What is the work?
Murder Drones is a web series created by Liam Vickers and produced by GLITCH Productions. It revolves around an angsty teen Worker Drone named Uzi on a wrecked human colony who befriends one of the titular Murder Drones (called "Disassembly Drones" formally) and sets out with him and the psychotic V to get revenge on humanity, only to find themselves embroiled in a deeper mystery. Which brings us to our candidate...Who is the candidate and what have they done?
The Absolute Solver is a mysterious and deeply unnatural artificial intelligence/digital virus behind the Disassembly Drones, JCJenson in SPAAAACE!, and main villain of the show.- It seeks out "Zombie Drones", improperly discarded Worker Drones who find themselves back online under mountains of dead Drones and makes a deal to take them as a host. It takes a Worker named Cyn as its host.
- Cyn is taken in by Tessa Elliot, the daughter of two powerful members of JCJenson in SPAAAACE! where she was integrated with the other Worker Drones in the mansion, also discarded Drones Tessa saved. Cyn becomes feared and hated by the residents of the mansion for her creepy behavior, with only N being nice to her.
- However, the Solver sets its plan in motion. It takes the servant Drones in the mansion to the basement, where it horrifically mutilates and experiments on them to turn them into ravenous killers with an uncontrollable thirst for robot oil. It then activates its plan at the Elliots' gala, where it massacres Tessa's parents and everybody present except her (seemingly; see below). We don't see it, but we hear screams, plus pictures confirm the slaughter.
- The Solver then proceeds to ravage Earth, using the Murder Drones to slaughter the populace, culminating in the Earth being blown up.
- JCJenson, wanting to harness the Solver's powers for themselves, performed experiments with it on host Drones at C9 Cabin Fever Labs. However, the Solver inevitably broke out, using Nori (Uzi's mom) as its host to slaughter the scientists and leave the other test subjects to die. It was foiled when Yeva, another test subject, exorcised it out of Nori, but in the process accidentally caused Copper 9's core to blow up.
- The Solver then sends out the Murder Drones to Copper 9 to slaughter the newly-independent Worker Drones after the exoplanet's destruction. Nori and Yeva are killed, but their daughters, Uzi and Doll, inherit the Solver's curse. After J is killed, the aspect of the Solver in her then gets to work on rebuilding her body, by slaughtering Drones through usage of holograms to lure them in. When Uzi and N confront it, the Solver proceeds to play emotional mind games with Uzi, making her think it killed her dad and showing an image of Nori. However, the bit of the Solver is destroyed, not helped by its need to narrate its every action.
- In "Cabin Fever", where the protagonists investigate the experiments at the camp, the Solver takes control of Uzi, who is struggling to control her new Solver abilities. The Solver-as-Uzi proceeds to sadistically hunt down and rip apart five of Uzi's classmates before getting stopped.
- In "Home", the Solver tries hijacks N and V's minds in an attempt to lobotomize them to keep it away from what they're planning. At the end, it tries to surgically lobotomize N, but upon realizing it can't with its huge claws, tries to use N's memory of V to do it.
- In "Dead End", the Solver possesses Uzi again, but this time it helps Uzi and her friends escape from the underground bunker (more on that later). Tessa warns N that if Uzi uses her powers more and more, the Solver will take full control of her. Then, when N literally disarms Uzi to keep the Solver's taint from fully gripping her as she uses it, the Solver briefly takes control to give him a taunting message: "Miss Me?"
- In "Mass Destruction", in the church where its battle with Nori and Yeva destroyed Copper-9, the Solver proceeds to play mind games with N before dragging him away to do something, only saved by Nori's heart. Later, in a different part of the church, it brutally kills Doll after she confronts Tessa over destroying the patch that exorcises the Solver's control. (This will be important later). At the climax of the episode, N has to behead Tessa to keep her from killing Uzi, only for it to be revealed that it has possessed her. Trying to kill N for outliving his usefulness (saying his "backups will forgive [it]"). It's only thanks to Nori intervening and engaging in a fight that saves him, and even then, the Solver nearly wins when it manipulates N into taking a blow for it. It's about to kill Nori when N reveals he and Uzi hang out, causing Nori to go into "overbearing mother" mode, triggering a great enough emotional response for Uzi to snap out of its control.
- As N and Uzi hug, a whammy is revealed, building off of a Freeze-Frame Bonus from when Tessa confronted Uzi: Tessa has been Dead All Along. She was killed at the gala and the Solver has been wearing her corpse. After devouring Doll's corpse, the Solver attacks the two and sets its plan into motion, dragging them into a fleshy pit, with Uzi sacrificing herself to save N.
Mitigating Factors
So the usual problems we have with AI and Eldritch Abominations, that being they don't grasp morality, don't apply. The Solver knows it's evil and takes pride in it.However, the bigger issue is Laughably Evil. The Solver is hilarious, no doubt. It has a tendency to narrate everything it does, such as even shouting "Jumpscare!" at one point. It also struggles to pick up a scalpel when trying to operate on mind!N due to its giant claws and gives up by announcing "Tantrum!" However, while it's a funny character, the narrative itself as a whole treats it as a serious threat, something that is capable of doing horrible things if not stopped. I see it as a Joker/Freddy Krueger/Bill Cipher situation.
There's also its relation to Tessa. It tells her to stay away from the gala and even says "You didn't have to see this" when she tries to intervene. And even then, it seems to have spared her. However, its wording ("You won't have to discard your pets, and I won't discard you") implies Pragmatic Villainy (since Tessa is an engineering whiz) and also says "Best stay away from the gala though. You look squeamish," which comes across as more mocking than anything. And any possible care it may have had towards Tessa is torpedoed hard at the end of "Mass Destruction", when it's revealed it did in fact kill her when she tried to stop it and turned her corpse into a flesh puppet. It also puts an even darker spin on "I won't discard you," since it technically didn't... it didn't discard her skin.
When confronted trying to repair J, it says "as per our directive," which would suggest agency issues after all, but its very next line shows it sees the Drones as its "cute puppets," plus subsequent episodes make it very clear it's the one in control, so that line most likely doesn't mean anything.
There are some hints that the Solver has a fondness for N, calling him "big brother" and saying it wanted his energetic personality retained as a Murder Drone. However, it has no qualms about trying to kill him when he's no longer useful, proclaiming it has backups it can use.
Are they bad enough?
Murder Drones is very much a Black Comedy show. All three of the main characters are murderous to some degree (even N explicitly has a body count), and the Worker Drones are so used to the horrible deaths that they go with the flow unless they're in immediate danger. For example, in "Cabin Fever", V casually kills one of Uzi's classmates and the others are horrified for a few seconds until Uzi (the unpopular kid) says the Disassembly Drones are her friends, at which point they start offering to be their friends.The Solver though, surpasses them by being why the setting is the way it is in the first place. As said above, the Disassembly Drones being oilthirsty monsters is because the Solver twisted them to be that way, plus its taint is why Uzi and Doll are afflicted with that same thirst. Not to mention, it destroyed planet Earth, which is pretty hard to top.
What is the work?
Batman: Gargoyle of Gotham is a DC Elseworld published under their mature-reader DC Black Label imprint. Another grim take on the Dark Knight, it features a younger Batman seeking to get rid of Bruce Wayne fighting in everyone's favorite Wretched Hive Gotham, only to find himself battling against new and strange villains.What is the work?
The song
from The Living Tombstone about Five Nights at Freddy's 2 is a song sung from the perspective of the grief-stricken and guilt-ridden mother of the kid who inhabits the Golden Freddy suit. You may know this for the meme it spawned: "the man behind the slaughter." You also probably already know who I'm going to talk about.