Childhood Conspiracies

WALL-E killed all the other robots and doomed the earth

The WALL-E we know tells the heartwarming story of the destruction of Earth. When mankind goes off to travel the universe and get fat, they leave a bunch of robots behind to clean up the mountains of garbage that now cover the planet. Seven hundred years later, only one of those trash-compacting robots is left: the adorable WALL-E. He (it?) falls in love with a space-traveling robot called EVE, and together they bring the humans back home.

The Theory:

But wait, back up: What happened to all the other WALL-E-type robots that were left on Earth? We see their broken bodies scattered here and there -- why is WALL-E still functional when all of his brethren are broken down robo-corpses?

Easy: According to this theory from Reddit, WALL-E freaking destroyed them over a 700-year-long murder spree. That's why there's still so much garbage covering the planet after so long -- there was just one robot to clean it, and he's a psychopath.

Why It's Totally Possible:

First of all, just look at how casually WALL-E cannibalizes the parts of the deactivated units at the beginning of the movie -- he remorselessly rips the treads off of another robot to replace his own and hoards other spare parts in his trailer.

WALL-E is clearly a sentient being, capable of pain and emotion. He recognizes fellow robots as living beings (and of course falls in love with one). And yet, he doesn't appear to give the slightest fuck about desecrating the scattered corpses of his robotic kin. He's playing music from Hello, Dolly! as he tears their parts off. Apply the same thinking to human beings and picture a man who collects human body parts to wear and dance around in. Congratulations, you just imagined Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs.

So WALL-E is a disturbed individual. But why would he kill the other robots? Maybe, as the fan theory points out, it's because his objective and their objective weren't compatible. The entire purpose of these robots was to gather the trash and compact it -- and yet WALL-E, no doubt as a result of some fatal flaw in his programming, actually takes some of those worthless artifacts he's supposed to be destroying and keeps them to himself, just to stare at them.

Or, hell, maybe he just wanted to be able to use their parts to live forever. Either way, at the end of the movie, the humans don't even suspect that they're now stuck on a planet with a remorseless mass-murdering machine, surrounded by the grim evidence of his madness.