DOGE must exist in the future, because safety standards in the world of Murderbot have gone completely to shit. The factory where killer SecUnit robots are made is a dingy factory staffed by bored indentured servants. The IT system is buggy and glitches out for seconds at a time. Thresholds for product quality are met with an “eh, good enough.” Defective android body parts are passed along the line to avoid having to start over. Each SecUnit face the facility makes is different in order to make rogue bots easier to track down, but that’s just it — robots go rogue often enough for this to be a concern.

The whole thing seems less like a disaster waiting to happen and more like one that’s happened already. Such is life in a world where the generation of cash in ever-increasing amounts divorces itself from the need to provide useful, workable products made with even a modicum of thought or care. It’s not too hard to draw the link between the SecUnits and and a different form of so-called “artificial intelligence”: the AI models currently plagiarizing all of human creative endeavor to help students cheat on papers with subliterate garbage, advocated by tech lunatics like Sam Altman and Elon Musk so that they can eliminate the means for anybody but them to make a fulfilling living. When robots are deployed, it’s no one’s goal to help humanity thrive. 

Anyway, back in the present — the present of the show, I mean, not the dystopian hellscape ushered in by fascist techbros in the here and now — Murderbot’s having a rough go of it. Completely trounced by a superior model armored entirely in cool Knight Rider black, Murderbot has a control module attached to it by its opponent. Once the module finishes downloading its data and rewriting the SecUnit’s programming, a process that takes about ten minutes, Murderbot will be utterly under the control of the evil robot, who plans to turn it against its own humans. 

But not if Dr. Mensah can help it!

Overwhelmed by a feeling of obligation to another sentient being no matter how hard the rest of her team tries to convince her he’s just a machine, Mensah braves the overrun compound and takes the evil bot down with a mining drill to the chest. She tries to help Murderbot out of there, but finds it…less than cooperative. Between the damage incurred in the battle and the whammy being placed on it by the new module, its circuits are so fried that all it can do is repeat itself and/or hallucinate that they’re characters on its favorite TV show, Sanctuary Moon. At least it gets some fun new hair out of the deal.

But the evil robot is harder to kill than it seems, and starts coming for them again. Meanwhile, Mensah’s teammate Ratthi, perhaps trying to impress the two other members of his throuple, heads into danger to rescue their boss, even though he doesn’t know which end of the gun to point at the enemy. Fortunately for everyone, Ratthi’s partners Arada and Pin-Lee take matters into their own hands and squash the bot with their landing craft, saving the day.

But only for a minute or two. With the bad robot slain, Murderbot is able to once again think clearly and disables the module. But the reprogramming has already been loaded into its system, and the team refuses to listen when it warns them they have to run or it will kill them all. So it does the only thing a Murderbot with a heart of gold can do: It grabs Mensah’s gun and shoots itself in the chest.

The moment works because Murderbot actually feels like a character, not a narrator who tells jokes. They’re not without flaw in this area, but for the most part, Alexander Skarsgård’s wry, self-deprecating voiceovers sound like the thought process of a specific, singular person who’s kind of sealed in within its own mind; it’s never “so yeah, that just happened” snark. Watching Murderbot and Mensah stagger their way through the compound to safety, you’re entertained by the robot’s goofy hallucinations, but you also have to wonder how much Mensah is learning about just how off-program this SecUnit now is, which should pay dividends in the future. Surely its dramatic self-sacrifice served much the same purpose. 

Meanwhile, the throuple’s dialogue — all of them are almost unbearably anxious not to the one who’s causing problems for the throuple, which of course causes problems for the throuple — rings true even on another planet. And it’s always fun to watch an evil robot get stabbed by a giant drill, then squashed by a spaceship’s landing gear. Once again, Murderbot delivers on its modest promise: fun sci-fi shenanigans, 20 minutes at a time. 

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.