Summary
An exterior shot of the imposing Tyrell Corp Building. An elevator moves up the side exterior, carrying J.F. Sebastian and Roy Batty. Meanwhile, Dr. Tyrell is in his chambers, lying in bed and commanding a machine to buy and sell stocks. The machine's female voice announces J.F. Sebastian's arrival. Tyrell's voice is piped in to the elevator, and J.F. Sebastian announces his next move in their chess game - Queen to Bishop 6 - which leads to a check. Dr. Tyrell gets up from his bed, crouches in front of his chess board, and moves the Queen accordingly. Sebastian's next move, coached silently by Roy Batty, results in a checkmate. Amused by J.F. Sebastian's newfound brilliance, Tyrell beckons the designer to his room.
A closeup on the Replicant Owl as the door to Tyrell's bedroom creaks open, and J.F. Sebastian enters meekly, announcing that he has brought a friend. Roy Batty is right behind him, visible in a wide over-the-shoulder shot of the doorway - revealing the gothic decor and multitude of candles filling Dr. Tyrell's chambers. Dr. Tyrell is not surprised that Roy Batty is there - but he still backs up slightly as Batty approaches him, demanding a longer life. Dr. Tyrell tells Batty that this is impossible - and discredits each of the scientific solutions that Roy Batty suggests, as trying to change a Replicant's code would kill the Replicant.
Batty comes and sits down, his eyes downcast. He and Tyrell speak in alternating close-ups, referring to each other as father and son, creator and creation. Tyrell tells Batty that he has done great things in his short life - but Batty admits that he has done questionable things as well. Then he comes in close to Tyrell's face and kisses him on the mouth - before starting to push his thumbs into Tyrell's eyeballs, slowly, with tears running down his face. Sebastian cowers behind the tall candles, crying. After Tyrell's dead body falls to the floor, Batty runs after J.F. Sebastian, trying to apologize. This scene ends on a close-up of the Replicant Owl, its eyes burning orange. Cut to a close-up on Roy Batty, riding down the elevator alone.
Dissolve to Deckard's point-of-view as he drives through a dark tunnel. Alarms are blaring all around him and frenzied voices are coming out of his intercom system. He pulls over and speaks to Bryant over the intercom - who tells him that J.F. Sebastian has also been killed, and commands Deckard to go to Sebastian's apartment in the Bradbury Building. Deckard calls J.F. Sebastian's apartment using the video-phone in his car, and Pris answers. He pretends to be a friend of Sebastian but Pris hangs up on him abruptly.
Inside J.F. Sebastian's apartment, in an extreme close-up, Pris puts a veil over her face. Her eyes are alert and her expression looks robotic. Deckard slowly enters the building in a wide shot from many floors up. The advertising zeppelin flies over the building's glass ceiling, and its focused lights swirl around Deckard as he creeps slowly up the stairs. He enters J.F. Sebastian's apartment with his gun locked and loaded, and J.F. Sebastian's little friends greet him. Cut away to the extreme close-up of Pris, rolling her eyes. Deckard enters the "menagerie" where J.F. Sebastian keeps all his toys, friends, and oddities. Pris is frozen in the foreground with a veil over her face, pretending to be a doll.
In a wide shot, Deckard eventually approaches Pris and pulls off her veil, examining her face. Suddenly, she kicks him and he flies backwards. She does several backflips and lands on his shoulders with her legs around his neck. She tries many different ways to kill him - breaking his neck, strangling him, even shoving her fingers up his nose - but he gets away. She runs at him in another backflip attack but Deckard shoots her, mid-air. She wretches and screams on the ground - he keeps shooting her until her body stops moving.
Deckard stumbles away from Pris' body, shaking. Meanwhile, cut to Roy Batty who is in the hallway outside J.F. Sebastian's apartment. Deckard moves slowly, and Roy Batty enters the apartment. Batty sees Pris' bloody body on the ground and crouches over her, devastated. He touches her bloody face and kisses her mouth. On the other side of the wall, Deckard is trying to follow Batty's voice. Batty, however, reaches right through the wall and grabs Deckard's hand. He breaks Deckard's fingers - one for Zhora, one for Pris, before giving Deckard his gun back. Deckard fires through the hole in the wall, hitting Batty's ear, but Batty still gives Deckard a head start. While Deckard runs, Batty cries over Pris' body, howling like a wolf. He whispers her name and wipes her blood on his face. Deckard pops one of his broken fingers back into place and howls in pain.
Batty tells Deckard, in a sing-song voice, that he is coming - but Deckard cannot see him. Batty, stripped down to his underwear, gallops out of J.F. Sebastian's apartment, screaming like an animal. Deckard climbs to the top of a ceiling-high bureau and accidentally drops his gun. He breaks through the ceiling and climbs into a bathroom on the floor above. Batty's fist starts to clench up and he screams, "not yet!" and bites his fist, trying to keep himself alive. He even drives a nail through his own hand, relishing the shot of adrenaline, while Deckard is upstairs, trying to recover from his broken fingers. Moments later, Roy Batty sticks his head through the bathroom window where Deckard is, and says he will kill him - but Deckard manages to grab a tall metal stake and hit Roy Batty with it.
Analysis
Through his interaction with Pris and Roy Batty, it is clear that J.F. Sebastian is innocent and easily influenced, and certainly less intellectually sophisticated than Roy Batty. Batty sees that Sebastian has a bit of a crush on Pris, and uses this information to wrangle the meeting with Tyrell. Additionally, J.F. Sebastian claims that he has only beaten Tyrell at chess one time, but in the elevator, Roy Batty is able to win the game in two moves. Ridley Scott says, "to play chess, you gotta have intuition". In this case, Roy Batty is so intuitive that he manages to beat his maker, Tyrell and engineer a way to get inside Tyrell's chambers. Batty is actually sophisticated enough to manipulate real humans. Scott explains, "we can assume that Roy Batty... has private thoughts. And if you feed enough information into a computer, then the romantic notion is - at what moment does a computer start to have its own feelings?"
Unfortunately for the Replicants, they cannot control the way this society categorizes their humanity. In the world of Blade Runner, corporations are king, and Tyrell's characterization embodies this idea. Lawrence Paull says he designed Tyrell's office at an "inhuman" scale, so that "it dwarfed the people within its space, which is what we were trying to say about the central character that inhabited it" (Sammon 124). The LA Times' Kenneth Turan observed that in the Blade Runner universe, "progress and decay... exist hand-in-hand, and the city's major buildings, like the massive, Mayan-inspired pyramid that houses the Tyrell Corp. would tower miles above the squalor below". Inside Tyrell's chambers, the art department drew influence from religious icons - filling the room with candles and modeling Tyrell's bed after the actual bed of Pope John Paul II.
Batty's murder of Tyrell relates to the underlying social commentary of the Replicant manufacturing business. The Replicants are commercial entities, manufactured by the Tyrell Corp to be sold as slaves. They are intellectually sophisticated enough to perform tasks as well as (or in many cases, better than) any capable human being, which also means that by the Nexus 6 generation, the replicants understand that they are being used and cruelly discarded by their human creators. Hence the decision to fight back. "They are not just physically and intellectually superior to humans," writes Scott Bukatman, "in the dehumanized world that Blade Runner represents, replicants are 'more human than human', just as Tyrell proclaims. Their inferior status is arbitrary, solely a function of legal definition and the 'fail-safe mechanism' of a severely restricted lifespan" (Bukatman 88).
When Deckard kills Pris, Ridley Scott used an undercranked camera to make her look like she was "moving insanely fast and desperately trying to fight off her death", according to Daryl Hannah (Sammon 183). Of course, she does not succeed - and as a gesture of respect, Batty pushes her protruding tongue back into her mouth when he finds her body. The compassion between the Replicants is part of what makes them so sympathetic - and by the end of this section, when Roy Batty dies, both the film and the audience treat his demise with similar respect. Tyrell wanted to create creatures that were more human than human - and that is what he got, with all the accompanying complexities of human nature.
Hampton Fancher points out that the shot where Batty rides down the elevator alone is the only "shot in the whole movie where you see stars. And they're moving away from him, as if he is some kind of fallen angel" (Bukatman 96). Roy Batty started out the film on a mission to extend his life, and now that he knows this is impossible, he is forced to figure out what to do with his final moments - what is the appropriate ending for a light that has shined so bright?
In the final, epic battle between Batty and Deckard, the line between hero and enemy becomes especially unclear because at this point, Batty is completely aware of the fact that he is going to die (especially when his hand starts cramping up). Rutger Hauer and Ridley Scott worked together to develop Roy Batty's unusual behavior in this final segment and decided that Batty would want to celebrate the last moments of his life. He explores his raw warrior instinct, painting his face with blood, stripping off his clothing, and howling like a wolf. He is playing a "wicked game," Hauer says, tapping into primal instincts at the last gasp of his human-like life.
