It’s not easy being Murderbot: The more people care about it, the more uncomfortable it feels. It can’t comfortably make or maintain eye contact. It has a hard time answering direct questions — in part because it’s trying to calculate the right answer to make it look like it hasn’t freed itself of its programming, in part because it seems stunned and slightly terrified anyone wants to talk to it.
What Murderbot would really like to do is go back to watching its television shows. The latest, Strife in the Galaxy, seems a bit more politically minded than Sanctuary Moon, but Murderbot dismisses it as an amusing but inferior effort. But the bot is continuously beset by the noble-minded explorers asking it about its feelings or inviting him to sit down and chat. “What was it with humans and sitting?” it wonders to itself. “It was like a fetish to them.”
You may have gathered from its suggestive choice of pejorative comparison that Murderbot doesn’t have much time for sex. It frequently complains about humans and their “pheromones.” It’s revolted by the prickly interplay of the group throuple, Ratthi, Arada, and Pin-Lee. It’s aghast to discover (via its access to literally all the data recorded by the expedition) that Dr. Gurathin is snooping around Dr. Mensah’s room not because he’s a spy or a saboteur, but because he wants to smell her pillow. I don’t see a Murderbot marriage in the future anytime soon.
What Murderbot mainly wants to do is prevent these hapless humans from getting killed by whatever wiped out the people at the other exploration base, to which a team consisting of the robot, Mensah, and the throuple travel. (Gurathin stays back at the ranch with Bharadwaj, whose physical recovery masks trauma and terror over what she experienced at the hands, or mandibles, of that giant centipede in the premiere.) But getting to the truth without getting murked is hard to do when Ratthi’s out there shouting into the communicators loud enough for anything within hundreds of yards to hear.
Moreover, Ratthi and Mensah are deeply concerned about Murderbot’s wellbeing and sentient-being rights. But this only makes its anxiety about whether it can continue to cover up its jailbroken programming more severe. Some of the other teammates, like Gurathin back the base, are understandably a bit more bearish on whether they can really trust a killing machine with an emotional affect issue.
But so far, it seems they can. Murderbot has no great wish to die on these people’s behalf, but it’s serious about trying to keep them alive as well. Following its instructions — setting down the landing craft outside the base’s perimeter, staying behind while it investigates, heading back for the ship the moment it spots trouble, taking off without it if it doesn’t return in ten minutes — all prioritize the team’s safety ahead of the robot’s.
It may not have to guard these people anymore if it doesn’t want to. Who knows, maybe it’s just force of habit keeping it on program, in the same way it never quit its job after shutting down his governor module in the first place, since it didn’t know what else to do with itself. But for all its disdain, never once does it say anything like “good riddance to these meat puppets” when contemplating disaster befalling them.
Instead, disaster nearly befalls Murderbot. Entering the base, it finds widespread carnage, and deduces that one of the slain team’s multiple SecUnits turned on the others before finally dying himself. Not so fast, Murderbot: the culprit bot is just playing possum, and springs to life to take Murderbot down. Our hero triumphs, but only for a moment. Emerging from the shadows, a robot (or human?) in all-black armor and helmet zaps Murderbot in the episode’s closing moments. From what Murderbot’s narration implies, this is the person, or person-like entity, who seized control of the rogue SecUnit and set it on its killing spree.
That final laser blast is our cliffhanger ending, but the episode isn’t all plot mechanics and inner monologue. Via Mensah and other members of the team, we learn something of the politics of this section of the universe. The continued existence of the Preservation Alliance — the free, communally administered planet from which the team hails — runs counter to the Company’s philosophy that free planets can’t hack it on their own. The team, therefore, is out to prove that they can survive just fine out here without abandoning their mission or losing anyone, or any robot, along the way.
But this also means that the expedition is a prime target for Company mischief. Murderbot accidentally reveals that he’s spying on their activities for the Company; could there be even more nefarious programming lurking in the cyber-organic recesses of his brain? Not even Murderbot himself knows the answer to that. And what about faulty equipment, bad maps, perhaps even the slaughter of the other team? Is any or all of this deliberate sabotage?
Finally, Mensah mentions that some of her colleagues in the Alliance think the Company is right, and that merging with a corporation is their only hope for survival, even if it’d be survival in name only. Does anyone on the team share these feelings? If so, will they act on them in such a way as to endanger their teammates, or the big gawky terminator who guards them?
Clocking in at just around 20 minutes total — shorter than a Friends episode, minus commercials and the Rembrandts — this installment of Murderbot shows what a fun approach to this material these bite-sized episodes offer. There’s something really old-school about it, and I mean old school, like 1960s Batman old-school. Here’s a colorful genre piece about a strange pereson in a costume fighting to keep people safe against nefarious forces that nearly triumph once every half hour.
Why belabor the issue by extending the episodes to an hour, or deviating from the bubbly pop-surival-horror tone? Why not play the Aliens Colonial Marines’ arrival on LV-426 with Burke from the Company in tow for laughs? Why not do it as the thesis statement for an entire show?
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.