Headscratchers / Blade Runner 2049

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Ana's history

• So how does Ana's history make any sense? She claims she was the child of rich parents who went off-world without her because of her immunity problems, yet the memory of her being bullied and chased in the child labour facility are genuine.
  • She lied. If anyone else knew that a replicant gave birth, they would want to kill and/or dissect her, so her history has been falsified.
  • This is her reason for crying during her interview with K. "Yes... someone lived this." She's confirming his suspicions, but not revealing that these are her memories. It's grieving her to relive this and see it put in someone else's head. She may or may not even be responsible.
  • Sure, but are her immunity problems real or not? If they're real then how exactly did she survive in an orphanage built on a trash heap?
  • She says that her symptoms weren't revealed until she was 8 years old. Then again, it's also equally likely that her condition was falsified so there would be an excuse to keep her isolated from society.

Wallace and replicant production

• I'm not sure to get what Wallace end game is, like he seems to want replicants that breed because that would make production faster, but if he can gut a replicant open every time he wants to make a point they probably aren't that hard to make and while anyone in the movie seems to do it he can't rule out that Replicants baby might have to go through a slow growth which will again take more time than manufacturing.
  • They're human replacements. He's probably banking on there being some day more can't be produced in a factory (i.e. his facilities are destroyed or they are sent to other worlds). While not ideal for what's now Earth, they're probably more generally survivable than humans.
  • Wallace is more looking to find ways to make replicant production more efficient, as he wants to eventually spread replicants to the entire galaxy and his current methods apparently will not be enough to meet future demand. Plus it also plays into his A God Am I tendencies, being able to boast that he can create self-perpetuating life.
  • We don't know how long it takes to make a replicant. Just because Wallace is willing to slit one open for not meeting his expectations does not indicate that it is efficient to make them, just that he's really psychotic.
  • Unless he had a back up of Rachel for no reason it takes a few days to make a replicant.
  • I guess it makes sense, I mean unless he can manufacture them in a shuttle Replicants that can reproduce would be easier to reach the stars.
• Does he say faster? He says he doesn't have enough, and if he can have the replicants effectively self-modify, he can exponentially increase his workforce. It's the opposite of normal manufacturing limits; the more he makes, the fewer resources it takes to make them. This is especially true considering his goal is deep-space exploration; he can have a Replicant Generation Ship without having to worry about it running out of crew.
  • If it's not faster than he can just mass produce like crazy to complete his stock, because it's not true raising a child Replicant from birth takes less resources than just making a fully grown one, they still have to implant memories pass test and do whatever they do to teach them how to do their tasks. If he focus on putting a Replicant making machines on a spaceship instead of a Generation Ship he doesn't have to wait 18 years for a new crew every time one is conceived and waste resources on them waiting.
  • Perhaps it plays into the "more human than human" motto from the first movie, Wallace is trying to create the next generation of humanity itself by having a self-perpetuating race that is smart and tougher than baseline humans which will then spread across the stars.

K's birth

• How does K think he is the born Replicant? Like wouldn't he have a bar code that identifies him as a new model Replicant (like did he believe his DNA just made a serial number tattooed on his eyeball?) or only the Nexus had the serial number on them?
  • He really wanted to believe he was different from all the other Replicants, even if there was evidence of the contrary.
  • K thought he was the born Replicant because he had a memory of hiding the wood horse in the foundry when he was a child. At first he thought it was an implanted memory , which meant he was a normal Replicant. But after Dr. Ana Stelline tells him that it's an authentic memory, K concludes that means he had an authentic childhood, ergo he is the born Replicant. Too bad he didn't notice that Dr. Stelline didn't specify whose memory it was...

Symbolism of the sheep

• While K talks to Gaff about Deckard, he (matching his habit from the previous movie) fashions an origami sheep. Given that in the original all his origami had some deeper meaning (e.g, he makes a chicken to tell Deckard he's just being afraid of retiring replicants, or the ever-infamous unicorn at the end), what did this particular one stand for? Or was it a mere reference to the title of the P.K. Dick book that inspired the original movie?
  • Nexus 9 models like K, by his own admission, "don't run". That is, they follow orders blindly... like good little sheep.
  • The name Rachael means "ewe" in Hebrew. She was the one that got away, and a special case in her own right. Could be Gaff's way of reverentially marking her passing.

Ana's accent

• Ana's parents are American, despite her not having met them. She grew up in LA or possibly San Diego in the orphanage, both of which speak American English, before being put into a bubble at age 8. Where on Earth did this girl pick up a French accent?
  • The fake memories delivered to her.
  • It may have been something she picked up during the course of her isolation, as all she would have access to would be videos and recordings of the outside world.
    • Yes. From a filmmaker's perspective, the accent highlights her isolation from the rest of society, so within the story it probably stems from that as well. She's heard the speech of only a small number of people since a formative age, so that would affect her accent.

Luv and the LAPD

• Just how was Luv able to sneak into LAPD headquaters, twice, murder two police officers including the head of their Blade Runner division and steal evidence from under them]], and somehow evade detection or having every cop in the city after her?
  • One would assume that her position at Wallace and Wallace's own near-empirical control on the population lets her get away with it, especially if she lied about it being self defense.
  • Judging by Joshi's reaction when she enters her office and lack of investigation about Coco's death, I think Wallace employees are allowed to enter and even kill police officers if they want, like it's in the new constitution or something.
    • Governments being subservient, if not outright controlled by corporations is a very cyberpunk theme. While killing a public servant in broad daylight might be going too far, there's not much to be done in a he-said-she-said situation like this. As obvious as it was that Luv was the aggressor, the police would have to build a case against Luv's owner, Wallace, possibly the richest and most influential person alive. Any cops brave or foolish enough to stand up to him are probably Reassigned to Antarctica at best or dead at worst.
  • Then why didn't the corp just demand those evidences for themselves, officially or not? Why did bother about killing? Thoughts it may be faster, or some sort of Kick the Dog?
  • Because Joshi wouldn't go with it she already decided to kill a Replicant child before its existence is known, that's not something in the law it's just her covering the story of her own accord. had they asked she would hae given fake bones or something.
  • Officially asking for the evidence would have attracted more attention to it, which is something that none of the parties involved wanted. Also, Luv had the intention of just taking the bones and leave, Coco had the unfortunate bad timing of arriving to the office at that moment. With Joshi, it's pretty clear that Luv wasn't supposed to kill her, since she mentions she will have to make up a lie to justify herself with Wallace.

K's fate

• So, is K supposed to have died in his last scene? The consensus seems to be that he does, but when I was watching the scene I assumed he was just resting. If he does die, then how come he was able to drive/fly long enough for night to become day, and then act more or less normal after sustaining a "mortal" injury?
  • It's pretty obvious from the filmmaking at play that K is supposed to be dead. He sends Deckard off alone because he doesn't want to quite literally drop dead in the middle of their reunion, and the scene is a clear Call-Back to Roy Batty's death in the original. Think about it, a replicant with whom Deckard only has brief interactions saves his life after a long and brutal fight scene in the rain. The scene being scored with 'Tears in Rain' from the original just drives the comparison home, it's a reflection of the original ending with a different context. As for the pain resistance, being that he's a Replicant designed for law enforcement, he very well may have been able to suppress the pain long enough to be able to fly back to the lab with what little strength he has left. He's still probably coming off a massive adrenaline rush, so he's using that long enough to avoid the obvious pitfalls of, well, dying.
  • To add to the above, when Deckard asks K if K was alright, K dodges the question by telling Deckard to go meet his daughter. K's been shown to use this tactic to get around the "replicants cannot lie" feature, so it's clear he knew he was dying. That, and right after Deckard went inside, K's walking became weaker (showing that acting "normal" was literally just an act) and as he sat down, the camera blatantly focuses on his wounded area which has now seeped through his clothing. Finally, the scene was foreshadowed near the beginning, where K was forced to use glue to repair a stab wound and it was clear he couldn't properly heal for whatever reason. The foreshadowing indicated that the bleeding hadn't even slowed down - let alone stopped - and thus he was on his last breaths. Then again, Blade Runner is all about viewer interpretation, so there could be elements hinting at K's survival that I missed.]]
  • The camera cuts away from K rather abruptly after he lies down in the snow. It was a deliberate choice by the director to leave his ultimate fate ambiguous.
  • Word of God is that K is dead.
  • One should be careful about what to consider Word of God, especially with a property like Blade Runner. For example, Ridley Scott went on record saying Deckard was a replicant, but was quickly ruled Canon Discontinuity since the rest of the crew insisted it was supposed to be ambiguous.
  • Leaving the question ambiguous gives them a pretty convenient Sequel Hook as well, if they ever decide to continue directly on with K's story.

K's memories

• So is there any reason for K to have false implanted memories of being Deckard's and Rachel's child? Seems like that caused more trouble than if he hadn't.
  • It's implied that Ana deliberately recreated the memory and passed it on to Wallace Corp as one of the many implants. As to why exactly, there are two possible reasons: Ana was told by the replicant resistance to insert genuine memories into replicants to make them more human, or she did it of her own accord as a way to share her experiences with others. It's not unlike a programmer inserting some of their own personal code into a program just for fun.
  • Coincidence. It's likely that a lot of replicants have that memory, she used it because it's a strong memory of her own, one that fits for Replicant loyalty (being good and heroic and firm, but never retaliating to abuse). One of the main elements of the film is that there's nothing special about K, he's just in the right place at the right time...
• If many replicants have that memory, and many of them think they're the Child, why didn't any of them go back to the orphanage to take the wooden horse out of the furnace before?
  • K only had enough information and freedom to track down the horse because he was specifically tasked with investigating the Child. Other replicants likely would have had no way of finding it even if they tried.
  • It's never said that any other replicants had that memory. Though if they did, without any context, they would have no idea where to find the foundry where it occurred. K only happened across it because he was looking for the child and had the LAPD's birth records to point him to the orphanage. They would also have no reason to believe the memory was real or otherwise special; K didn't either until he came across the date etched into Sapper's tree that happened to match the engraving.
  • It's also never said that any other replicants had reason to believe they were the child. Freysa doesn't say they all thought they were the child, she says they all wish they were the child.
  • Moreover, given that Replicants are created as a slave race - each, presumably, with a specific purpose - how many of them would ever have the opportunity to freely travel away from where they work, to an isolated orphanage in the middle of a toxic waste dump full of scavengers? The only reason K was able to was because he's a blade runner cop with access to transportation and the freedom to follow bread crumbs.

Breeding replicants

• Why is it a big deal to make Replicants who can breed? They are flesh and blood, they have genes. One assumes that their genes are based on humans. One would think it would take more work to make them not be capable of breeding.
  • It's pretty clear to this troper that the long-term goal of Replicants is to replace humanity with something more survivable. If they can breed, they can continue to increase their own population even if the factories are destroyed.
  • They have flesh harder than wood and special blood for space travel, whatever is given to them to have a finite lifespan and Super-Strength could make them barren like if you give steroids treatment to a human. Also it wasn't until Nexus 6 Replicants that they could be mistaken for humans, other before looked more like machines.
  • Because replicants, unlike other forms of domesticated animal life, are bioengineered from the ground up. It's very likely that the process used to build them results in replicants becoming sterile. As for why it's a big deal, just look at how much Fantastic Racism replicants have to deal with for merely existing. The only thing that keeps regular humans calm is the belief that the number of replicants will only ever be finite because they have to be manufactured and therefore can never truly replace humans. Throw the capability for replicants to naturally reproduce into the mix and now replicants go from being a nuisance to a legitimate existential threat.
  • Given how much it is played up that humans have souls and replicants don't, it's a big deal because it means that replicants have evolved souls, and are now truly alive. Blade Runner 2049 isn't science-fiction, it's science-fantasy, and as such doesn't lend itself to scientific logic. For the premise of the movie to work, you have to accept that humans have souls, and that certain physical abilities are inherent to having a soul, such as giving birth, and feeling empathy.
  • The movies still use soul as an expression nothing tangible, they cal the Replicant soulless because they are synthetic, they don't feel empathy because they weren't designed to nor taught while humans learn and has Tyrell pointed out Replicants can experience empathy if they live long enough and experience the right stimuli, just like humans.
  • The soul is something which exists as an expression of consciousness even in science. Just isn't used in some places because of the religious terminology. Here, it's just another sign of humans justifying their Fantastic Racism.
  • Related to the above, as we saw with Agent K, Replicants are perfectly capable of feeling emotion. They just don't think they can.
  • Not to mention, as in the original film, much of the overall theme is comparing and contrasting humans with their artificial creations. Was Deckard, the alcoholic Defective Detective chowing on ramen and obeying his boss's directive to kill the Replicants any more human than Roy and his companions, trying to find ways to stay alive? Are Luv, Joi, and K AKA "Joe", expanding beyond their original designs and purposes, any less human than the stiff Joshi or the unsettlingly cold Wallace? Do any of these characters have souls? Do all of them?

Obedient replicants

• So according to the opening scrawl, all the replicants made for years now are made to be obedient. Yet both Luv and K repeatedly ignore or disobey direct orders, and in general act contradictory to the wishes of their commanders, with no apparent difficulties?
  • Luv works for Wallace. No doubt she is different as Wallace uses her for illegal activities.
  • Wallace is full of shit, as Replicants goes on they adapt to the world and see things differently. Plus Luv never disobeyed him.
  • The guarantee of obedience due to production quality is most likely a Wallace company lie tacitly accepted and endorsed by the government in exchange for the labor Replicants provide. The obedience of later models can actually be attributed to two things - first, the newer Replicants have lifespans comparable to humans. This was the major reason they rebelled in the first place. Secondly, they go through routine behavior monitoring to look for any sudden shifts in personality, so Replicants that do consider rebelling are likely quietly retired before they can shoot up a neighborhood or go on a rampage. Thus, to the public it seems like the Wallace corporation has "fixed" the flawed mental programming caused by Tyrell when in reality they just gave the Replicants something major they were willing to fight and die for (human-like lifespans) and do constant maintenance to take out non-conformist units.
  • Given that Luv tells Joshi that she's going to lie to Wallace about the circumstances of the other character's death, it's implied that she does disobey him (or at least disobeyed by implication, such as if he never explicitly ordered her to do the killing). Wallace just doesn't know Luv is going rogue yet because she's careful to cover her tracks.
    • Not to mention that by that point of the film she's well "off-baseline" and thus exactly now one of the non-conformist units the maintenance was supposed to detect and "retire." Compare to K lying directly to Joshi's face when he's off-baseline but being unable to lie by ommission to Deckard when calm. Zig-zagging that though is a sense of a "zeroth law" where Luv may be willing to lie to Wallace but is still explicitly serving his ends—achieving her master's objectives is more important than simple rote truthfulness to him.
    • This. The replicants will be obedient as long as they stay baseline, that's why they get routinely checked. Luv probably is not even close to being baseline, but she belongs to who is probably the most important person in the world so she gets a free pass.

Finding out about the bones

• So Wallace has his agents swipe the Madonna-replicant-bones, sure... but is it ever explained how he found out about the bones in the first place? The only thing I can think of is maybe there's a deleted scene where we learn he has an informant inside the LAPD.
  • K basically told him by bringing the serial number and hair to Wallace HQ to see if they had that replicant on file.

Joi seeing

• How does Joi perceive her surroundings when she's not in K's apartment? Sure, there'll be cameras and certain types of sensors everywhere, but it's somewhat unlikely that a civilian AI like she would have access to those. Becomes especially blatant once K goes on the run and ends up in the nuked ruins of Las Vegas.
  • It seems that the emanator lets her hear things going on around the device even when her hologram projection is turned off; her program active in the device even when we can't see her. The rest she gets from being programmed to read his body language and verbal cues to infer his feelings and thoughts.
  • Building on the above, the emanator and her installation in K's apartment likely employed sonar. As for things like looking on in awe while flying above LA in K's car, that's probably just acting.
  • She is a costly civilian A.I. K had to retire Replicants to have the emanator as a bonus.

Joi's Emanator

• Joi is explicitly stated to be a hologram, yet she is present even when the emanator is in K's pocket or otherwise obscured. In his car, he left it on the floor where it could slide around and go under a seat or the glove compartment. How does this work?
  • Your assumption seems to be that holograms are transparent to air, but not to solid matter. But since 3D holograms are fictional to begin with, there's no basis for this assumption. If this were Star Trek, it would be a violation of established rules, but nothing in Blade Runner suggests that holograms require line-of-sight to work (except the one in K's apartment, which is quite clearly less advanced).

Joi being a hologram

• Why was Joi a hologram at all? Surely if K wanted a companion, a Replicant version would have been more useful? At the very least it could do things for you when you are away, and you could have sex with it instead of finding a hooker. Then again, maybe Holograms don't need to be "baselined".
  • Could be a question of cost. Replicants seem to be pretty expensive for the average consumer. We typically see them owned or employed by wealthy individuals and large organizations.
  • Considering replicants were banned for a long time, they must be strictly regulated. Allowing private individuals to own replicants (especially when that individual is himself a replicant) may well be restricted, if not outright illegal.
  • Joi, being a hologram, can be customized at will, unlike a replicant. Although considering K's genuine affection for her, this was probably not an important factor for him.
    • I'd say it was the most important factor for him, at least initially. K most likely developed such an affection for Joi precisely because she was the ideal woman for him, with the guy spending countless hours editing every feature to his liking (something that people already do in MMORPGs, I must add).
  • For all we know, it is not legal for a replicant to own another replicant.

Illegal memories

• If giving Replicants an actual human memory (as opposed to the ones manufactured by artists like Ana) is highly illegal, then how did K end up with Ana's memory of the horse?
  • Ana said she takes her freedom wherever she can get it.
  • Note that Ana's memory of the horse is entirely incompatible with what everyone thinks her Back Story is. It's no wonder that she's able to share her real memories with so many Replicants without getting caught.

Joi calling Mariette

• Mariette works for the Replicant resistance. She had sex with K in order to plant a homing device on him that the resistance can use to locate him. Joi called Mariette up to K's apartment. Did Joi do this on her own initiative, or did the resistance hack her in order to get the homing device planted?
  • Her own initiative. Joi recognised K liked her (since he was carrying the device with him by then) insofar as she looked identical to her, so called her.

Replicants and sex

• So why do Replicants have sexual organs and presumably a desire, or at least ability for it? In models designed to be sex workers it makes sense, but for the rest it seems like a potential reason to go off baseline (distracted by lust, absconding with lovers, etc). Wallace has his god-complex and wants them to reproduce eventually sure, but until he 'opens the lock' wouldn't buyers - especially with the more specialised, important models like K's - want to minimise any risk?
  • Going by Joshi's interaction with K it's not like wanting to fuck them is solely based on sex workers. And if self preservation is overridden like Wallace showed ordering them to be chaste isn't that hard if they want to.
    • This statement makes a lot of sense. If you have a replicant on your staff, or you have a replicant that is your secretary or maid, and you're in the mood, are you really going to go all the way downtown to get with a replicant that's been with lord knows how many people? Wallace's replicants would make it easy for humans to relieve whatever emotions they have whenever they want, including sexual in nature (and even more so for those who serve as a member of staff, secretary or maid, as they may not get into much action). Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if it's not on the replicants advertisements as much like how it is on Joi's advertisements (seriously, they even state that she can be whatever you want her to be and she would cater to your needs). So, all replicants are designed with sex organs and possibly desire because it's catering to the needs of the humans (much like how they're designed to be used for manual labor and, as we've seen with the original film, soldiers as well).
    • Besides all of that, it's simpler to design and produce them if they have a lot of overlap between them, insofar as those overlapping features don't cause problems for one specialty or another. Who's to say a Nexus 9 designed for soldiering even needs to be designed any differently from a cop or a coal miner or an accountant. Does it hurt anything for your accountant to be able to carry his desk with him any more than it hurts for a soldier to be able to perform double-entry bookkeeping? The only difference between them in the field might be the training provided to them.
    • We do know that replicants are not made the same, they have both a physical and mental rating. Also, in the sequel there was that brief conversation between Luv and that rep from a mining operation, where she suggests removing certain features that would make the replicants more human in order to save costs. It's even implied that they indeed can be made without genitals. On the other hand, one has to remember that the replicants are treated as nothing but tools to be used and abused as humans please, so it's entirely conceivable that when buying replicant for certain specific tasks, most would rather pay full price so him/her could be also used for... *ahem* recreative purposes.
  • Tyrell wanted to make a new humanity and probably made them as humanlike as possible to pass the Uncanny Valley.

The point of K's visit with Ana

• The big reveal when K visits Ana seems to be that his memory of the wooden horse is real, not created. He throws a fit when he hears it from her. Except it was already clear that the memory was real by the fact that he found the horse exactly where it was supposed to be. The question was whether the memory was implanted, because even knowing it's real doesn't prove that it was his memory, and that is what would prove that he's the child. Why would he not ask that question, and instead freak out over old news?
  • She told him no memories of replicants made by her are real so if she says it's real then it has to be K's. She doesn't need to say I did not implant it when she already said it. K just needed a confirmation of something he already thought he knew.
  • K is operating on the metric that if the memory is real, then it can't be implanted... and Ana only tells him that the memory is real, not whether the memory was implanted or not. She lets him construct the lie for her with incomplete information. To him, the memory is real and therefore not implanted; the not-implantation is "new news," and he freaks out enough to completely fail a baseline test. This way Ana can lie to K with a minimum of fabrication, which is how all good lies are supposed to work.
  • She tells him it's illegal to use real human memories in Replicants; therefore when she tells him its real, the only conclusion he can draw is that it really happened to him.

Why didn't Ana Lie?

• Why does Ana tell K that "someone lived this memory" right after telling him that it's illegal to implant real memories? Did she want K to assume that he was the child? Because that was the (misleading) implication. To protect her secrets (that she's the child and that she implanted a real memory) shouldn't she have lied and said that it was just another fake? She didn't know K or the personal journey he was going on. She had no reason to drop that revelation on him, which also endangered her secret, unless she was hoping to be reunited with her father, and even without knowing K she assumed that the information would drive him to seek out Deckard, learn where the memory really came from, AND do the right thing by bringing Deckard to her rather than killing him or letting Wallace get him. And of course, all of this put K through emotional and physical turmoil, ultimately resulting in his death.
  • I don't recall anything in the movie suggesting that Ana is aware of her true origin, so there is no secret to protect, at least from her perspective. She seemed to be a very emotional person, and was visibly shocked from seeing that powerful memory of her childhood, so she most likely didn't have enough presence of mind to lie to K. And if you want to be cynic about it, her being Wallace's #1 provider of memories probably means she feels safe from any reamifications of using real memories on the replicants.

Las Vegas energy source

• Since Las Vegas has been completely abandoned for almost 30 years, how can all the electrical devices in the casino Deckard hides in still be functioning? Even if the casino had backup generators, surely they would've run out of juice years ago? A renewable source of electricity such as solar panels wouldn't work either, since everything is covered by a thick smog.
  • Maybe its windmills.
  • Solar panels would work, just not very efficiently. You can actually see a few outside the bar, and there are probably many others, plus some batteries. It could work if Deckard is smart about rationing. After all, the one high-powered electrical object we see (the Presley-o-Matic in the lounge) was turned off. He presumably did the same for any other unnecessary gizmos that might leech power.
  • Further, the power consumption of a single man and his dog would be miniscule compared to what the casino (or the entire city, for that matter) would be designed around, especially if Deckard doesn't care about keeping the place air conditioned. Also, in Real Life, as in Fallout: New Vegas, much of Las Vegas's power needs are provided by Hoover Dam, which may or may not still be operating in 2049 despite everything. The real wonder would be that the power lines are still intact after years of disuse and scavengers.

Why "Bad" memories?

• Never mind if K's memory came from Ana herself or not. Ana's job is to insert good memories for replicants to 'have some good thoughts to think about'. So why a story of a child getting bullied?
  • The don't have to be pleasant, they just have to involve something to strengthen the resolve to do their jobs.
  • Ana's job isn't to create good memories, it's to create memories. She just prefers making good ones because, well, they're good. But in order to realistically simulate human behavior, replicants need to have diversity in their memories.
  • I believe someone makes a comment about how the memory reflects K's determination. Remember that the story is actually a success: the subject successfully hides the horse and does not back down even after getting beaten up. The crowd of kids fail to steal it.

Las Vegas safe to live in?

• So Deckard has been living in Las Vegas for a few years at least. The city was abandoned because a dirty bomb went off and the place is radioactive. So why isn't he dead from radiation poisoning?
  • Replicants were made to work in several conditions where humans can't be, including high radiation. If you buy the theory that Deckard is a replicant, then that's the explanation. Of course, if the bees and the dogs are real, then it would imply that the radiation in Las Vegas dissipated to tolerable levels, which would still allow Deckard to be human if that's your prefference.
  • It's easy to miss, but during the scene where K is exploring the ruins with his UAV, it performs a radiation scan that indicates the levels are back to normal by now. Also, when K first got the location from Dr. Badger, he says there's only one place that used to have that much radiation. Important detail in his wording, there. Lastly, K asks Deckard if his dog is real, which indicates that K believes the place to be safe enough for non-replicants. Otherwise, there would be no question that the dog was engineered. The question, and Deckard's response, may well be a small nod to the people who would obviously be wondering the same about Deckard. "Figure it out for yourself", which certainly seemed to be the writers' intent.

How did K work out who Ana's parents were?

I didn't notice anything that foreshadowed it, it seemed like an Ass Pull or did something go over my head?

• The movie does sort of abridge the details of that revelation. K seems to put the pieces together in the "flashback montage" during his meeting with Freysa, where he recalls Ana's pained reaction to the wooden horse memory, along with that bit of Foreshadowing when she said "There's a bit of every artist in their work". The implication being that it was her own memory that she created and sold to Wallace, and K ended up being a recipient. It does feel like a bit of a stretch — the whole meeting with Ana felt like the weakest link in the plot to me (I pointed out in an earlier topic that K asked the wrong question of her: he already knew the memory was real, he was supposed to ask her if the memory was his) — but I suppose we can wave it off as something Freysa or one of the other replicants confirmed for him off-screen as he was leaving to rescue Deckard.

Why did Luv leave K alive in Las Vegas?

It doesn't make any sense to me, why leave behind a potential threat (minimal as it could be) to Wallace's plan?

• Luv had no reason to believe anyone would be able to find him out there in the middle of nowhere (and nobody would have, if not for the tracker Mariette slipped him), but even so it's a bit of a Villain Ball moment. Perhaps a better explanation is that Luv didn't want to kill him outright because of the Villainous Crush she clearly has towards him (he wasn't a threat to her at the time, unlike at the sea wall later).

Why no robots?

• Robots seem like they would be more controllable, easier to invent, and cheaper than genetically engineered slaves. So why has a society that has invented synthetic people never invented plain old robots?
  • We have no idea how much a mass-produced replicant costs, it could very well be cheaper than a mechanical robot of similar physical abilities. The "controllable" factor is indeed a good point, but it could be that AI simple wasn't good enough and it was preffered to have sapient creatures with quick, abstract decision making skills. Also, by the year 2036 the Replicants were made much more obedient, so that was less of a problem.
  • The Doylist reason for it is obviously the Anthropic Principle. The main theme of both movies is about the humanity (or not) of replicants. But for in-universe reasons, there are a few possibilities. Mass-producing replicants may well be cheaper than we think compared to robots when you consider the scarcity of rare Earth metals (which is already becoming a problem now). Scavenging electronics seems to be a lucrative cottage industry in BR, as seen in the junkyard orphanage. Replicants, on the other hand, presumably require only biomass, and remember that Wallace made his fortune in synthetic food production. Replicants are also better generalists than robots. Robots tend to be built and programmed for specific tasks, whereas replicants can do anything a human can, use any tool or vehicle designed for a human, with all the intelligence of a human, if desired.

Was Tyrell a good guy all along?

• We now know that Tyrell worked on creating Replicants with a full lifespan (instead of their pitiful 4 year expiration date), implanting them with real memories to solve the issue of their stunted emotional development, and more importante, giving them the ability to procreate. Does this mean he also had some larger plans for the Replicants in the future? Conversely, does it mean that by killing Tyrell, Roy unintentionally screwed things up for his people?
  • A better question for the original movie, but I never got the impression that Tyrell was necessarily supposed to be a bad guy. He's at least an Anti-Villain, certainly compared to Wallace. Whether Tyrell's interest was motivated more by empathy or scientific curiosity, he still engaged Roy as an intellectual equal, whereas Wallace gutted one of his replicants just for the fun of it.
  • Tyrell didn't have any real on-screen antagonism for either Deckard or Roy. He was genuinely enthused to see Roy when J.F. took him to his penthouse, and honestly answered Roy's questions about prolonging currently existing Replicant life (that it was impossible; either a virus would mutate quickly enough to kill the subject in seconds, or they'd die slowly after cell mitosis made their DNA unstable). He did seem to really be interested in creating Replicants that were truly "more human than human", as shown with Rachael who was so advanced, she truly thought she was human. So when Roy killed Tyrell, the secret to creating Replicants capable of reproducing was lost with him. And since the Tyrell Corporation went on to create the Nexus 8's, who were basically the 7's but without the secret feature they had, this led to the rise of human supremacy against the 8's. And this led to the 8's creating the Great Blackout of '22 that destroyed nearly all the records of Replicant production, but also led to the world entering practical Dark Age and a decade of a moratorium of further Replicant creation until Wallace came on the scene. Long story short: Tyrell wasn't "bad" (other than creating a race of people used for slave labor), and Roy basically set Replicants on Earth back for decades.
  • Long story short, what makes Tyrell an antagonist is not any kind of malice. It's his hubris. Despite the sci-fi setting, his story really boils down to the classical plot of pitfalls in trying to overcome God (whether capitalized or not).

Lack of interest in Sapper's tree

• Wood is established to be extremely expensive, which would make that tree outside Sapper's house worth a fortune. Sapper had a sentimental reason not to cut it down, and K might be too "baseline" to have any ambition, but you'd think at least the cops in K's precinct would have some sort of reaction to a fortune in wood just sitting there on a dead replicant's front yard.
  • I'm no woodworker, but I believe many types of tree wood become unsuitable for crafting once they have been dead for a time, not good for much else besides burning. Sapper's tree looked pretty desiccated.

Gaff's memories of his working relationship with Deckard

• Given what Gaff tells K about the old days, K would be led to believe that they had this warm buddy cop relationship.
  Gaff: “He liked to work alone, so did I. So we worked together to keep it that way.”

Where did all of this come from? It was evident from the first film that although they knew of each other prior to the events of the first film, they never spoke much to each other, let alone worked together.

Deckard's narration:The charmer's name was Gaff. I'd seen him around. Bryant must have upped him to the Blade Runner unit. That jibberish he talked was city-speak, guttertalk, a mishmash of Japanese, Spanish, German, what have you. I didn't really need a translator. I knew the lingo, every good cop did. But I wasn't going to make it easier for him.

And later, he says this in narration.

Deckard's narration: I didn't have to worry about Gaff. He was brown-nosing for a promotion, so he didn't want me back anyway.

And even in the first movie, Gaff didn't do much working with Deckard aside from checking out Leon's apartment together.

• He's covering for him. Gaff could have killed Rachel at the end of the first film, but for reasons of sympathy or otherwise, he let Rachel and Deckard go. It's thirty years later and a simple white lie of "We were colleagues. But we kept our distance and he kept his own council." allows him to continue to hide Deckard's disappearance.

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