Nightmare Fuel / Murder Drones

Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies here and all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.

Terrifying moments are to be expected from a show titled Murder Drones.

Spoilers ahead. You Have Been Warned.

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General:

General

• The faces that the Disassembly Drones make when they have a murderous intent. Expect to see this a lot.
• While the constant Mood Whiplash and Better than a Bare Bulb humor keeps it from getting to the point of Too Bleak, Stopped Caring, many Worker Drones are violently killed every episode, oftentimes Uzi's classmates, who are teenagers.
• The Absolute Solver, despite having a GlaDOS-like personality, is still a vicious Mechanical Abomination that turns its hosts into the robot equivalent of vampires. Or rather, biomechanical, as its work features a lot of viscera.
• The amount of oil that gets splashed all over the place whenever a Worker Drone gets attacked. Good thing it isn't blood.
• Word of God states that if any Disassembly Drone other than N encountered Uzi, the series would've been much shorter. Uzi only survived out of pure luck; if it had been any other drone, they would've been too suspicious of Uzi even if their optics were damaged and they wouldn't have been so merciful with Uzi's rebellious personality.
• The first Glitch Productions intro, as usual, depicts characters from the show you're about to watch. In this case, N and V. While N just does his salute to the viewer, V turns to look at them while holding the head of a dead Worker Drone. All while the cheery music plays.

Episodes:

Pilot

• Uzi's first encounter with N, where she sees him through a mirror bringing a torn-off drone head to his ship. Then when she looks at the mirror again, he's looking right at her.
• N's massacre of Khan's door crew. One guy gets stabbed into the wall and has his head clawed off, one is blown up by missiles, one is mauled by N, and one is sliced in half vertically before he can even tell Uzi his name. N does the last one effortlessly with a laser cutter while he's still in the middle of eating his last kill. Keep in mind, he's considered the failure of his team.
  • N comes dangerously close to killing Uzi as well, stabbing her and pinning her to the wall with one of his wings. She even coughs up oil. The horrific Slasher Smile N shoots at her while she's pinned is absolutely haunting. He’s only stopped by Khan's brilliant parenting.
  • Really any time N flip-flops between his usual cheery persona and a murderous nightmare can be pretty horrific. You can chop it up to him being a robot made for murder, personality against programming. Doesn't make it any less chilling. Just take his explanation to Uzi about why he's killing Worker Drones.
    N: "You mean aside from ingesting their warm sweet oil to keep our bodies from overheating..."
• J infecting N with a virus once he starts questioning the company, something she says she's been waiting for an excuse to do. What makes it worse is N's reaction. It'd be one thing if he were just heartbroken from it, welling up in tears (Metaphorically at least), but instead, he keeps his usual Stepford Smiler demeanor, thanking her for killing him, as his voice glitches out and he goes limp on the ground like a dying ragdoll. The whole thing has an insanely disturbing feel to it.
  N: Th-Thanks J, always lookin' out for me...
  • He drops the act after J left when apologizing to Uzi, implying that N was actually so intimidated by J that he just couldn't bring himself to say anything bad about her, making the lame "The Reason You Suck" Speech he makes to J later the first and only time he criticized her in any way, which may cross into Tear Jerker territory as well.
• V sadistically stabbing and tossing Thad around, before pulling him close, as Khan's men stand by. If Uzi and N were a second late...
• The final scene where Uzi announces that she plans to Kill All Humans can be pretty jarring, especially when some fans were convinced that humanity was already dead.
  • It gets worse. As she laughs, Uzi's eyes/screen glitches out, showing the same error-screen that popped up when N stabbed her earlier. What did he do to her?
  • Said error screen has the words "absoluteSolver string FALSE" which quicky switches to TRUE. The next episode reveals that this is a matter manipulating property.
    • Take a closer look at one of the frames when Uzi's eyes/screen glitches out. One of the words that could be missed is "corrupted." That can't be good.
    • Also, another easily missed frame mentions a Self Destruct program triggering and failing in response to the Solver string activating. Someone/something really did not want that thing switched to True!!
  • Uzi's Evil Laugh at the end starts off sounding normal (As normal as an evil laugh can sound anyway), but as it zooms out, it devolves into a mechanical reverb.

Heartbeat

• J-borne Absolute Solver is a tangled mess of skeletal limbs, half-metal, half-flesh, with claws, eyes, tentacles ending in actual human hands and J's disembodied head without her visor and bottom jaw, stuck on a tentacle made of loose ribs. It is a horrendous sight to behold.
  • Speaking of the tentacles ending in hands, one of them crawls through the darkness towards the group. While anatomically correct, the skin looks... waxy and too shiny.
• Although Uzi and Khan’s relationship is unstable, imagine being in her position when she thought that he had been captured by the Absolute Solver, watching her father be ripped in half and eaten in front of her.
• Early in the episode we see J's body with actual flesh and a ribcage in place of her chest! What the fuck are the Murder Drones?! Vickers did say that the lore behind the Murder Drones was unpleasant...
• The Absolute Solver's holograms. The first time we see this ability, the Worker Drone its impersonating is transparent, there's an obvious blue light coming from the projector, and Bad "Bad Acting" is in full effect. Seems like the imitation isn't very good, right? Well, shortly afterwards is Uzi, N, and Thad sneaking past the crime scene. One Worker Drone is casually inspecting the corpse, talking to the other drones in the room, and everything seems perfectly normal... until it all suddenly vanishes. Her co-workers, the corpse, the police tape, and even the cup she was holding in her hand and had drank from all flicker out of existence, leaving her completely alone. Arguably even worse than if it was just a Master of Illusion, it will deliberately create flawed projections to lower your guard before unleashing its true power. Uzi questioning reality after the battle against it is not surprising.
• When Lizzy asks Doll where her parents are, we get flashes of what appear to be robotic corpses crawling with robot cockroaches (like the one she kills at the end) before responding that she watched them die. Lizzy then saying "That was the joke" would make this come across as another one-off instance of the show's quirky and dark humor, but the ending revealing there's more to Doll than it seems and she'll play a role in the overarching plot turns those moments into something much more serious and ominous.
• Doll's powers enable her to bend or obliterate anything at her will, with no explanation as to how. Maybe JCJensen had a reason for sending the disassembly drones...
• When N fires the rocket at the black area where J is, the blast briefly reveals a humongous centipede-like thing that is actually bigger than said blast. In that moment, you know just how many drones it ate.

The Promening

• In the bathroom where Uzi is changing, she then notices that the bathtub is dripping blood, not oil. She then pulls back the curtain to find junk in a pool of it. Where did the blood come from if all humans are dead?
  • The next episode gives an answer that's either less or more horrific depending on your viewpoint. The Absolute Solver has the potential to transform inorganic objects into biological matter, blood included.
• After Doll catches V in her trap, she quickly proves herself to be an even greater threat than the Disassembly Drones, straight up slaughtering any Worker Drone that happened to be nearby with the Absolute Solver, the only victim spared being Lizzy, who she considers to be a friend. And she does all of this while barely moving around herself.
• In addition to crushing things and flinging stuff around, Doll is also capable of duplicating a knife as if she was duplicating a game asset.
• When the trio investigate Doll's home, they find piles of butchered worker drone corpses, ones that she had apparently been eating. The overall scene if pretty horrific, with red lighting, swarms of robotic cockroaches, and oil and severed limbs all over the place. The fact that they're all robots surprisingly does little to make it less gruesome but the series probably would have gotten age restricted to hell if they were human.
• As the trio are examining Doll's house after the fight, it seems like Uzi was tempted into getting a taste of oil which, mind you, is the robot equivalent to blood.
• Doll's reaction to Uzi getting the same kind of powers she has. It's pure unadulterated terror and pity, telling Uzi that should she find whatever it is that she's looking for, she'll help her too. This coming from someone who was about to murder her just seconds ago. What the hell is happening to Uzi and Doll?
• A new threat has come down onto the planet and casually decapitated a meandering Worker Drone. While their face is obscured completely, the being known as Tessa (as denoted by her name-tag) might very well be a human, sent by the makers of the Disassembly Drones themselves, who's finally deciding to handle the situation herself. Oh, and she has a brand-new J by her side. Whether this J is a copy or a case of Body Backup Drive is unknown.

Cabin Fever

• Uzi's Absolute Solver form isn't as eldritch as J's but holy shit, it is just as gruesome, featuring disturbingly organic wings and a tail with purple eyes and a maw of fangs.
  • Worse, the wings aren’t just organic, they actively resemble warped human arms and hands, with the concept art even including fingernails on the more complete fingers! Combined with the idea that the Absolute Solver doesn't so much create matter as reformat/alter assimilated matter, along with the fact that N's flashback suggests the likely-related black hole like null object had sucked up a large amount of material from the human-inhabited mansion, and the potential reasons why her wings look the way they do can easily start to get… Very Grim
• At one point, Uzi begins overheating, requiring her to feed on oil. Where does she get said oil? Oh, from a severed Worker Drone hand that she brought with her.
• V seems fully aware of what the true nature Uzi's Superpowered Evil Side is, and it's enough for her to instantly consider killing her on sight. Just who the hell is "Cyn?"
• Uzi shows off her Absolute Solver powers unwittingly in front of the camp group by transforming an arrow accidentally shot her way into a fleshy, squirming thing that seems to be screaming. This just furthers how utterly unnatural and lovecraftian the Absolute Solver appears to be.
• Uzi, after killing Darren and bisecting Rebecca in a murderous frenzy, is shown messily feeding on their insides. It's disturbing and disgusting for both the audience and herself, as she vomits partway through.
• N finds several training videos titled "Zombie Drones" and going to touch one triggers blurred, yellow-tinged memories of, if you look closely, the nameless Worker Drone (possibly "Cyn") shown standing behind Tessa in Episode 2, a severed arm and what appears to be an absolute gigantic object in the sky, with its details blurred out. Judging by its size, it could be a Mile-Long Ship, a Colony Drop, a black hole, or something even worse! It definitely promises complications for the future.
• Uzi pursuing her classmate in the woods and getting the drop on him with her Nightmareface.
  Classmate: (referring to the Final Girl book Uzi dropped on him) *whimper* "Does it at least have pictures?"
  Uzi: (with a Slasher Smile and Solver logo for eyes) "It doesn't. I checked."
• Given all the prophetic drawing from Nori and facilities that are still intact, it's implied that JCJenson sent the Murder Drones to either recover and/or destroy whatever the Dark Secret is still there. Which begs the question: what could be so horrible that the company would send all kinds of horrors of their own to keep buried?

Home

• CYN. Whatever she is and when she's not being weirdly adorable, she is disgusting and disturbing to the extreme.
• At the start, we find out what a Zombie Drone is: a Drone that wasn't discarded properly and still has sentience. We see this with one such Drone waking up buried deep under a mound of corpses. There's also a brief message that flashes on their visor that seems to be a conversation with none other than the Absolute Solver saying that it "will not discard you," which raises some unsettling questions.
• When N and Uzi enter the Creepy Basement where Cyn was, they find the Drones in the mansion mid-conversion into Disassembly Drones. It's not pretty, what with their lifeless heads lying on the ground with razor-sharp teeth and equations carved into the walls.
• Cyn attempts to wipe N's memories for good this time, but when she finds that she is incapable of doing that even with a controlled V's help, she opts to instead delete N's OS by smashing his memory self's head with a nail and hammer, only stopped by Uzi conveniently reclaiming control over her at the last moment.
• That… THING that crawls past Tessa and J, after AbsoluteSolver!Cyn leaves to kill everyone in the Gala, and is never seen again.

Dead End

• The area that everyone has to explore has a bunch of Disassembly Drone parts littered all around the place. Guess now we know why we haven't seen any Disassembly Drones outside of N's squad.
• We get a doozy of a revelation: the Absolute Solver possessed Cyn, and through unknown means, blew up Earth. The scientists at Copper-9 tried to study it, but only "spread" it like a virus. Really puts into perspective what the Solver is.
• The Sentinels. Think of biomechanical velociraptors that can stun drones with blasts of light.
  • Even more terrifying is how simple and effective this mechanic is. Due to its huge blast zone, you cannot avoid it and the only way to No-Sell it is to disable your optics if you are a robot or be biological. The former just leaves you a blind sitting duck unless you use other forms of vision (like using glasses or thermal) and the latter still has to deal with a robotic killing machine that will just kill you the old-fashioned way with their teeth and claws anyway. No wonder the earlier Murder Drones sent didn't stand a chance. Even the protagonists spend most of their time hiding from their flashes instead of fighting them, with only V being able to face them because of her damaged optics.
• Alice, in a way, is downright terrifying. She is a serial killer who has her victims eaten alive before cutting their body parts to use them as a collection in her metal antlers, and if they are not killed by the Sentinels, Alice herself dissects them while they are still alive. Her creepy smile while talking about how she keeps her victims' "good parts" undamaged is also horrifying. Even the protagonists who consists of two Murder Drones backed up by a Worker Drone with the Absolute Solver get captured within minutes of encountering her, only surviving because they had to be dissected first.
• The nightmare of a Darkest Hour where N is forced to slice off Uzi's hand to stop the Solver from taking over and where V very possibly gets killed. Even worse is that it may already be too late, as Cyn(?) briefly takes over Uzi and displays a message saying "Miss me?" on her visor afterward.
• V's seeming death in here. Rendered vulnerable to the Sentinels’ flashes via losing her glasses and the elevator rising back up to the Sentinel pack due to a destroyed switch, she resorts to shooting the cables to make it fall back down and make herself bait. Even if she is cloned as "J" stated, or even if she died at all, her potential end here is still very brutal.
• Doll could have easily gone on ahead to go down the elevator before the heroes reached her, but deliberately stuck around to release the Sentinels and blocked all means of escape before taking off. Yeah, Doll seriously intended to finish everyone off right then and there, which comes to show how far she's willing to go to make sure that nothing interferes with her plans.

Mass Destruction

• We get to see one of the experiments of the humans on Nori who is infected with the Absolute Solver, when one of the workers leaves to retrieve Yeva, Nori massacred all the other workers and kills the high-priest worker in a very gory fashion. And throws the cross with the cure for the solver to the poor chap's face. It’s only thanks to Yeva that the guy manages to survive and even then, he probably died too after the null black hole causes the explosion that destroys Copper-9.
• We're given a glimpse of when the Absolute Solver destroyed Earth. After the Gala Massacre, it decided to do some old-fashioned invasion of the planet before performing the core explosion, despite having no reason to do so. With the screams of the terrified as they're torn apart by the Murder Drones and red skies, it looks like Hell itself. We also see J and V feasting on people, being more reminiscent of starved vultures than robots. And even though N is normally a kind person, if the flashback is real, he had a hand in the destruction of Earth.
• Tessa attempts to murder Uzi after she finds her. Uzi could do nothing but try to explain to Tessa that something else killed Doll. It did not faze Tessa one bit and only stated it just made her job easier before pinning Uzi on the ground to kill her only for N to DECAPITATE HER!! Remember, Cyn would only reveal herself when picking up her head, meaning that in N's mind, he is willing to murder his old friend without a second thought due to just how off said friend is compared to before. When he said "One chance!", he meant it.
• Speaking of Doll, her brief encounter with Tessa ends with a small glimpse at Tessa's true form in the form of a Jump Scare straight out of Five Nights at Freddy's. The next time we see Doll, she's been reduced to a disemboweled oil-covered corpse with her eyes showing "FIGHT BACK" in Russian to Uzi after limping with a bleeding open chest for who knows how long. The mere glimpse of a pretty capable antagonist being torn apart like this only further sells how much of a threat the Absolute Solver is.
• Tessa was already dead from the very beginning. It turns out the Absolute Solver murdered Tessa when she was a child and Cyn wore her body since. This could mean that for the entire time Uzi, N, V, and J never realized that the woman they knew, Tessa, was truly gone until it was too late.
• Ever wonder how a human would look like in the series? Well, at last we finally see what Tessa looks like underneath, and holy hell is it freaky. She looks like IC-0N, but the realistic textures make it look so fucking off. She doesn’t even have eyes, instead having black holes with yellow X’s while her mouth is in a permanent Slasher Smile.
  • The reveal of this form also counts. Uzi has managed to fight off the Solver's control, and it seems like, at least for a moment, she and N have a minute to breathe. This is quickly followed by a shot of Tessa's severed head, still in the helmet, rolling towards the pit... only it for it to be caught and stopped by Tessa's space-suited foot. We are then treated to a shot of "Tessa" reattaching her head, removing her helmet, and transforming into the form described above, all capped off with her speaking in Cyn's voice:
    Cyn: Oh yes... get snuck up on.
• Tessa EATING Doll's core like a wild animal devouring its prey! Afterwards, she teleports towards Uzi and N and further demonstrates her ferocity by nearly doing the same to N while stabbing Uzi with her tail.
• The pit that Tessa drops herself into looks more like a portal to Hell than anything, making Uzi and N being pulled into it look like they're being Dragged Off to Hell.
• The final shot of the episode: Uzi wakes up in what seems to be outer space, looking at Cooper-9, its mantle blown apart enough to leave the core visible and its moons in the background. While it's a good question if she was blasted back out or out the other side of the planet, the real question is whether or not anyone else survived.

Teasers:

Teasers

• The original teaser for the series, which casually dropped out of absolutely nowhere on Liam’s YouTube channel during the premiere of the fifth episode of Sunset Paradise, and teased something far more sinister than Glitch’s previous output. It consists mostly of contextless images of the snowy ruins on Copper 9, littered with both the skeletal remains of humans and the fresh remains of recently “disassembled” Worker Drones. And then there’s the last shot, with the silhouette of V flying in and touching down… and then a big yellow X comes up on her visor and the camera zooms in to give us a lovely close-up of her spit-covered fangs as she gives off a creepy little chuckle. While the humorous text after that assures us this is a horror-comedy, there’s nothing but a sense of horror for most of this trailer, with AJ Dispirito’s synth-filled music only heightening the dread.
• The new season 1 teaser isn’t any less sinister. We’re once again given absolutely no context; it shows Uzi in some kind of wood-walled house, making an Evil Laugh with a symbol over her visor as she's standing over what appears to be drone corpses. The lighting makes it hard to tell if she's standing over disassembly drones or worker drones, but the lighting certainly helps make it creepier. The teaser ends with the Murder Drones title, but in blood red rather than ice cold blue, and partially obscured by what appears to be a human organ. The subdued and slightly off-key piano cover of the main theme only serves to make the image more unnerving. We get a zoom in on the symbol over Uzi's face and it seems to resemble some sort of infection symbol. Is she the actual "Murder Drone" that the title is referring to?
• This teaser image for Season 1, which consists of a severed drone arm in a dark-looking futuristic kitchen that has a knife still sticking out of it, with everything covered in oil.
• The Episode 4 teaser is this. A found footage roll of a Worker Drone running for his life through the woods as Murder Drones chase at him at high speeds. When one of the Murder Drones attacks, the camera glitches before the Worker Drone drops it. As the footage continues, we hear the Worker Drone pleading for his life before his arm and oil falls into view. Soon, munching sounds come from offscreen implying what the Murder Drone is doing to the Worker Drone's corpse and it continues like this for a few seconds before the footage ends. Needless to say, this teaser is pretty chilling and so photo-realistic (even the VHS effect) that it would certainly remind you of Gemini Home Entertainment...
  • Closer rewatches have revealed that the Murder Drone is actually Uzi in her Solver form and acts as Foreshadowing for the events of "Cabin Fever"
• The teaser for episode 5 starts out eerily enough with the lifeless mansion drones put on display like statues in an art gallery. Then, after a blackout, we suddenly see all the lifeless drones activate with the same "X" symbol in their visors as a disassembly drone. If that wasn't bad enough already, we're treated to the voice of a familiar foe after everything suddenly blacks out again.
• The second teaser image for Episode 6 is of a open elevator. This implies that our cast will finally enter the Cabin Fever Labs and find out what exactly happened down there... and face whatever horrors lurk in it.
• The teaser trailer for episode 6 at first shows the open elevator from the example above, but starts showing the floors for the facility it leads to with multiple destroyed drones littered throughout. What's worse is that some of the drones shown are Disassembly Drones, hinting that something much more dangerous in the facility killed them all and is still active.
• The teaser for Episodes 7 and 8 is only twenty two seconds, but manages to be this in spades.
  • The teaser starts by showing a fleshy hole in the wall. It's revisited two or three scenes later-with N being pulled in by dozens of humans hands.
  • The next scene is an abandoned church in an enormous underground cavern, which is already creepy enough-but is only aided by the skulls and tombstone scattered around, with "NULL" and "END" written on them. The creepiest part, however, is the chained up Sentinels-both for what they are, their inhuman shrieks, and the fact someone tied them up.
  • Uzi comes up to a distressed N while facing down, and holds his hand-before suddenly, and without looking at him, starting to crush it.
    • The worst part? The triangle on Uzi's hand is briefly shown to be purple-which means this isn't The Absolute Solver. Uzi is crushing the hand of one of the few people she loved completely willingly, and worst of all, something set her off enough to do it.
    • Or maybe she's just *that* terrified of something? Any way you look at it, definitely does not feel like a good sign.

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