Recap / Murder Drones E 7 Mass Destruction

All spoilers here are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.

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The truth behind the incidents that destroyed Earth and Copper 9 are revealed and an unexpected ally joins the battle.

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This episode contains examples of:

• Beware the Nice Ones: N only gives Tessa one chance to explain herself when he learns about the patch. He doesn't hesitate to cut off her head when she doesn't take it.
• Big Damn Heroes: Nori rescues N when Cyn tries to dispose of him.
• Big "WHAT?!": Uzi has this reaction when N reveals the angry talking drone core she kicked into the abyss is actually her long-lost mother.
• Blood for Mortar: The Solver makes a point of redecorating the cathedral with the skulls and bones of the human researchers it kills there.
• Borrowed Biometric Bypass: Wearing Tessa's skin, Cyn is able to use her fingerprint to gain access to human-only computer systems.
• Cliffhanger: Uzi lets herself fall into the flesh pit, and wakes up floating in what seems to be space next to Copper 9 with a massive hole in the surface exposing its glowing core. Cue silent end credits.
• Continuity Nod: N is briefly forced into re-experiencing a memory of him and his coworkers killing the human race on Earth, but he is eventually broken out of it thanks to Uzi replacing Cyn as N's admin in "Home".
• Dead All Along: Tessa is confirmed to have been long dead, with her corpse fused with Cyn's Worker Drone body. Going by her dress, it's further implied Tessa died during Cyn's massacre of the gala shown in Episode 5.
• Empathic Environment: Fittingly, we see a massive thunderstorm outside of the cathedral on the night of the core collapse. How exactly this works when the cathedral is underground goes unexplained.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing:
  • While N and an initially-unidentified Solver parasite run from the Solver itself, the latter briefly mentions that she's looking for "a hunk named Khan." This heavily implies her true identity and is immediately followed by an exchange that confirms it:
    N: Uzi's dad?
    [...]
    Nori: How do you know my daughter?
  • When Tessa encounters Doll in the tunnels, she seems to fend off the lightning-fast robot and her knives with remarkable ease. These inhumanly fast reflexes make sense, given that "Tessa" is really a robot too.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • Tessa's "human" form can be seen for a split second when she takes off her suit to tear Doll apart.
  • A posted memo reveals that the company found the creepy cathedral underground on Copper 9 and simply chose to build its lab inside of it since it was available. (Presumably, the scientists decided to lean into the whole motif with the faux-priestly outfits and the cross-shaped USB sticks.) The further questions this raises naturally go unaddressed.
  • A cheerful poster next to it reminds employees that overtime is optional, but on a completely unrelated note, "the singularity is consuming everything you hold dear!!"
  • Another note features an ominous countdown to "Universe Big Crunch"... suggesting that the stakes here may be even larger than the characters realize.
• Funny Background Event: When Thad and Lizzy show up in silhouette to confront J, Khan can be fully visibly seen laying down on top of the bus they arrived in with his arms crossed behind his head.
• Genuine Human Hide: Tessa was Dead All Along, and her corpse has been grafted onto Cyn's body as a Borrowed Biometric Bypass to get around anti-robot security measures.
• Homage: When "Tessa" kills Doll, she is shown pouncing right at her in the same way Withered Foxy jumpscares the player in Five Nights at Freddy's 2. Following the episode's release, Liam Vickers confirmed on Twitter that the script outright described this as "straight up FNAF[ing] the camera."
• Hope Spot: It's revealed in this episode that there is indeed a cure for the Absolute Solver in the form of a USB patch, meaning that there's been a way to help Uzi all along. Unfortunately, by the time N delivers the patch to Uzi, it's too late as Cyn takes control of Uzi and destroys it.
• It Amused Me: Cyn reveals to N that he's one of the primary reasons that he, V, and J retained their personalities, and noted that he "loved doing anything".
• Keeping Secrets Sucks: N comes to feel this way when his hesitation to tell Uzi what Tessa told him in "Dead End" leads to their Plot-Mandated Friendship Failure in this episode. When Nori warns him against revealing to Uzi that her mom is still alive, N asserts he's through keeping Uzi in the dark about anything, only promising to keep it a secret as long as Nori is the one to tell her, which he breaks anyway when Uzi punts Nori into the flesh pit without realizing who she is.
• Leave No Survivors: Turns out J has been destroying all of the remaining landing pods on Copper 9 excluding her own, clearly with her boss's intent to let the planet's destruction swallow up everyone living on it.
• Let's Get Dangerous!: Khan finally decides to take action and follows his daughter's blueprints to recreate the railgun from the first episode.
• Losing Your Head: N slices off Tessa's head after learning she cannot be trusted. Unfortunately, this doesn't last long, as she turns out to be Cyn in disguise.
• Magic Antidote: There's a special religious cross shaped USB with a patch that can be used to, at least mostly, remove the Absolute Solver's influence from an infected drone, which made N upset because Tessa had claimed to him that there's no cure for Uzi. It is unfortunately destroyed by a possessed Uzi during the climax.
• MacGuffin: The USB crucifix is called one, but it is directly relevant to the problem at hand while it lasts.
• Meat Moss: The tunnels carved out by the Solver — including the pit leading to the planet's core — appear to be coated in this.
• Not Quite Dead: Nori turns out to have survived by detaching her core from her body and has been living her life below the surface for years.
• Offscreen Reality Warp: A possible explanation for how a Solver-possessed Nori manages to tunnel all the way to the core of the planet in however much time it takes for the intern to go fetch Yeva and come back. Given that this is the Solver we're talking about...
• Oh, Crap!: When Nori asks N who's the Solver's next host, N confirms Uzi and Doll as potential candidates. Nori then asks which one was just trying to eat them, causing N to realize it was neither of them.
• Plot-Mandated Friendship Failure: Uzi and N suffer one when Uzi learns that Tessa has made N complicit in working against her, which leads her to back away from N out of paranoia when the ceiling caves in shortly after, willingly allowing the rocks to separate them. However, it doesn't last by the time they're reunited, with Uzi only being pissed at him for making what could be taken for a Love Confession, which quickly gives way to a tearful reunion.
• Reactive Continuous Scream: When N accidentally lets it slip that the Solver parasite was actually Nori, Uzi's attempt to process the situation and N's panic results in a brief confused variant of this... as they pull each other into an embrace.
• Religious Horror: This episode's specific homage to horror. The action takes place in a dilapidated cathedral, and the Absolute Solver's possession is explicitly compared to a Demonic Possession. The USB patch even takes the form of a cross.
• Rescue Romance: According to a photograph Nori had to assist with her exposition to N, she was first found buried under the snow by Khan after the core collapse knocked her offline for who knows how long. Due to her memories being heavily scrambled at the time, she ended up having a kid (Uzi), which likely wouldn't have happened if she had remembered that Uzi would inherit the Solver.
• The Reveal:
  • Nori and Yeva are the ones who started Copper 9's core collapse when the latter cut off the former's arm while holding onto a black hole, which then fell into the flesh pit leading straight to the core.
  • Speaking of Uzi's mom, Nori is still alive, albeit in the body of a corrupted drone core, and has been living underground.
  • "Tessa" is actually Cyn's original body dressed in the real Tessa's decomposing corpse, confirmed by a Freeze-Frame Bonus of her armband.
• Ruins for Ruins' Sake: For unknown reasons, a cathedral was built in a cave on a mining planet, before if fell into disuse and was rented out.
• Three Laws-Compliant: N proves that Disassembly Drones are not this when he slices the (allegedly) human Tessa's head clean off her shoulders. An earlier flashback furthermore reveals he, J, and V fed on humans during the destruction of Earth.
• Silent Credits: After an intense climax followed by a surreal, muted cliffhanger, the episode's credits are completely silent.
• Stock Scream: The Wilhelm Scream is heard among the sounds of people screaming during the flashback to Earth's destruction by the Disassembly Drones that N is subjected to; specifically, when an overhead helicopter tries to fight back and is destroyed.
• This Is Gonna Suck: When Thad, Lizzy, and Khan show up to fight J, her visor briefly flashes a "prior hazard" warning when she sees the railgun Lizzy is holding, showing that she remembers how her first encounter with Uzi ended.
• Too Dumb to Live: Lizzy assuming that she and Thad could take on J, who, by the way, is a Disassembly Drone with a virtually limitless arsenal when they've had absolutely no combat experience prior. Luckily, Khan shows up to rebuild Uzi's railgun, giving them an actual fighting chance.
• Uncertain Doom: Uzi throws Nori into the flesh pit, and then throws herself into that same pit. Uzi is then shown to still be alive, but her mother's fate is left unknown.
• Weakened by the Light: Interestingly, the cathedral scientists appear to use artificial sunlight to dissolve the organic tentacles and claws generated by Nori while in Solver Mode. Given that the Disassembly Drones share the same weakness, this may be a vulnerability common to all of the Solver's creations.
• We Have Reserves: After taking control of Uzi, the Absolute Solver intends to kill N because he no longer has any purpose in its plans, saying it still has plenty of N backups to use.
• Wham Shot: When Doll, and later Uzi, attempt to use the Absolute Solver on Tessa when the latter is trying to kill them, it's revealed that Tessa is a "like object", foreshadowing that it's actually the Solver/Cyn herself in disguise.