Ahhh, yes…Roy Batty. He is noble. Brave. A proud antagonist but not a villain. A warrior.

So strangely beautiful. That wonderful hair–peroxide blonde. And spiked. Those fine, yet distinctive, angular features. Those steel blue eyes. Sculpted, muscled thighs. The broad chest of a sprinter. If not for his slightly crooked teeth, he’d be very nearly perfect.

As a biorobotic android “combat model” with super human strength and genius level IQ he is literally a killing machine. His theater of operations is “off world”; he guards and preserves intergalactic colonies.

But Roy has the audacity to want and that is a tricky thing in this dystopian, Blade Runner world of 2019. It is okay to want those basic things that he is programmed for, but to want more is subversive. To feel is anathema.

And he does feel. He experiences. Loyalty. Longing. Love. He knows what beauty is and perceives these, the most profoundly dangerous things of all: He feels empathy and he has hope, though his lifespan is programmed at a mere four years.

Roy fosters these emotions in other biorobtoic androids–“skin jobs” is the derogatory term some humans refer to them as–and they rebel violently, ruthlessly. Murderously. Roy is the leader because although the others have superhuman strength, they are not as beautiful or as beautifully smart.

Four of them–they are also called replicants–escape to planet earth on a desperate quest for more time, tracking down those who are complicit in their design. They interrogate; they punish. And they do what they were made to do. They kill.

But, just as they are hunters, they are hunted too. Death hangs over them and onto them, picking them off one by one, till only Roy is left. Roy knows that he has eluded and outsmarted it, even as he also knows, he can not outlast it. His last act is terrifying–he literally howls like a wolf because he is alone with no comfort as he confronts his demise with dignity and pathos. And, more than that, with empathy. Like the warrior he is. Like a real man.

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe…Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion…I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate…All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain…Time to die.”