Rick Deckard's arrest at the opera house
Rick Deckard's arrest at the War Memorial Opera House marks the moment when the hunter becomes the hunted, exposing a hidden android infrastructure that nearly destroys him. After the android Luba Luft, a soprano rehearsing Mozart's The Magic Flute, calls the police on Deckard for asking obscene questions, a uniformed officer named Crams arrives and arrests him, claiming that Deckard's own department—the San Francisco Police Department on Lombard Street—does not exist. This arrest shatters Deckard's professional identity and forces him into a confrontation with a parallel police system run by androids.
The Confrontation in the Dressing Room
Deckard enters Luba Luft's dressing room after the rehearsal, intending to administer the Voigt-Kampff empathy test. He finds her marking a clothbound score, still in costume. When he reveals he is from the police, she grows apprehensive but challenges him: "An android doesn't care what happens to any other android. That's one of the indications we look for," Deckard explains. Luba retorts, "Then you must be an android," and insists he take the test first. Their exchange grows tense as Deckard's questions—about a wasp on the wrist, a boiled dog entrée, a mounted deer head—meet with semantic confusion and resistance. Luba produces a laser tube, accusing him of being a sexual deviant, and calls the police. When Officer Crams arrives, he frisks Deckard, confiscates his service pistol and laser tube, and notes that the pistol has been fired recently—Deckard had just retired the android Polokov.
The Arrest and the Phantom Police Station
Crams takes Deckard to the Mission Street Hall of Justice, a building Deckard has never seen before. During the ride, Crams steers south instead of north toward the familiar Lombard Street station, claiming the old building has been abandoned for years. Deckard realizes the truth: "I understood it all, now; saw what the androids, working together, had achieved. He would not live beyond this ride." At the Mission Street station, Deckard is booked on charges of homicide and impersonating a peace officer. A plainclothes officer named Garland intervenes, examining Deckard's briefcase and discovering that the bounty hunter's list includes Garland himself. Garland reveals that the station is an android-run operation, a "homeostatic enterprise" cut off from the rest of San Francisco. When Deckard tries to phone his wife, the call is trapped and rerouted within the building; a stranger answers.
The Intervention of Phil Resch
Garland summons the bounty hunter Phil Resch, who works for the android police. Resch, unaware that he himself is an android, retrieves the Boneli Reflex-Arc Test gear. As he prepares to test Garland, the inspector draws a laser tube; Resch fires first, killing him. Resch then handcuffs himself to Deckard and leads him out of the building, past uniformed officers who pay no attention. Once airborne, Resch admits he has long suspected something was wrong. "It's not just false memory structures," he says, describing his real squirrel, Buffy, as proof of his humanity. Deckard, knowing from Garland that Resch is an android, says nothing. The escape from the Mission Street station sets the stage for the final confrontations with the remaining androids, but it also plants a seed of doubt in Deckard: if a bounty hunter can be an android, what does that make him?
Consequences and Thematic Significance
The arrest reveals that androids have infiltrated law enforcement itself, creating a shadow police force that protects their own. It forces Deckard to rely on an android—Resch—for survival, blurring the line between hunter and hunted. The episode also deepens Deckard's crisis of identity: he has killed Polokov and will soon kill Luba Luft, but the arrest shows him how easily the roles could be reversed. The parallel police station, with its trapped phone lines and false records, embodies the novel's theme of a reality that can be faked at every level—a theme that will culminate in Buster Friendly's exposé of Mercerism. Deckard's arrest is not merely a setback; it is the moment when the system he serves reveals itself to be as constructed and unreliable as the androids he hunts.
