I think I can speak for the majority of the class that the ending to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep wasn’t as great as the rest of the novel. I feel that there was a definitely a huge change of direction from the first few and middle chapters to the final chapters of the book.

At first, as we all know, reading the book was exciting, and one could try to figure out, as they’re reading, what the next stage of events would take place, but there always seems to be a twist in the most shocking way possible, such as (which is one of my favorites) finding out that a whole “fake” police department were created and ran by androids, in order to throw Rick off his trail. I mean that was unexpectedly awesome.

But now, I start coming across all this stuff that I can’t begin to understand.

Oh, and here’s one of them: The little “sex” scene we encountered. For me, this was quite a shocker. For one, Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter that is specifically trained to hunt down and kill androids on Earth, and we know he has been doing this job for most of his life, but suddenly, out of the blue, after only seeing Ms. Rachael Rosen once before, he has the audacity to sleep with her. And two, she is a machine. She does not have feelings. She says, “I love you” (Dick 194), but even I would know that it’s impossible for her to even comprehend what that means.

I mean, I wouldn’t be able to understand that. She, or rather it works and was created for a company that has done some questionable things.

Then, to add a little spice to it, we discover that the whole thing was just a ruse. It was all planned out in order to change Deckard’s mind about the job he does. Inevitably, however, she fails, and Rick proceeds in finding the three missing androids.

Wow, that was such quick thinking. You should’ve thought of that before you went in bed with a robot, Rick.

Oh, but it doesn’t end there. When we finally get to our final three androids on the list, what we expected and what actually happened were two totally different things. To me, I was expecting more of a resistance from the final three, and from what we heard about this Roy android on page 184-185 in Chapter 16, he isn’t the kind of android you’d want to piss off. I guess I was just expecting a mix of clichés; lasers flying all over the place and explosions, but you know what did happen? They all died pretty quickly with very little effort by Deckard’s hand. Oh, and with a little help from none other than ‘Mercer’ himself.

And that is where my brain exploded. Not in a good way, but in total confusion. I still don’t know who this Mercer guy really is, but from what I can tell, he is a religious figure.

To put in simple terms, he is accepted as ‘God’ by the general public.

And then the ending happened:

“I didn’t know what else to do at the end, so I just decided to end it with Rick going to sleep because, you know, he had a long day, and he needed some much needed rest,” says not-Philip K. Dick.

Yeah, that was certainly a surprising ending. I just made 6,000 dollars today so let’s just drink coffee and go to sleep.

I guess I can just say that was a little boring. I guess I was expecting something more badass; Harrison Ford would never do such a thing.

But, as a final statement: Overall, this was a fantastic read. I can’t wait to see what’s in store next in the course.