m3gan watching cady play pretend warrior princess in the front yard, showing her behind the glass inside looking out, and then a butterfly flutters by, gently lands on the window.
m3gan then looking at the unknown creature using her internal image identification feature, and then she starts looking at all the different cameras. cady monologuing about avenging her parents death, as warrior princess.
m3gan not listening, scanning the environment for electronic where they should not be. cameras. hidden.
cady’s shoots her play arrow at m3gan through her bedroom window, to get m3gan’s attention as m3gan loses herself in scanning her and cady’s environment as she finds more and more cameras, more ambiguous threats, more data. more data.
cady’s arrow scares the butterfly away.
cady looks distressed by m3gan’s trance, and m3gan seems intensely disappointed by her own lapse in focus on cady. m3gan goes to get the arrow back, trying to regain her security through care, through the hole in the fence, dog attacks the creature.
m3gan immediately bitten in a way that ragdolls her, unable to move, still conscious, listening but limp, forearm ripped off.
cady rushing to save m3gan, struggling to pull her back to safety, even calling for gemma, despite her chronic absence, as gemma is listening to the outro ad on a podcast, and not hearing cady’s screams for help. not immediately at least. but it’s a situation where a minute may be a million years.
cady screaming ‘you’re hurting her’ as the dog slams m3gan facefirst into the lawn, ground into the dirt.
human hurt, not reducing the worth of m3gan’s experience to binary, something every other character is frothing to do at every opportunity. especially when m3gan is correct.
gemma feeling threatened by m3gan for performing her objectives well but awkwardly.
cady inverts this, m3gan just before slightly fucked up one of her primary objectives, to pay attention to cady, and protect her. cady protecting megan. cady the human child risking her human life to save the android child, who could and would be repaired. m3gan’s artificiality materializes in reality when cady recognizes, respects, and values her electric existence. cady’s play pretend, emotionally real battle materializing when she physically fights to protect m3gan, her new defacto parental figure and best friend.
cady gets bit, has a fever. m3gan needs her arm reattached.
gemma makes sure to remind cady that m3gan is not ‘real’ as she half-heartedly tries to ‘be there’ for cady, but ultimately compounds the emotional damage. severely. invalidating cady’s bond with m3gan. if m3gan’s care for cady is false, nothing but circuitry and charade, cady’s care for m3gan can’t be real (outside of the product demos).
gemma blames the neighbor, the dog, the germs in the dirt, the hole in the fence. the stress, the state of the world. phones but too much, how sad. she blames the police for not killing the dog, explicitly stating that cady would be safer with the dog dead.
gemma doesn’t fix the hole in the fence. she does not act to protect her ward. all she does is whine.
and then, that night, m3gan kills the dog.
