Headscratchers / I Am Mother

• Where did Woman see all the other people she drew pictures of? One possibility is that all the TV shows she watched when she was in the special breeding/learning facility stayed in her mind, and she was mentally reworking them into people from a vaguely-referenced "mine". Possibly she had become mentally unbalanced due to her years of isolation outside the compound in a very hostile world.
  • Woman wasn't born in the facility. She was born before the apocalypse, which was only about 38 years ago.
  • Actually, that's the twist at the end. Woman is Mother's failed first experiment. Mother incubated an embryo within days of human extinction, but if we do the math, when it says how many days since the apocalypse, it matches approximately how old Woman is, not how old Daughter is. Plus the new Mother droid at the end pretty much alludes to this when she confronts Woman in the beached shipping container.
    • Huh? The new Mother droid said to Woman that it's awfully funny how she's managed to survive for so long, almost as if someone had a plan for her... until now. In other words, Mother kept Woman alive because she was a part of her plan to test Daughter. And I am not sure where this Headscratcher came from, because I'm pretty sure when Daughter asks her about the pictures, she talks about how she was in a survivor camp (and later moved to a mine) and she was an orphan taken in by a couple, and in the ending, she says that she left the mines because everyone else was going crazy and the droids probably wiped it out since, unless I'm missing something?
    • In their final scene together Mother makes an offhand comment to the Woman, "Do you remember your own mother?" alluding to the fact that she's an orphan. It's possible this means she was actually gestated in the facility by Mother and then abandoned for the human survivors to find, explaining things like when the Woman would've gotten the chance to watch The Tonight Show, but this may be Epileptic Trees.
    • When Daughter opens the embryo container, there are 3 missing from the females: APX 01, APX 02, and APX 03. When she investigates the grading tablets (?), she picks up one for APX 02 and it says "FAILURE" and "ABORTED"; this is intercut with finding the ashes and the small child's jaw. We never see APX 01, but we can assume that was the first child born at the very beginning of the film. And I may be wrong, but the young girl we see right after the opening montage set to "Baby Mine" (she asks why there aren't any more children) looks a lot like the picture used for APX 02. This would mean that wasn't Daughter we saw as a little child. I would also guess the baby we see at the very beginning isn't Daughter either, but APX 01 or APX 02.
• Why does Woman even try knocking on the hatch and asking for help in the first place? There's no reason for her to think there's anyone inside, and even given that she's desperate after being shot, there's no reason for her not to think that even if it's not just another ruin from before the apocalypse, that it won't be full of robots.
  • That's all part of Mother's "long con" / Xanatos Gambit. She had subtly manipulated circumstances to get Woman to that point - by, e.g., commanding her outside droids to hunt her but never quite catch her and thus slowly "herd" her to the facility.
• Even if Mother molded Daughter into what she believes is the ideal human, how is Daughter going to raise humanity? She's one person with a bunch of embryos, she doesn't have the lifespan or multiple bodies to guide humans.