Blade Runner 2049’s replicants invest deeply and sentimentally in the organic family. The ability to make more replicants does not seem to be the issue; after all, they could always organize to take over the Wallace Corporation and seize the means of reproduction as it stands. What’s it to a robot whether it comes from a womb as a baby or is brought to life by industrial means, so long as it’s free once it’s born? Why is birth the trigger for their rebellion, and not pain or suffering or even boredom with their labor, as in Her? More than the replicants in the first Blade Runner, 2049’s bots behave like David in Steven Spielberg’s A.I.: a perpetual child whose only programmed directive is to be bonded to a mother. 2049 would have us believe that replicants arrive at this desire on their own, not as a result of human programming but as a response to new, unexpected stimuli. Rather than constructing value beyond the human, they long for the nuclear family structure as soon as they know it’s available to them, flattering patriarchal conceptions of meaning, purpose, and worth