guess. But then they tell him she's human, that she had been born, and lived all of her childhood, in a spaceship and therefore she had never direct experiences with living beings other that the nine adult tripulants of that ship. Her most basic learning about animals were only vicarious, through video recordings and stories from those adults, and because of that, her reaction patterns were flattened. The Rosens' point is to make Rick believe that he could kill a human based on the VK results, and Rick then regrets that he didn't reject the challenge of testing Rachel without a certain external criterion to compare his result, given that they sol logically assure him that if they wanted to like, they'd done it in the other way. The implication is that if he tests an android and it passes as human, there is no harm to human life by direct action of the bounty hunter (except maybe the loss of his own life by some accident arranged later by the unspotted andy), but if he tests a human and thinks he/she is an android, he proceeds with his bounty hunter duty and inadvertantly committs murder. He could not operate efficiently with an unreliable test, and now that they had proven it unreliable _with a human_ there was no point in proceeding with the tests on artificials. Faced to the possibility of losing his job, he wants to think about their offer of giving him the owl in exchange for his silence (if he talks they all lose) but in he last moment Rick has the insight that Rachael Rosen is really an android when he hears her calling a supposedly real owl "it". What gives her away as artificial is that she calls "it", despite the fact that this is an animal with wich she has been close, not an image from a video or a hypothetical situation in a question. This is a genuine an unique animal that she doesn't want to give away, without at least having assured the ownership of the offspring, but she doesn't seem to really care that much about the owl emotionally. So he catches her off guard, asks the final "Babyhide Briefcase" question and the delay of the 'apropiate response' he gets, decides it all.

My conclusion: Deckard didn't guess, neither in the film, nor in the novel.

PS: Maybe under closer examination of the neuro-physiological basis of the VK, the scene would become less solid or raise other issues, but, at least for now, I won't do that.

PS: Any errors in english grammar, please correct me.