Gather up your rail guns and crank up your angsty teenage energy,
because they were covering something brand new.
I'm talking about Murder Drones, one of the most popular animated series
across all of YouTube,
a series that has found
a completely different original way of communicating its story to us.
Instead of using found footage or hidden shorts videos to tell its story
like most indie projects, Murder Drones is releasing, get this, 20
minute episodes one at a time in sequential order.
What?
No QR codes? No unlisted videos? Madness.
Who knew that structuring your animated series like an actual animated
series would feel so refreshing these days?
Hello internet!
Welcome to Film Theory, the show that locked itself
behind three layers of doors to hide from the watchful eye of the algorithm drones.
And, ladies and gentlemen,
today we're going to absolute solve the world that is Murder Drones.
Produced by Glitch Entertainment here on YouTube, Murder Drones tells the story
of some teenage robots who have to save the universe from a rogue A.I.
program.
And for as much as I was just praising
the series earlier for its straightforward content delivery strategy,
it doesn't mean that the story is a purely linear experience.
This show is filled with twists, flashbacks
and fourth wall breaks that keep you on the edge of your seat,
guessing about what's going to happen next.
And that's not an exaggeration either.
If you look away for 2 seconds, you stand to miss a hidden detail
or clue buried in something as simple as flashing source
code or a class presentation, which is where I come in today.
Since this is a new series that I'd like to talk about moving forward...
Like I said, since this is a new show that I'd like to talk about again
sometime in the future, I want to start by giving you
all a simple, straightforward overview of the plot and key details
that’ll help you fill in the gaps that you might have missed
during your first or even your 40th watchthrough.
I'm also going to be doing it not in episode order but rather timeline
order, the order that all the major events actually happened in the universe
since that's the way
that makes the most sense, as opposed to the twisty way
it's ultimately presented in the show.
And hey, if I make a mistake along the way, just remember:
Then by the end of
the episode today, we’ll actually solve the rest of the first season.
That's right. We are six episodes in right now,
six episodes spread across two years.
So why wait any longer?
I suspect that I know the big twist reveals
that are going to be planned
for the final two episodes of the season and potentially even deeper
into the series.
And if you don't want to be spoiled, well,
I suppose you could always just forget everything that I say.
So let's rewind, or rather fast forward to the 3000s,
as I introduce you to a potentially new series and solve
where the Murder Drones universe is headed next.
Get hyped guys.
The main story of Murder Drones takes place in the far
future, the year 3071 to be exact, based on these balloons
that we see in the background of episode 3's prom scene.
However, the real start to our story happened quite a number of years earlier.
This was a time when humans were expanding beyond the confines of Earth
to set up colonies on planets
outside of our solar system, mining them for all their resources.
One of the biggest players in this world was:
J.C. Jenson In Spaaaaaaaace.
To help with both mining and domestic life,
the company created a series of autonomous A.I.
robots called worker drones,
each with their own personality, thoughts and feelings. Basically,
these robots were indistinguishable from a normal living creature.
Sadly, though, not everyone agreed, killing them for even perceived
minor offenses.
Pause it right there.
Putting aside the obvious issues around techno ethics here,
that type of behavior right there is a big no no in the world of murder drones.
You see, all worker drones came packaged with an established proper
set of step by step instructions for decommissioning old robots.
And they're delivered to us on old VHS tapes.
Truly a film theorist classic.
Why should you bother following those instructions?
Well:
In short, if improperly
disposed of, the dead robots might wake up literally turning into a zombie drones.
And not only do they wake up, they're changed in that process.
According to the VHS, these drones experience, quote, potentially
hazardous mutations to their coding,
which we later learned to be known as the Absolute Solver program.
And that, my friends, is
why you always get to take time to read the terms of service.
We're told that there's only a 0.01% chance that the robots
will come back to life.
And of that 0.01%, only 0.7% have this dangerous mutation, thereby
yielding a 0.007% chance
that the improperly disposed of drone will have this Absolute Solver mutation.
But, of course, this incredibly rare, will-probably-never-happen
thing, in fact, does happen.
And it happens in the form of a worker drone named Cyn,
waking up alone, confused and scared in a pile of robot corpses.
She's eventually
found by a human girl named Tessa
Elliott, who's taken
a liking to some of the broken worker drones and has been repurposing them
to be her friends.
Among the drones Tessa’s taken in are the lovable goof N, the butt kicking V
and the incredibly loyal J.
But clearly Cyn is different.
The Absolute Solver program that activated inside of her changed her.
She speaks in a more robotic,
Microsoft Sam-esque voice, literally stating her emotions as they happen.
And it generally seems that she's on the fritz, acting like a puppet on strings.
However, Tessa has a very different view on the drones than her parents.
Parents who, it would seem, work as higher ups at the JC Jenson Corporation.
While that's never directly stated in the show, we can infer it from what's
said during this moment when Tessa gets locked up by her folks.
Additionally, the family possesses an entire staff of worker drones
at their mansion on earth, treating them more like slaves and pests.
Cyn, infected by the hazardous mutation that is the Absolute Solver program, sees
this and does not like it,
eventually deciding that it would be much better
if these humans just weren't around anymore.
And so when the Elliotts throw a big dinner party at their mansion,
Cyn executes her plan, transforming into some eldritch abomination
and killing everyone at the party except for Tessa.
The only human who decided to treat this robot with respect.
And Cyn didn't just stop at the party, she killed everyone
on the planet by collapsing the core of earth.
And if you thought
killing off a planet's worth of creatures would be enough, think again.
Remember, at this point in history, humans have expanded far beyond just one
planet, meaning Cyn needed to find ways of infiltrating these exoplanets
if she truly wanted to wipe humanity from existence.
Thankfully for her, humans, ever the curious bunch did most of the heavy
lifting for her.
After seeing what happened to Earth, the humans brought Cyn's programing
into their various systems to study it, and that was a big mistake.
The Absolute Solver program does the exact same thing again on Copper
9, one of these human colonized exoplanets and our main setting for the series.
And again, all human life gets extinguished.
The newly liberated worker drones
now have no more commands that they need to follow.
They are free to live their lives as they wish.
And yet, this worker bot peace doesn't last for very long.
At some point in history
a new breed of drones, the disassembly drones or murder drones,
arrive on the scene with a directive to eliminate all the workers.
This forces the everyday bots to live behind
a series of three protective walls, Attack On Titan style.
And though the worker and murder drones
are told that this comes straight from the J.C.
Jenson Corporation, we learn in episode six that that actually isn't the case.
Instead, the murder drone massacres that are happening across various planets
are being orchestrated by Cyn for unknown reasons.
But that's weird, right?
Cyn initially retaliated against humans because of their callous mistreatment
of the worker drones, but now she's sending
murder bots out to massacre the very bots that she initially worked to free?
Why? Well, I suspect it's for recruitment.
I suspect it's a numbers game.
If the odds of the Absolute
Solver mutation activating in a dead drone is 7 in 100,000, you’re
going to need to pile up a whole lot of dead drones
in order to get a couple of Absolute Solvers out of the group.
Cyn wants to kill more and more worker drones,
not because she's cruel, but because she wants to build her army.
What's more, the Absolute
Solver mutation seems to get handed down between generations of robot families,
which, yes, is a real thing in this universe.
So Cyn may just be looking to speed up natural selection of this
super trait by weeding out all the worker drones who don't possess it.
This would basically be the concept of robotic eugenics.
Get ready to clip this next section out for your MatPat
out of context compilations, my friends.
But you can't talk about Murder Drones without talking about World War II.
During World War II, the Nazis firmly believed in eugenics,
eliminating, quote
unquote, “undesirable” genetic elements from the German population
so that the “ideal” Aryan human could dominate.
In order to create a race of genetically pure, physically fit human beings
they used tactics like forced
sterilization and selective breeding to ensure the, quote unquote,
“positive genes” were the more prevalent and circulated throughout the gene pool.
By eliminating all the normal worker drones, it enables the Absolute Solver
code to dominate and procreate, for lack of a better term.
Beyond that, though, Cyn’s motives
remain unclear, is it to build up enough of an army
to fight against the last strongholds of humanity?
Is it because she's lonely and she wants more like her?
Is it because Absolute Solver has actually been in control of her this entire time?
Currently, it's unclear,
and we're just going to need more time to see what happens.
Anyway, it's finally time that we cut to the actual events of the show.
Yeah, it is here
finally where we cut back to the story of our characters as depicted in episode 1.
Uzi, our main protagonist, is one of the drones unknowingly affected
with the Absolute Solver, having inherited it from her mother, Nori.
Sadly, Nori was killed by the murder drones soon after Uzi’s birth.
And now a teenager,
Uzi is full of rebellious
teen spirit, annoyed that the workers have hidden away from the murder drones
rather than fighting them head on.
So armed with a homemade railgun, she ventures
out of the safety of the doors and meets N, V and J,
Tessa's drone army that she rescued so many years ago.
And now the murder drone squad tasked with slaughtering the workers of Copper 9.
Except there's one problem with this:
by the end of the episode Uzi’s Absolute Solver has activated.
As we're getting this cliffhanger ending, blink
and you'll miss an important line of code flashing on Uzi’s eye visor.
It says absoluteSolver string = FALSE before quickly switching over to TRUE.
Yep. Our main protagonist now has herself a penchant for human genocide.
Which again, feels weird since Uzi didn't die here.
How could the Absolute Solver program have activated inside of her
if she needs to have been a zombie bot for it to have activated?
Well, remember the code for these drones functions a lot like DNA, meaning
that their programing can be handed down between generations.
It seems that Nori, the mother of Uzi, passed it down to her daughter in the same way
that human parents pass down hair color or some other disease or trait.
And when passed down this way, Absolute Solver doesn't require death to activate.
So Uzi teams up
with the disassembly drones to solve the mystery of what's actually going on.
Looking for clues around Copper
9 eventually leads the gang to a place called Cabin Fever Labs, an old J.C.
Jenson facility.
This place is filled with a lot of interesting details.
For one, the show makes a canon that despite killing
all humans on Earth, the Doggos are, in fact alive, safe and immortal.
See, sometimes a plot hole can be a great thing.
Also at this place, we get ourselves a tiny hint about a new character.
As Uzi’s exploring the Cabin Fever labs,
she picks up some paperwork that talks about decommissioning a particular worker
drone named S-010011X01.
We don't get an official name for the drone,
but based on the way that this
series turns serial numbers and names, the fans have dubbed this character S.
You could argue that this is just a random sheet of paper, but I don't think so.
This clue about an S drone happens
in the same episode where we learn about the insane things that Uzi’s mom
used to say before she went full Absolute Solver.
Sky demons, Singularity, cool ‘s’.
More S things.
I believe this S character will be making their appearance
sometime in the seventh episode of the series, as a good robot
built by Tessa, to make some big reveal about Uzi’s mom's death.
You see, in this series every drone has two numbers that ultimately identify them.
One is their S/N or serial number,
a string of letters and numbers unique to each character.
The second number is the P/N, presumably the product number.
This string indicates what model of drone they are.
Drones that are of the same kind have the same P/Ns.
We see that this is true with N and J and presumably V,
who all have themselves the same P/N, CYN-MYKX.
Notice that CYN or Cyn hidden right there.
All the murder drones are part of the same CYN model group
and have been controlled by Cyn at some point throughout the series.
However, this S has itself a completely new P/N that we haven't seen before.
TSA-MMAC.
Now the TSA there can't be a coincidence when we have ourselves a human named Tessa
running around who loves repairing
robots and is trying to stop Cyn’s quest of absolute domination.
In addition, I believe we'll discover
that S was a friend or colleague of Uzi’s mother Nori.
How can I be sure?
Well, in episode three, we're shown Nori’s security badge,
which shows that she used to work at Cabin Fever Labs.
The same is true for Yeva, another carrier of the Absolute Solver corruption.
And, wouldn't you know it?,
but Cabin Fever Labs is the same place that Uzi found the document about S.
Furthermore, take a closer look at that document.
We see black creepy drawings written all over it.
These drawings bear a striking resemblance
to the ones that were drawn by Uzi’s mother.
So I think at this point it's far more likely
that whoever this S character is will be an old ally of Nori and Yeva
and will be willing to lend a hand to Uzi and company
as they try to defeat the Absolute Solver corruption.
Moving back into the main story, though, for a minute, after exploring around Cabin
Fever Labs, Uzi starts to act strange and we begin to see the full extent
of her Absolute Solver powers.
She transforms into some kind of monster and attacks all the other drones.
After being talked down by N
Uzi returns to normal, solidifying them as the cutest couple ever.
Eventually, the team finds a key in the form
of a robotic cricket that unlocks the innermost part of Cabin Fever Labs.
They then run into Tessa Elliot, the girl who befriended
Cyn and the other drones back in the day.
Tessa, now an adult, has made it her mission to stop Cyn
and any other Absolute Solver drones from taking over the universe.
In the end of the most recent episode, we see Uzi, N and
Tessa finding their way to the elevator that leads down into the innermost lab,
leaving them and us, the audience, curious about what they'll discover down there.
And honestly, that's where the series stands
at the end of Episode six, the creators of the show have said
that the first season will consist of eight episodes.
We're really close to the end
and there's still a lot of mysteries that have yet to be solved.
Is Uzi going to fully transform into Cyn?
Is this mysterious S character going to make an appearance?
Will Tessa be forced to kill Uzi to save the world?
Well, loyal theorists,
it turns out you don't
have to wait for the next 4 to 6 months for the final episodes to come out.
I suspect that I already know everything that's going to happen
there, beat for beat, in the final two episodes.
In fact, I suspect that we've known where the show was headed
since the very first scene of the very first episode.
Right after the
opening exposition of episode one, the show reveals everything to us.
Right when we're first introduced.
Uzi, she's giving a PowerPoint presentation to her class
about the dangers of sitting around
waiting for the murder drones to find a way past the doors.
As she's talking, this diagram appears behind her.
This image is almost a complete rip of the infamous hero's journey.
If you're not familiar with that, the hero's
journey is a storytelling template
that many of the stories throughout history have followed,
from ancient epics like Gilgamesh
and The Odyssey to modern classics like Harry Potter and Star Wars.
If you're writing yourself a fantastical story,
then the hero's journey is breaking down the format of your narrative.
Now, on my first viewing, I saw this reference as just that, a reference.
Murder Drones loves meta humor and fourth wall breaks,
so I just chalked this up to another inside joke.
However, when I went back to the series again
in preparation for this theory, I realized that everything that's happened in
the first six episodes has lined up exactly with this little visual gag
beat for beat.
We start off with the call to action that draws the hero into adventure.
Uzi wants to leave the safety of the doors
and deal with the murder drones directly.
Then she gets saved by an unlikely aide, N.
Right after this, Uzi
teams up with a helper, Doll, and a mentor who's been around the block, Tessa.
Together, this crew fights back against a bunch of challenges,
and Uzi becomes more and more tempted to use the Absolute Solver
abilities, culminating with her
being fully possessed by Cyn and N having to cut off her hand in Episode six.
And, mind you, this diagram isn't just for any generic hero's journey.
It is one that is specifically built for Uzi.
Notice all the references to angst moments built into this wheel,
and if there is one emotion that definitely connects back to Uzi, it is angst.
So if I'm right, that then leaves us right here on the chart
at the bottom, ready for another helper and a big revelation
that's tied to three specific things: rebirth, abyss and death.
So remind me again where these characters are:
exploring Cabin Fever Labs, a giant underground facility
that keeps going down to the center point, an abyss, if you will.
And who have we been talking about this entire time:
S, potential new helper associated with Uzi’s dead
mom, who probably has more information than anyone about what happened to her.
According to the hero's journey at this point, Uzi,
our hero, will be given some sort of a revelation.
S is going to reveal some saucy detail,
something that, according to our template, will lead Uzi to a full angst overload.
If what we've seen previously are just tiny overloads,
what could this possibly look like?
What could be so devastating for Uzi to hear
that it’ll send her into a presumed meltdown?
Well, I suspect that S is going to reveal that N was the murder drone
who killed Uzi’s mom. Yeah.
I'm just as shocked as you are, but N is the most likely killer.
At this point in the series we don't actually know what happened to Nori.
All we know was that she was bitten by some murder drone
and that Nori's father ultimately had to put her down.
On Copper 9 there's only three murder drones that we know of: V, J and, of course, N.
Nothing would make for a more catastrophic revelation
than finding out your new boyfriend is the one that killed your mom.
This devastating news will be too much for Uzi to handle, and she'll fully succumb
to her Absolute Solver powers going full angst overload.
Then, after being saved once again by N in the crew,
Uzi will atone for her sins and make her mission for season two clear:
defeat Cyn, stop the Absolute Solver, and end the cycle of violence
that prevents humans and drones from living the peaceful lives they want.
So, there you have it, my friends, Murder Drones, the plot
so far as well as a solid hypothesis or two on where it might be headed
in the final episodes of the season. How am I so sure about this?
I guess you could say it's a mixture of Easter eggs,
narrative logic and a whole lot of watching other forms of media.
You know, stuff like movies, TV shows and of course, anime.
But hey!
That's just a theory. A FILM THEORY!
aaaaaaand cut.