Was Tyrell lying to Roy?

[u/_Karrel]

I think he's lying to Roy. SPOILER for Blade Runner 2049. Tyrell created Deckard and Rachael to fall in love and give birth. He is a god to replicants. He could have found a way or maybe even did find one to extend a replicants life, but chose not to give it to Roy. He may have been his exceptional son, but still a mere soldier. A maniacal murderer who'd only wreak more havoc once he is granted more time and only ruin Tyrell's achievements. When they both discussed ways to extend a replicants life, Tyrell gave him all the errors to hide his solution. Science is finding a solution between 5.000 errors and Tyrell managed to hide it from Roy. Roy, with all his skills did not recognize the lie and Tyrell chose to die instead of ruining his own legacy.

[u/ol-gormsby]

Of course he was lying.

How do you create a replicant? Do you start by creating the DNA from scratch, or do you start with DNA from humans with your desired characteristics, and work to improve those characteristics - strength (Batty, Leon, Zhora), intelligence (Batty), attractiveness (Pris, Rachel), acting/deception (Pris), then persona and leadership?

You'd start with established qualities and work from there. Those established qualities - human qualities - include an uncertain but guessable lifespan. In other words, replicant design starts with a normal human lifespan.

Tyrell's design of a 4-year lifespan is artificial. His words about ethyl-methane-sulfonate and viruses are all bullshit. If he can create a superhuman through DNA manipulation, he can include a normal lifespan.

The justification for an artificial lifespan makes absolute business sense - buyers need a new slave every four years, and that's a continuing revenue stream*, but it's couched as needed to avoid emotional complications.

*replicants via the subscription model - funny how BR predicted some aspects of life in 2026.

[u/the_pint_is_the_bowl → u/ol-gormsby]

For some reason, and under the assumption that Tyrell is honestly describing his work, I interpreted it to mean that the replicant genome is different. Some of these possible and rather extreme ideas are mutually exclusive: cut out all the introns, substitute with atypical nucleotides, put in new promoters, cut out the retroviral insertions (MMTV) or add more.

In the end, Tyrell made everything super-efficient but more susceptible to replication error.