Despite a middling performance at the box office, Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 was regarded as one of the best films of 2017 and a worthy sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1982 original.

In March 2022, the sci-fi sequel made its way onto Netflix in the US and quickly rose up the streaming service’s top 10 list of trending films and shows.

As such, Blade Runner 2049 has attracted plenty of new viewers who have been left with a multitude of questions about the film, including whether or not Ryan Gosling’s Officer K is a replicant.

*WARNING: Spoilers ahead for Blade Runner 2049*

What is Blade Runner 2049 about?

A sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1982 original, Blade Runner 2049 tells the story of Officer K (Ryan Gosling), a blade runner within the LAPD who is called out to ‘retire’ a rogue replicant named Sapper Morton.

After carrying out the deed, K discovers a box buried outside Sapper’s house that contains a secret that could change the whole world’s perception of replicants and potentially bring society crashing down.

The box contains the bones of a replicant who had given birth, something that was thought to be impossible.

Is K a replicant or the child?

Officer K is a replicant, meaning that he is a genetically bioengineered human.

Even his name, K, is short for his serial number, KD6-3.7 – although K’s AI companion, Joi, eventually changes this to Joe.

As a replicant blade runner, K hunts down and kills others of his own kind and is hugely unpopular among his human colleagues at the LAPD.

K starts to question his origins as the film progresses, however, as he believes that he could be the missing child of the replicant.

During his investigation, K travels to a location that he remembers as a child, finding a toy wooden horse that was hidden in his memory.

However, it turns out that K’s childhood memories were implanted in him when he was created and the memory actually belonged to the real replicant child.

Who is the child in Blade Runner 2049?

The replicant’s child in Blade Runner 2049 is Dr Ana Stelline.

We meet her during the film as she is creating memories that will be implanted into future replicants.

K seeks her knowledge to confirm if the memory of the toy horse is real or has been created.

When she confirms that “someone lived this,” K is convinced that he is the child and has been lied to his whole life.

What Ana doesn’t divulge though, is that the memory is actually hers.

K later learns that the replicant child is the daughter of Rick Deckard and Rachael, the protagonists from the original Blade Runner, and had been hidden for her own safety before Deckard even got to meet her.

After finally learning and accepting that he is not the child, K takes Deckard to meet his daughter for the first time at the end of the film.

Blade Runner 2049 is available to stream on Netflix in the US after being added to the streaming service in March 2022.

In other news, What are Blade Runners and Replicants in the Blade Runner franchise?