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.