Fridge Brilliance
- Fridge Brilliance: Roger Ebert, initially a critic of the ending, warmed up to it in his "Great Movies" essay
after gaining a new interpretation of the ending.
Fridge Horror
- Suspiciously convenient, isn't it, that when Gigolo Joe gets mixed up in a murder case and needs to shed his operating license, he just happens to have a scalpel handy in a toolkit he keeps in his arm? This is no Contrived Coincidence, however: while the only clients of his we see on the screen are evidently lonely ladies with relatively vanilla sexuality, Gigolo Joe and his fellow robot prostitutes presumably have the programming to deal with a versatile range of clients, including sadomasochists. They also presumably have some of the more portable pieces of equipment such clients would require for playing out their fantasies... such as scalpels, which fit easily in a tool kit in the hollow spaces in the robots' arms, and can be used both as a torture instrument for masochists and a weapon for defense against more sadistic clients whose rape-and-torture fantasies take a lethal turn.
- Or it could be for removing constricting clothing in emergencies. Or tracheotomies.
- Or just a standard self-repair implement for robots with fleshy outer sheaths, same as Teddy has a needle and thread.
- The "Trenton incident", mentioned in the movie, was revealed in the novelization. A homeless, drunk man was scanned with malfunctioning equipment and ripped apart on stage at the Flesh Fair, them thinking he was a mecha. This adds an extra element to the crowd's protests at the very life-like David being part of the Flesh Fair.
- What happens to Teddy?
- For that matter, what happens to David? Does he wake up tomorrow missing his now permanently-dead mommy, or does he simply not wake up?
- Let me get this straight... by the end David discovers that his model of child-robot is being mass-produced, so that childless couples can purchase their own David or Darla who will love them unconditionally, just like a real child. However, as has been pointed out elsewhere, nobody wants to take care of a child forever. Add to this the fact that apparently humans consider Mechas to be disposable, to be thrown away when they no longer serve their purpose or even when their human owners get tired of them. How many Davids and Darlas wound up abandoned and crying for their parents?
- David and most likely all future Davids and Darlas can only imprint on one parent. So when childless couples buy a David or Darla, that couple either has to buy two robots or have to agree on who will be loved by the child and who will be accepted.
- Here's a bit of Fridge Squick from one seemingly throwaway line: David may be the first robot with a child's personality, but he's not the first robot with a child's anatomy. How we know this? David's "brother" Martin notices, when he's first introduced to him, that he's not like other robots he's met before; specifically, "You're not cute."
All the other human-looking robots in the movie were serving humanity either as household laborers, or SexBots. A robot with a child's body wouldn't be much use as a laborer, and we didn't see any children in Rouge City. So where might Martin have seen another child robot? Simple: as the Flesh Fair ringmaster notes, there are "custom job" robots out there. The sex bot manufacturers doubtless have a very profitable sideline making child-sized custom robots for pedophiles that cost a little more, but have the same basic programming as their other sex bots (such as Gigolo Joe).
To keep a sexual version of the aforementioned "Trenton incident" from occurring, they add some unrealistically "cute" physical feature (maybe a pair of anime-sized eyes?) to differentiate their child robots from real children. Martin has apparently seen some such child robot(s) at some point in his past, though he obviously didn't realize (and wasn't told) exactly what its function was. That's why, instead of asking "Dude, do they even make child robots?" he just wonders why David looks so real.- It is possible that, since there are probably a lot of only children in this world, there are playmate robots similar to Teddy that have a cartoon or cutsey design.
Fridge logic
- Would a lock of hair contain all that person's memories as well, or are the future robots using some kind of as yet unknown technology to do that? Just how logical is it that clones would only live for one day?
- As noted by those paying attention to the robots' explanation, cloning the body from the hair's DNA is far easier than extracting the soul's "imprint" from the fabric of the universe to inhabit that body. As for why the "imprint" of the soul refuses to linger for more than one day? This is probably due to a little plot contrivance we tropers call Holding Back the Phlebotinum; for whatever reason, Kubrick and Spielberg refuse to allow David an eternally happy ending, so this "imprint" phlebotinum stuff has got a roughly 24-hour time limit on it.
- If eating spinach breaks David, why do they even give him any food at all? That's just offering him poison three times a day and expecting him not to commit suicide.
- The capacity for eating food as a social activity is probably just a feature David's programmers neglected to implement in their prototype; a particular oversight that also plagued some of the robots in West World, it's worth noting. One does have to wonder whether the engineers thought to correct that in the later models, or just went the cheaper route and instructed future "parents" not to allow their robot children to join them at the table for meals.
