Blade Runner 2049: 9 Easter Eggs You Probably Missed
They're easier to hunt than Replicants.
Blade Runner fans were forced to wait more than 30 years for a sequel to their beloved cult classic, but it's finally here and it didn't disappoint.
Denis Villeneuve stepped into the world created by Ridley Scott and Philip K Dick and made a little piece of it his own, taking those gritty cyberpunk visuals and wrapping them around an all-new story set three decades later.
Blade Runner 2049 follows Ryan Gosling's Officer K on a mission to round up the remaining last-gen replicants, a task which takes him to the doorstep of Harrison Ford's Deckard and sees him uncover a conspiracy with world-changing implications.
Villeneuve's sequel is everything it should be, and that includes Easter egg-filled and packed with call-backs to the original and the novel which inspired it. If these fans-pleasing nods passed you by the first time around, the chance to hunt them down at the next opportunity makes repeat viewings all the more rewarding.
Many of these bonus inclusions are tricky to spot, but at least they're easier to track down than rogue Replicants.
9. Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire
After K has dispatched Sapper Morton, he's subjected to a Post-Trauma Baseline Test to ensure he wasn't emotionally affected by his murderous mission.
Presumably standard protocol for any Blade Runner, the procedure has the subject recite words like 'cell' and 'interlinked' in response to a string of prompts.
It sounds like gibberish, but it's actually poetry, taken from the book Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov which, like Blade Runner, is rich in existential themes.
A subtle nod to the Baseline Test's inspiration appears later on in K's apartment when a copy of Pale Fire can be glimpsed. Joi doesn't appear to be a fan of the book.