They are, we are given to understand, Rachel's bones, the female protagonist of the first film. It turns out that K's replicant victim Sapper Morton has buried a box containing the bones of another replicant under this tree, bones that shall turn out to be the hidden sacred relics of this tale. The farm seems to consist of two hot houses and a house, and there is a dried-out tree almost always in the middle of the shot. Soon enough, certain revelations will put K's beginnings as a sentient being in question again. In this world originally created by Dick, one is never sure whether a character one encounters is a human or a replicant, and it is only when Sapper Morton, the replicant that Agent K has to retire, pushes K through a wall that we are certain K must be made of something sturdier than flesh.
He's wearing weathered workman's clothes that somehow suggest a Soviet aesthetic - the colors, surfaces, and even the pot that's boiling over the heater takes us into Tarkovsky's "Stalker" territory. The spiraling movement of the camera, with Hans Zimmer music first hurls me into the world of "Space Odyssey," and then when our ride with Blade Runner Agent K finishes, we land in a dusty, yellow world where a "farmer" is testing his produce in hot houses that have Russian writing on them. There are still blade runners whose job is to retire old-make androids, or replicants, as Philip K. The starting credits have informed us that after where the story was left off in the first Blade Runner, after the first uprising of the androids there was a cataclysm, all farming on earth stopped (was there much of it anyway, I forget), and a new mogul called Wallace has started to make androids that will not rebel. It starts off with a dizzying angle showing shiny surfaces, and then we realize we're in a car/vessel over desert conditions.
Villeneuve's film is full of references to the collective memory of cinema, so to speak. The film tries to invest in the emotional tie between the replicant and the hologram in several ways. The totem for memory in 'Blade Runner 2049' is a wooden horse, hidden not in an attic, but very near the furnaces of the ground floor of a horrifying factory. But already the images of "Blade Runner 2049" are seeping into the generic attic-room atmosphere I want to create for my own narrative purposes. So re-entering the "Blade Runner" world recreated by Denis Villeneuve has been a much anticipated, strange delight, akin to a sensation of going to the attic to look at the books and toys you have discarded once, not sure if you can understand the moral of that particular old book, or get the springs working in that once much loved toy horse. It has been with me for decades like a childhood memory, experienced once, but certain aspects of which have been told and retold by myself and my elders - film critics. Although I never went back to the film or the book I have made references to it in my own work. Dick's novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" and did a project on it. I watched the original 1982 version of Blade Runner at a very impressionable age and it raised my awareness, more than any other work of art, about what being human meant, what a soul might be, and what purpose memories serve.