So, to report back, my script is no longer hung up on the \M and \A from before, BUT, it's showing the same error messages for any $powershell vairable. I ran a little test program for this and found the same results even when distilled down.
Here's a testing program I used, and it's output.
Any ideas? Thank you again, you absolute legend

#!C:\Strawberry\perl\bin

use warnings; use strict; use autodie;

\$var = 3; \$var; print "Hello world\n";

This yielded the same issue that I got before
PS F:\Coding> perl .\Testingps.pl
'$var' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.
'$var' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable progr