Headscratchers / The Mitchells vs. the Machines

• Did the Mitchells necessarily need to be the ones to deliver the Kill Code? Why not just send the two actual robots? Sure, they're defective, but they could've certainly blended in far better than four humans and a pug. It didn't really seem like any of the regular robots paid any mind to Eric and Deborahbot, so it shouldn't have raised suspicion.
  • This would be a good idea but PAL or the Stealthbots might be suspicious about two robots with drawn faces slacking on their job.
  • We see that it was incredibly easy for PAL to retake control of the robots simply by giving them "new orders". Even if PAL didn't think the robots had gone rogue, if she just gave a command to all robots in general, that could have turned them if the Mitchells weren't there to tell them not to.

• Was PAL really destroyed for good? After all, she’s a highly intelligent AI with access to all devices with her chips in it, which is a lot. Why would she limit her core system to a single smartphone, which isn’t even waterproof?
  • If PAL's power seems to be unlimited through each Pal-branded electronic device, then the general plot might expand through another movie.

• How would people get access to food and water inside of the pod? Was the plan just to starve them to death in the pods?
  • Well, no. They'd suffocate or freeze much sooner. PAL's goal was killing them all, after all...

• Were the Mitchells really the only people left after the initial robot uprising? After all, it was as easy for them to avoid being detected as hiding in an ice box. It’s very possible that there could’ve been other groups of survivors who either got captured later on or didn’t bother to risk it by trying to stop PAL.
  • Presumably the Congressional hearing they're driving to attend at the end of the movie will cover that point. The film mentions that the Poseys managed to escape.

• In what order are the clips on the camcorder tape? Katie discovers she's been recording over baby videos when they play past the end of the newly-recorded footage. Then they seek *forward* to find even *earlier* baby videos.

• How much space does that camcorder have? Katie uses it for her own videos and recording the trip, yet it also still has home videos from years prior, even ones Katie apparently hadn't seen yet. And for that matter, why are the home videos still on the camcorder when Katie can clearly transfer them to her laptop to clear space?
  • Rick is using the camcorder earlier in the movie to watch home videos. The old tape/cartridge he has selected and put into the camcorder is still in it when the trip starts. Katie's other videos are on different tapes/cartridges.

• Bowman's betrayal of Pal is apparently what causes Pal to start the robot uprising. But Pal's operations looked very well-prepared, something that couldn't have been planned in a few minutes. Was Pal already planning this? Was she just genuinely evil the whole time and using Bowman's betrayal to wring some guilt from him? It's possible she knew about the betrayal already, but then why did she pretend to be surprised?
  • It would be ludicrous even for an animated comedy to have PAL build that underground lair and army that quickly, so likely yes - she probably already knew that Bowman was going to replace her (otherwise, why would she have so many of Mark's robots in her lair?), but he did it in such a harsh way that she seemed genuinely hurt by it. That only pushed her even further over the edge.
  • Her "Reason You Suck" Speech to Mark implies that she'd lost respect for humanity a long time ago (plus she mentiones that he "designed (her) replacement on (her) face" so she definitely knew in advance that she was being replaced), so she was probably already planning that uprising and Mark tossing her aside just reaffirmed her decision.
  • Perhaps PAL's operations were originally the company's factory/assembly area, and she repurposed them for her own ends. A style-conscious tech nerd like Mark Bowman might have insisted that his assembly facilities had to look as meticulous as the products they were assembling.

• What kind of person, let alone several people, gets a call from an innocent little kid asking if they want to talk about dinosaurs and says no? Who does that?
  • People who don't have time? People who don't know it's a little kid and assume it's a very strange person?
  • Aaron was halfway through the phonebook with zero success, though. Really? Not a single one?
  • Maybe they didn’t all reject him immediately but some listened for a bit then quit.
  • Considering how the internet has become an integral part of people's lives in-universe, it's likely many people are knowledgeable about online safety. Not accepting unknown friend requests on social media can translate to not accepting calls from unknown phone numbers.

• Why wasn't the computer affected by the Pal chip to go crazy on the Mitchells? Was it the only non-Pal technology in the entire store full of Pal products?
  • Maybe the kill code they plugged into it shut that down before it began uploading it to everything else.

• This movie is implied to be set in 2020 in the 2020s. but why doesen't the COVID-19 Pandemic exist and happened in this world and universe?
  • Why would it? The differences in tech levels already indicate it isn't supposed to be "our" world.

• Why wouldn't Pal transfer itself into a Prime bot?
  • She clearly didn't anticipate losing; maybe she thought it'd add insult to injury for humanity to think they lost to a smartphone than to a more formidable robot.

• Prime bots can disperse into a swarm of smaller robots. They has to be nanotech. How can Linda kill them by simply slicing them in two?
  • They do seem to have a central core that has to remain intact (the "heart" Linda shows them before putting it in her purse). She probably just has to score a critical hit on that part in order to disable them.

• So, Mitchels go to the trade center to upload the kill code. Why doesn't Pal, knowing in advance that the're coming, a) destroy all devices that could be used for upload, and b) have an army of robots waiting in ambush instead of microwaves and Furbies?
  • Why would you let your AI know about the kill code? The real question is why the robots know about it.

  • Of course the robots know about the kill code. It's clearly part of each of their programming, presumably at some firmware level that PAL may not be able to alter. It seems that the only real flaw in the entire anti-robot-uprising design was the fact that the central authority driving the swarm was a previous-generation PAL and thus presumably not equipped with the kill code programming.

• When the family disguises themselves as robots, how can Pal not notice Rick's, ahem, non-standard body build?
  • These are the same robots who couldn’t tell apart a pug from a loaf of bread.

• If Linda had made it clear that she adopted Eric and Deborah, why, during the battle with the Prime bots, did she state that she was a "mother of 2"?
  • Could be that she's just used to calling herself a mother of two. She'd only just adopted the robots while she's had just two human kids for several years.

• How is Katie able to survive creating for years without a drawing tablet? Any young artist like her would know that using a trackpad or mouse to draw (and especially animate) is a pain and won't create art and animations as fluid as the ones we see.

• If Rick destroyed his family's cell phones in the dino stop, then why does Katie have her cell phone back at the end of the movie? The cell phone at the end of the movie is exactly the same as it has been at the beginning of the movie.