The film begins as a riff on the first with Blade Runner KD-9 to find Deckard and retrieve some answers.
One of the more contentious ongoing debates in cinema is whether Deckard in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner is a replicant or not.
Blade Runner asked us whether harmless existence as an artificial intelligence should be permitted, 2049 asks when something becomes human enough for us to disregard the “artificial” part.
Ridley himself has weighed in on the subject several times, believing that Deckard is an android, adamant his movie makes that explicitly clear.