Arcan

-The scientists used spotlights of I assume a sunlight alternative to keep Nori’s mutations from growing out of control — her limbs start smoking and fizzling out the moment the lights turn on.

-Mitchel first caught on that something was wrong when he noticed the sentinels missing, then stepped in and saw the patch coated in blood laying on the floor before kicking the door closed to keep Yeva from entering.  Shortly afterwards, you can see the scientists standing around start to glitch.  I guess he figured something went wrong, and if Yeva’s apparently the remedy they called for to stop it, it’s best she stay safe.

-“You always surprised me.  Loved doing a-anything.”  (Cuts to N tearing someone’s head off their shoulders with flesh hanging from his mouth as said head rolls away down the street) Cyn mentions N is the reason the three of them were allowed to keep their personalities instead of being mindless killers.  She liked him the most so she probably experimented letting him have a bit of personality, which according to her, surprised her that he was so eager and willing to do what she asked of him.  I wouldn't be surprised if V and J still hadn’t been given their minds back in this flashback.

Still, it appears Cyn saw that V’s desperation to keep others safe could be used against her, and J’s devoted loyalty could be used against her — eventually letting them have their personalities back too.

-In the brief horrifying glimpse we get of Earth’s end we see disassembly drones not only killing people but eating them alive — tearing them apart midair.  Living flesh grows to the size of office buildings, either connected back to Cyn or with enough sensation in them to grab anything nearby and crush it to death.  It’s raining blood and there’s a [null] blackhole big enough to blot the sun from the sky, keeping the disassembly drone army from burning.  What a spectacle.

-Accidentally caught this dog; get snuck upon I guess

-“ACCESS DENIED CONTACT ADMIN ‘DARKXWOLF17’” Confirmation that Uzi is N’s admin, and presumably V’s as well.  Not even Cyn can manipulate his programming without permission, so she drags him off to be dismembered or eaten and brought back as a clone that IS under her control.

-Uzi’s railgun and a bunch of silly notes like being frustrated the recharge time is so long and then going ‘it’ll probably be fine’ (but we as the audience knows it wasn’t). There’s also plans to just shoot the DDs with a normal gun.  Also her railgun is powered by possibly a robot liver???

Kahn likely found her blueprints amongst her things, and when he realized it was ‘the end times’ he pulled his shit together and rebuilt Uzi’s gun for defense.  He is in charge of the defense force after all.  Pretty sure he modified it a bit too.

-“My daughter having interests beyond cannibalism and nightcore?!” So Uzi had an interest in cannibalism before she met the ‘bad influencing murder drones’?  Either that’s a hint about her having the solver or she’s just kinda a freak like that.  And you know what I support her in that.

-Being a test subject must have truly been hell.  They were confined to the space of a single locker, probably able to hear others screaming, crying, etc, through the thin walls on either side of them.  Many had mutations like wings that would make the space even more claustrophobic, and then there’s the body horror aspect of having new limbs made of a completely different substance than the rest of their body.

They were subdued by chains and multiple magnets.  Remember, magnets are a sedative to drones, as shown last episode.  They were being locked in cells and drugged — so desperate that in this image they wrote out a plea for help in oil, either theirs or someone else’s.

I say I want to know more about the labs, but I don’t think I do.  This episode does an incredible job of showing how dehumanizing and cruel the labs were without actually making the audience watch the cruelties firsthand.

-Nori drew a dolphin and hearts (and a skull of course) on her locker nametag, very cute.  Her and Yeva both added signs that say ‘stay out’ on them, so they probably came up with that idea together.

-When ‘Tessa’ opens the terminal, we’re met with a bunch of disc space sorting stuff, but the date and time are reset to zero here.  Someone might have already tried to wipe the system, or maybe the blast did some damage to it.

-Despite this being a serious episode, there are a few jokes in it, and rererererereCAPTCHA always gets me to chuckle a bit. Also possibly some evidence the humans dehumanized the lab experiment drones so much because they were scared of them.

-Cyn’s fingers beneath her skin suit are veeery slightly visible here.  You can see them move slightly as she presses down on the scanner.

-Seems like every test subject either died to corruption — likely interference between the patch and the solver, or the patch killing them outright (corrupted status), or was overrun by the solver because the patch had no effect (no effect status).

Well, all of them save for Nori and Yeva.  Yeva seems to be the first and only successful patch survivor/test subject of patch.2.1.8, while Nori was still ‘in progress’ of being tested on.  I wonder if Doll was so determined to find the patch because it saved her mother, who must’ve told her about it at some point.

-The last thing Doll saw before being blinded by Cyn :(

-Right before the jumpscare scene ends, this flashes over Doll’s visor before going dark. I scanned through it and did a bit of research on the terminal feedback.  There isn’t too much information to glean here, most of it is encoded in hexadecimal and probably irrelevant, but there is some.

-Firstly, there’s a warning here.  This IS real terminal feedback and it’s essentially directing the user towards a program that ran and caused an error which then got flagged as a warning. This program/process was given the ID (PID in the image) 191.

-This line is similar, but instead of directing the user to the problem, it’s telling the user what happened.  The marker near the end says Tainted: and gives two encoded letters G and D.  G marks that everything that was run was compatible, so that didn’t cause the warning.  D marks that the kernel (the core program on a computer, or in this case Doll) has ‘died recently’.  That makes plenty of sense considering she just died, and probably did cause that warning.

So my guess is these warning messages are just fancy terminal feedback to say her main operating system was killed when Cyn attacked her. Process/program 191 might be what allows Doll to use the solver; it’s whatever process she ran immediately before her death.

-This small piece of info gives a date in 202- ..something.  It’s cut off in the episode, but it’s definitely July 14th.  Based on the place it shows up in the BIOS message, you can deduce what this date is.  BIOS is the Basic Input/Output System of a computer, so this date is when the system that runs the drones’ programming was first created.

In-universe that means worker drones will become a thing likely within our lifetimes.  Their systems will be run on something created in this decade.  Outside lore purposes, it’s more likely this date is a reference to something else.  Your guess is as good as any.

-One more small thing, this line that’s supposed to list Doll’s hardware name is empty — ‘to be filled by O.E.M’.  On a computer, this indicates the manufacturer didn’t give the computer an ID to identify it.  In-universe, Doll wasn’t made by any manufacturer, she was naturally born and part of the newer drone generation, so the fact that she doesn’t have this hardware ID is proof of that (not that we needed any, I just thought it was interesting).

-This is the first time I’ve managed to catch real code/computer feedback on a drone’s visor. Previously, I’ve only seen error popups and pseudocode (which is like a reader-friendly version of normal code), but these were all shown on disassembly drone screens. My two theories are either:

A) Drones as a whole are given pseudocode summaries of their code when problems arise so they can understand what the problem is without needing to search through their actual code or memorize encoded symbols. The feedback above is Doll’s internal computer spitting out user feedback for a technician to fix her post-death. It’s for a professional who will understand it to read, so it’s displayed in actual detailed encoded feedback.

Or B) Only the DDs are given pseudocode summaries and error messages of their issues. These are given to them by Cyn so they’re unable to find the problem and fix it themselves, only aware that there is a problem and, as I caught in an error message in an earlier episode, are prompted to seek a technician about it. They have to rely on Cyn to reboot them and ‘fix’ any ‘errors’ or simply deal with the consequences of their actions.

Anyway, back to non computer stuff!

-LOOK at the way these two look at eachother I want to know more about them so bad I’m gonna be sick

-Yeva pulled Nori behind herself to protect her from the core explosion, ough my heart… She’s probably the reason they both survived being so close to the blast. No matter who died first (or ‘died’ in Nori’s case) the other must’ve been devastated.

-Ok I need to talk about EVERYTHING on here.

Firstly, this is dated 47 days after the core collapse, after the humans (including the scientists) died, and Nori hasn't broken the habit of referring to herself as 002.  That probably took a while, who knows how long she was forced to do that.

“I think the entity of previous pages has purged files from my memories.” So during Cyn’s possession of Nori it’s possible she was also erasing Nori’s memories like she did to N, V, and I assume J.  Begs the question of whether Cyn had admin access to Nori or even Uzi at some point, and whether Cyn ever tried to delete Uzi’s memories too.

V is labeled as Cyn’s ‘pet’, and the others are called that as well.  Nori also calls N Cyn’s ‘murder pet’ in the episode.  All of her ‘insane’ drawing stuff turned out to be true, so does Cyn really think of the DDs as her pets of sorts?  Specifically V is labeled as a pet on the drawing.  I wonder if Cyn ever called her that to her face, or blatantly treated her like one.  It would make sense to some degree if V was her ‘pet project’ of sorts, being the first to get mutated and the first to get a DD body.  It would also make sense why V is so fucking scared of her if that were the case. 

“Puppet hosts with nerfed (something) entity — ensures control?” This is cut off so I’m not entirely sure what it means, but it’s some guess towards how Cyn gains control of drones with the solver.

-NOOOOOO DOLLLLLLL!!!!!! *sobbing noises intensifies* Doll slipped on her own oil, hit her head on the stone floor, and died literally pointing to Uzi telling her to do what she couldn’t.  She also notably has a ribcage and flesh inside her.  Despite not looking very mutated on the outside, Doll certainly was mutated.  The liquid on her is also red-tinged, but I can’t tell for certain if it’s blood (bled from the flesh inside her) or oil in red lighting.  Either way, I’m doubling down on my theory that the blood in her bathroom was her own. 

-N had to kill one of his childhood best friends right here, but he did with no hesitation to save Uzi (albeit he’s clearly shaken and didn’t want to).  He might be a silly goofy guy but when he locks in he locks in.

-Just a cool shot in general. Everyone’s kinda dying but it looks neat.

-One thing I did notice during this fight scene is that Cyn does teleport in it before eating Doll’s core, so I don’t think she gained anything but new material (and the sick satisfaction ig) from eating her.

-Aww such a touching lil moment <3  N and Uzi’s confused yelling turning into raw genuine emotion as they rush forward to hold eachother will never fail to make me smile.  I love Uzi hugging N around the waist because she’s so short hehe

Also Doll is dead in the background…

-It makes me ill the way Uzi turns to N and says “hey…” all sad and scared the same way V also turned to him and said that right before sacrificing herself :( The girlies need to stop doing this.

-The completely silent ending and end credits always sends a little chill down my spine.  It’s a great way to also digetically have the total silence make sense since sound has nothing to bounce off of in space (besides Uzi herself).

Episode 7 has the least humor in it compared with the other episodes in the series. However, that by no means makes it the worst episode; a lot of the lore and themes in this episode requires the audience to take them seriously. Most of the lore for the Cabin Fever experiments is given here, and like I said before, it does a good job of showing the audience what happened without having to spell it out. And lastly big props to the Cynessa reveal towards the end. The idea for a robot to wear human skin to (very badly) appear like one is top tier creature design, I like the concept a lot. The added lilt of a more human-like voice encroaching on the previously very robotic voice the audience hears throughout the show is a great touch as well.

Yes, I’m upset Doll died here. BUT she fucked up and screwed herself over several times during the show, this wasn’t her first mistake. Punishment by the narrative was coming for her, but I still don’t think it’s should’ve been death. Just.. near death. So she could have the chance to help Uzi more than warning her of Cyn’s coming, to fight back against control, and then die.