Fridge / Blade Runner 2049

Fridge Brilliance

• A major clue that K isn't the replicant child. All the boys in the orphanage have buzz cuts. The girls all have short hair. The child in the memory has short hair.
• K remembers having a wooden horse as a boy. Once he finds it and learns it's a real memory and not fake, the horse becomes an allusion to the Trojan horse, for the audience. Viewers are tricked into believing the horse means he's Rachael's child, when in fact it's Ana.
• While K is reviewing the birth records to find the replicant child, he discovers that some of the records have been faked, as he finds records of a boy and girl with identical DNA, which is impossible. The records say that the girl died of genetic defect, while the boy disappeared. When K first meets Ana, she tells him that she must be locked in a sealed environment due to a genetic defect that compromises her immune system.
• Tyrell mused that a limited lifetime is so that Replicants don't become too much like human beings, new models Replicants are supposed to be completely subservient but as time went on and with their longer lifespan they outgrew submissiveness as Luv, the Resistance and K as well show. It helps that they have a real memory of preserving what is precious to them at all cost, once what is precious is no longer human being but a miracle child things change. Much of Luv's increasingly erratic behavior as the plot progresses is due to the above, plus her awareness of how Wallace would likely react to discovering she was no longer "Baseline."
• During the scene when Luv is directing the air strike while having her nails done the camera closeup shows one fingernail has a design resembling Rudolph, a hint that she isn't like "all the other reindeer."
• Crossing horror and brilliance; Rachel's Death by Childbirth and Ana's genetic condition. While Tyrell certainly had designed Rachel well enough to conceive and carry a child, he didn't live long enough to work through any bugs in the process.
• Ana is roughly thirty, but has a Ph.D. and has been working for Wallace as a subcontractor for roughly a decade. Yes, twenty is a very Improbable Age for a doctorate. But factor in that Replicants can process information faster than baseline humans, and she's at least half-Replicant, if not the offspring of two Replicants. Also, there isn't a whole heck of a lot to do in her glass cage.
• Mariette's reaction to discovering the wooden horse in K's room is to exclaim "This came from a tree!". At first it seems she is amazed at the monetary value of what she's found, understandable for a person in her position. When it's revealed that she is an agent of the Replicant Resistance, it seems more likely her reaction was because she knows about the tree it came from, the site of Rachel's grave, and thus the significance of K having it.
• Wallace pays Ana to create memories for his Replicants becauese she's the best in the business. Not only is she putting real memories in his Replicants, but her memory of the horse is implied to be a major reason for the Replicants going rogue. So not only is the prize he is seeking Hidden in Plain Sight, but his employment of her as a subcontractor is undermining his own plans.
• Being severely immunocompromised is a frequent issue with real-world cloning, especially the offspring of clones.
• Joi gets most out of sync with Mariette in places that are outside of K's vision, such as behind his head or below his sight line. Since the synchronization is a purely visual effect, she can indulge in moving more how she wants in these instances rather than just copying Mariette's movements.
• The test for replicants has been completely inverted from the original film. In the original, replicants were identified by their lack of empathetic response to questions in the Voight-Kampff test. Those who failed to show human empathy were revealed as replicants and killed. Now, replicants are tested to ensure their lack of emotion by responding to questions designed to provoke an emotional response. Those who fail to respond in a dispassionate fashion are revealed to be "off baseline" and killed. The method of the test is also inverted: The Voight-Kampff is a free-form interview where the subject can respond in any way he or she wishes, while the baseline test is a rapid, formalized and completely scripted recitation.
• Joshi's "Facing the Bullets" One-Liner, telling Luv to just do what she has to, is a Stealth Insult, implying that Luv has no free will even in her decision to kill Joshi, despite Luv's statement that she'll lie to Wallace about it implying that she's going off the reservation.
• Wallace's lair uses a lot of wood. His whole private room is covered wall-to-wall in the stuff, and chips linked to his camera drones are kept in a simple, varnished wooden box. It's later revealed that wood is extremely expensive, so this is Wallace's Conspicuous Consumption.
• Comparing and Contrasting K's Animal Motif with Deckard's reveals some very interesting details. For one, while Deckard had visions of a living unicorn, K has memories of a toy horse. In other words, an imitation, hinting at the true nature of his memories.
• A very subtle hint at K being a Replicant is Joi, in that Joi is the only stable, emotional relationship that K has and maintains. The "anniversary gift" his insistence that Joi doesn't say things just because he may want to hear them, his concern for her safety... K connects with Joi not because (or not only because) Joi was made to be everything he wants, but more because of the fact that they are both artificial constructs with a built-in purpose.
• In the first movie, when Rachel is being given the Voight-Kampff test, she replies to the question of what she'd do if a wasp landed on her hand by saying she'd kill it. In this movie, when K sees a bee land on his hand, he simply stares at it in wonder.
• K and Deckard's discussion about whether or not the dog is real reflect's K's own identity crisis, and also ping on the franchise's central theme, the humanity or lack thereof of the replicants who are rebelling and the humans who slavishly stick to their roles. One interpretation of the film is that the question, which everyone obsesses over, just doesn't matter. It also works as a call back to the first movie, when Deckard asks whether the owl at Tyrell's office is real. Contrasting the two scenes shows Deckard's character development in him having come to view humans and replicants so similar it's meaningless to ask which is which.
• Deckard's opening line from Treasure Island asks Joe if he has any cheese. In a world where everything natural seems to be dead, even a replicant animal wouldn't be able to provide milk since pregnancy to provide the lactation is a Lost Technology.
• Sapper lives a humble life on his grub farm, but he has a large, dead tree outside, under which Rachel's body is buried. It's later established that wood is extremely expensive, so that tree must be worth a fortune. The fact that Sapper never cut it down to sell the wood off shows what sentimental attachment he has to it through its link to Rachel and her "miracle."
• The hairless data archivist prattling on about his family's history with the Blackout serves two functions: it provides exposition about the Blackout, but it also serves to obscure the Conservation of Detail in Ana's story. If he hadn't existed, Ana's story about her family and history would stick out more and provide a stronger clue that she's someone important.
• Ana's home is a dome with snow falling outside. It's an inverted snowglobe. Instead of a perfect, preserved scene on the inside for people to look at, she creates scenes and sends them out into the world.

Fridge Logic

On the headscratchers page.

Fridge Horror

• K is notable in the fact he lives in a building with a nice apartment, is paid for his job, and has a enough discretionary income to buy himself a holographic girlfriend. This despite the fact his apartment is surrounded by the homeless and he visits a junkyard with a massive sweatshop of destitute starving children. In simple terms, as bad as it is to be a Replicant and a slave, it's actually BETTER than the people left to die out in the streets. This is because Replicants, at least, have value as property while the poor have none in the Cyberpunk future of 2049.
• K's interaction with Joi's advertisement avatar is peppered with evidence that much of her affection for him was preprogrammed. Not only did K lose her cruelly, he and the audience are left wondering if she was even capable of loving him.
• One of Joi's first lines is a complaint about being cooped up in the apartment. Considering she's a Wallace product, is she programmed to nag for expensive upgrades, which the lonely interpret as a chance to make their love happy? Brr.
• As a Replicant himself, was K ever capable of loving her in the first place?
• The fact that K has some of Ana's memories means that the Resistance deliberately ruins his life so they can gain another recruit and divert attention away from Ana. Sure, the Resistance is a good cause, but K is happy enough with his old life and content about serving humans. Watch how his immediate reaction to the discovery is not a one of joy, but of distress because he knows he will be hunted by those he loyally served. The Resistance is not above possibly killing one of their own to further their cause.