If you saw Blade Runner 2049 this weekend, you probably left the theater with a few questions. What happened to Jared Leto’s eyes? Can replicants and humans really reproduce together? And is Harrison Ford a goddamn replicant or not?

There are lots of fascinating debates to be had after the credits roll, and I hope Blade Runner fans are ready to start having them. (It didn’t help, of course, that critics were expressly forbidden from saying basically anything about Blade Runner 2049 before it was released.)

But the gloves are finally off, and there’s one scene I’ve been dying to talk about since I saw Blade Runner 2049: The strangest and most interesting sex scene I’ve seen in any movie this year. It’s a kind of technologically enhanced ménage à trois between the characters played by Ryan Gosling, Ana de Armas, and Mackenzie Davis, and it’s complicated enough that it merits a particularly in-depth analysis. So let’s take a look at it from each character’s perspective.

Warner Bros.

K

The sex scene begins when K (Ryan Gosling) returns to his tiny Los Angeles apartment. His life—as a replicant created, specifically, to hunt and kill other replicants—is not deeply fulfilling. Early in the movie, we watch K stoically return to his apartment as fellow tenants hurl anti-replicant slurs at him. The only interactions K has within anyone are transactional. There’s his boss (Robin Wright), who alternates between browbeating him and making passes at him. There are all of his adversaries, from the villainous human Niander Wallace (Jared Leto) to Wallace’s brutal replicant enforcer Luv (Sylvia Hoeks). When K does meet someone new—say, the replicant played by Dave Bautista—it’s generally so he can kill them. And when K is not trying to kill someone—as with Harrison Ford’s Rick Deckard—that person is generally trying to kill K.

The Long Solo Flight of Harrison Ford Since the dawn of Hollywood, no movie star has seemed to need stardom—or movies—less than Harrison Ford.

The big exception is Joi (Ana de Armas). Joi expects nothing from K. In her first scene, she shifts roles and outfits rapidly: Brady Bunch-style housewife, attentive and sympathetic confidant, coy seductress. It is only after we’ve seen Joi play those wish-fulfillment roles, and several others, that Blade Runner 2049 makes it clear that Joi is a computer program—an adaptive hologram K purchased to improve his exceptionally lonely life.

The sex scene comes later, when K—in the midst of a complicated and potentially world-changing investigation that might also explain his own murky origin story—has begun to rely on Joi all the more. Joi responds to K’s desire, and her own (apparent) desire for him, by hiring Mariette (Mackenzie Davis), a replicant sex worker whom Joi can holographically project herself onto. As Joi’s features merge with Mariette’s—the computer program doing its best to mimic the movements of a physical body—the effect is fascinating and creepy and intimate, merging the features of the two actresses together, with subtle but unsettling breaks in the projection.