If you want to make me love your work, take a scene or a character who could have been flat or cliche or basic, and write them a wildly new direction. In Murderbot, to my surprise and delight, it was what the Weitzes did with the character of Dr. Gurathin. In the books, Gurathin is the one member of the PresAux team who’s a little more suspicious of their assigned SecUnit. He clocks that Murderbot is acting weird, and he questions it in front of the rest of the group to figure out whether they’re in danger. Once they figure out that it’s autonomous, he needles Murderbot occasionally just to make sure it’s not going to go rogue and kill them all. This is brave of him, from a certain point of view, but also stupid, and Dr. Mensah mostly seems to be annoyed when he does it.
When I learned that David Dastmalchian had been cast in the Murderbot adaptation, I figured he was playing Dr. Gurathin, and that Gurathin’s role was going to be expanded a bit. My first thought was that he would be the Dr. Smith of the group, which would have been fun, but nowhere near as meaningful as the path they took.
One of the highlights of reading Martha Wells’ Murderbot books is watching as she builds a comprehensive critique of unchecked capitalism. As we travel through her world, and meet Murderbot, ART, Three, and the Preservation Alliance team, we gradually see how corporate greed has ruined every aspect of sentient life. It works incredibly well because, since we’re in Murderbot’s head, the horrors of the Corporation Rim are presented as simple fact: many of Murderbot’s clients torture it for fun; SecUnits and ComfortUnits have to obey orders no matter the circumstances; many of Murderbot’s clients make equipment a higher priority than human life or safety; yes Murderbot is also equipment; of course the Company can be bribed.
We get a sense of how bad things are largely from watching Murderbot’s confusion and initial discomfort as it gets to know its new clients from Preservation Alliance, where life and freedom have intrinsic value, and where Murderbot itself would be a person with autonomy.
Since the first season of Murderbot primarily adapts Wells’ first book, All Systems Red, it can’t show us all the worldbuilding yet. Instead, the writers decided to frontload a critique of capitalism that feels much harsher and more immediate than the one in the book. Some of this is purely a matter of medium I think—we see the cops order SecUnits to attack starving indentured servants; we see the exhaustion and desperation of the people who work at the SecUnit factory; we see that the world Murderbot accepts as normal is deeply, terribly sick. And on top of that, best of all, we have Gurathin.
Gurathin starts out as the same character he was in the book: an augmented human, slightly shy and awkward, and openly more suspicious of Murderbot than the rest of the Preservation Alliance team. When we meet him, we see that he hold himself back from the rest of the team. When PresAux meets with the Company to fine tune their mission, he glares at the reps like he expects a fight. He’s reluctant to turn his back on them long enough to join the Consensus Circle; he also doesn’t want them to watch him join hands with his friends. And, as Alex Brown pointed out in their fabulous episode reviews, note how Gurathin dresses: the bright colors of PresAux covered by a bland suit jacket. He doesn’t want people to notice him. He doesn’t want to seem “weird”.
At the habitat, while the others dance freely to their upsetting music, Gurathin does… pretty much what I’d do in the scenario: he stands still, only moving his torso and arms, folded into himself like he wants to make himself small. His resistance to Murderbot is presented as a distrust of corporate spyware. But the expansion of his character begins when he asks everyone to meet in the hopper to avoid Murderbot overhearing his suspicions. Ratthi says Gurathin doesn’t trust anyone, which in a different kind of show would just be a comedy setup—“here’s Gurathin, our resident grump, he’ll be cynical about Murderbot until it saves him and he admits he likes it.” But on this show, one that takes human emotion seriously and treats its characters and audience with the care we all deserve, the scene becomes something else entirely. No one treats this like comedy. Gurathin turns to Ratthi, and with total sincerity replies, “I trust you. I trust this team. I don’t trust anything that comes from the Company.”
Oh.
Mensah responds by saying “You have good reason for that”—which immediately tells us that Gurathin has a history with Corporation Rim that the others do not. And, being Preservation, they all chime in with affirmations, tell him they love him, and Ratthi calls him “Gugu”.
The grumpy cynic is not being dismissed or discounted, and now we know he has a History.
When he forces Murderbot to meet with him privately, he vacillates between seemingly sincere questions about Murderbot’s sense of self, and more pointed ones that show his distrust of Corporation Rim. His interrogation is cruel if you know anything about Murderbot and its hatred of interpersonal contact. The eye contact thing is actually torture—there’s no mission-based reason for it, Gurathin’s only doing it because he knows it makes Murderbot uncomfortable, and he knows it can’t say no. The rest of PresAux would be horrified if they saw him doing this.
He uses the interrogation to establish that Murderbot shouldn’t have emotional attachments, that there’s a line between it and a “ComfortUnit”—and he takes the time to tell it that in Preservation Alliance it would be considered a person. He goes on to say that he’s only been in the Alliance six years, and that he joined because he was friends with Dr. Mensah. (We later learn that this is a much more complicated situation.) Gurathin describes himself as being “extremely cautious” and tells Murderbot that he cares very deeply about his friends, but his intensity and attempted Bond Villain vibe are undercut when when Mensah and Bharadwaj end up in actual danger, and Murderbot isn’t there to protect them. After that, Gurathin seems to step back for a while, presumably muttering to himself that the rest of the team are being too trusting.
While Murderbot is away with Mensah we get the first real hint about Gura’s past, but it’s hidden in a charged moment so it could be overlooked. When Leebeebee is hovering, and trying to get Gura to talk with her about his projects, she offers him a “stimulant” from the Medpak, and he snaps “No!” in response. Which in the moment could be seen as the Grumpy One being annoyed, but it still seems like an overreaction to what could be a traumatized person trying to make a connection.
It’s revealed that this wasn’t an overreaction in the next episode, which was when I realized what the show was doing.
Is the “Bitter/Sweet” scene my favorite in the show? I think there are a few others that top it, but only barely. The teammates are playing a “game” where people share their memories of each other, teasing out moments that were “sweet”, but balancing them with moments that were “bitter”. This is the kind of thing only Preservation Alliance would call a game—if I was invited to their table I’d definitely go with an acid bath instead.
When it’s Gurathin’s turn, he only gives in because they chant his name loud enough that people at other tables begin to stare. It seems like he’s never played before—he checks with the others to make sure he’s doing the hand gestures correctly, and, rather than telling them about a simple moment of interpersonal connection, or like a time Ratthi annoyed him or something, he dives straight into terrible trauma. And it’s here that the season’s true critique of capitalism snaps into focus. He was targeted by the Corporation, who saw an opportunity to exploit the augments that set him apart and could be used for so much good. He was intentionally hooked on hardcore drugs, and forced to spy for the Company on pain of being refused his medication. He didn’t just join Preservation Alliance because he and Mensah were “friends” like he told Murderbot—Mensah was meant to be his latest victim. Faced with her loving personality he came clean. Faced with this broken, desperate man, she offered him sanctuary and a shot at a new life.
He tells his story in present tense. He’s telling this story to them, now, on the eve of their mission, in the belly of his personal beast, surrounded by the life that almost killed him. He ends his “sweet” memory by saying, “I see what is possible between people of good will. I break down, tell her everything… she forgives me. And I move to Preservation Alliance and here we are.” Then he flees the table rather than giving a “bitter” memory—as though there isn’t enough bitter laced into what he’s just said?
Because think about what he’s editing out as he speaks to them: escape from his corporate overlords, flight to a strange part of the galaxy, learning how to live in a society that is utterly alien to him (six years later he’s still visibly uncomfortable with it), a leap into the unknown—all of that without getting into the hell of kicking drugs that were custom-made to control him. (I’ll mention that Dastmalchian’s acting here is among the best of the series–I’ve loved Dastmalchian since I saw The Dark Knight on opening night in 2008, and watching him carve out his own fabulous goth niche alongside his work in stuff like Late Night with The Devil and Animals has made my sparkly black heart sing. And this??? I practically crawled into my TV during this scene.)
But the other thing that gets to me is just how raw it is. Not to dismiss Bharadwaj’s pain, but she’s confessing to having feelings for a coworker, and whomst among us? But when we get to Gura’s turn, he trusts them with part of the truth of who he is—a truth that could make them look at him differently, that could set him even more apart from them. He honors the conceit of the game with an offering that is as bitter and sweet as anything could be. And he does it in this glittering restaurant, in the place he hates most, surrounded by all the trappings that almost killed him. In this room filled with artifice and small talk, elites eating and drinking while indentured servants and enslaved bots provide all the labor, he cuts through all of it to get to a place of brutal honesty. Gurathin is what happens when capitalism can do whatever it wants. It latches onto a person and sucks them dry until they’d rather die than keep living under it.
Again, I love it when people take big swings. This games could have happened privately in the team’s quarters. He could have told his friends his story after he was shot, to explain why he wouldn’t use painkillers. The Weitzes could have undercut it with jokes, Dastmalchian could have added a layer of irony to distance present Gurathin from his past. Instead they use the scene to get the core of what capitalism does to people: make you want more and more and more, and then hold that “more” just out of reach to control you. He chooses to tell his friends about this now, on the eve of their mission, so they can see what the Corporation is truly capable of.
He chooses to tell his friends about this now, on the eve of their mission, so they can see what the Corporation is truly capable of. This is why he’s been holding himself back, this is why he’s been suspicious of Murderbot, why he was suspicious of Leebeebee, why he snarled at her when she casually offered him speed. Where Murderbot’s greatest fear is the Acid Bath, Gura’s is falling back into addiction, being dragged back to the Corporation Rim, back to the half life he had there. This is how much he loves Mensah and the team, that he’ll come on the mission with them, because he knows he’s the only one who understands what they’re dealing with.
Well, him and Murderbot. But he can’t trust Murderbot.
Which leads to the most heartbreaking scene of the show. He’s been shot, the wound is infected, Bharadwaj can operate on him but he can’t have any pain meds without risking addiction again. At first he tells Murderbot to restrain him, but then both of them seem to have the same idea at the same time—Murderbot can link to him and block the pain from hitting his nervous system. If he hadn’t had the idea, it seems like Murderbot would have suggested it anyway, which is what makes everything worse. Murderbot pokes around in Gura’s head (payback for their earlier confrontation) but then inadvertently reveals the man’s deepest secret, and most likely the thing he would have claimed as “bitter” during that dinner a month ago: he’s in love with Mensah, and she doesn’t love him back. Not like that, anyway.
But even here, Murderbot doesn’t announce that—it just, again, seemingly accidentally, says “Why don’t you love me back” out loud. Mensah knows what the words means; who knows if the others do? Gura even asks if he’s said something, implying that when the two of them are linked together, the lines between Murderbot and Gura are blurry at best. So when Gura chooses to stay in Murderbot’s mind for an extra second, dredge up the memory of the massacre, blurt it out to the group, and reveal Murderbot’s name for itself—despite Murderbot saying “Don’t!” with more emotion than it’s ever had in its voice before—it feels like a far greater betrayal than Murderbot’s slip. Is this Gura’s spy training coming to the fore? Or was this pure anger, lashing out at a being he already doesn’t trust, after having to make himself vulnerable? Why else would he take that extra beat to lock eyes with Murderbot and say, “You’re defective”?
Under a capitalist system “defective” is the worst thing you can be. If you can’t do your job, make your company money, and spend your money to fund other companies, you’re useless. Everything in a society like that will hammer home the idea that your life has no worth if it isn’t earning money or spending it. If you’re a SecUnit who can’t be trusted to do security, you’ll be melted down and stripped for parts. If you’re an augmented human, you’ll be hooked on drugs and used as a weapon.
How often were insults like that thrown at Gurathin, in his old life? Of course he puts Murderbot’s worst fear, and his own, into words and spits it out for the whole team to hear.
But as he says later, he’s been in Murderbot’s mind. He’s the one who figures out its secret plan, who has an abrupt and total change of heart when he realizes that Murderbot is about to sacrifice itself for them. He’s the one who risks capture to finish the beacon launch, and it’s him, not Mensah, who realizes Murderbot is dying and runs to its side.
He’s also the only one who knows what it’s going to take to get Murderbot back.
While the rest of the team try to use political power (“‘Madame President’. You will address me as ‘Madame President’.”) legal wrestling in the form of Pin-Lee’s massive lawsuit, and sheer emotion and appeals to common decency, it’s Gurathin who understands the Corporation Rim. He’s the one who finally steps into the center, sits down across from the company reps, and tells them that they’ll buy SecUnit. Naturally the others react in horror, because SecUnit isn’t an object to be bought or sold, but Gurathin understands that here, it is. But more than that: they all are. The Preservation Alliance doesn’t realize it, but he knows: you can believe in autonomy and self-determination and free will and even the soul—you can believe anything you want; functionally speaking, if you’re in a room with people who are more powerful than you and the majority of them don’t agree that you’re a person, your internal personhood ceases to matter.
So, use your wallet.
The problem is that they’ve already downloaded SecUnit’s personality and cycled it back into the system. And it’s here that for once capitalism inadvertently saves the day.
While the rest of them are basically helpless, Mensah says, “I refuse to believe that the experience of everything we went through together is just a stream of zeros and ones” and Gurathin snaps “It is.” As she looks up at him, startled, he repeats himself, but more quietly. Mensah still pushes back. “Removed? Yes. Erased? No.” But Gurathin points out that that’s the true evil here. Sure, they’ll keep Murderbot’s memories to strip them for any data they can use, but “personality doesn’t possess any monetary value to them. This is Corporation Rim—they don’t play fair.”
And he thinks like one of them.
He goes back to his old dealer, but this isn’t the kind of soapy, over-the-top show Murderbot would like, so there’s nothing seedy here. This isn’t a drug den or the backroom of a nightclub or anything, just an apartment. Gura’s dealer was a co-worker, a regular man with a day job, who ended up exploiting someone who would have been his friend in a better society. I would be willing to bet my own capitalist earnings that the dealer didn’t have much more choice than Gurathin did. Now he’s free of that life. He has a kid, and (thanks to Leebeebee) we know that’s prohibitively expensive, so he must have done well for himself. But here’s where Gurathin twists the knife. There is only a thin door between the ex-dealer’s husband and child—and the truth of how he used to make his money. The man caves to Gurathin’s blackmail almost immediately.
Who knows if there will be consequences for this man? If Gurathin’s hacking and theft comes to light will it be traced back to him? Will he lose his career and family after all this, anyway? Gurathin can’t let himself care. He can’t think like a member of Preservation Alliance if he wants to win against the Corporation.
He goes into the system, searches for the remnants of Murderbot’s personality. He tries a couple basic searches before he realizes that the key to finding Murderbot is through accepting Murderbot for who it is. He searches for the soap opera that he’s never watched and regards with distaste, and there’s their Murderbot, its personality shaped by the media it loves.
Gurathin then does something that no one else could do: he uploads Murderbot into his own mind. Even as he’s told not to.
Pin-Lee’s legal actions have worked in that they’ve been able to retrieve Murderbot’s body; Mensah’s political clout allowed her to offer up the GrayCris scandal to a ravenous media industrial complex. They’re able to fight the Corporation Rim in ways that don’t touch their selfhood—if anything, this will enhance Pin-Lee’s status as a lawyer, and other leaders will learn not to test Mensah. But Gurathin is the one who knows that you have to get dirty if you want to beat the Corporation. He drags himself back into the shame of his old life, he comes face-to-face with the worst moments of his past by confronting his old dealer. He checks his own moral code at the door to threaten the man into giving him what he wants. He presumably risks arrest if he’s caught hacking into a Company database. He risks his own mind by uploading Murderbot. And what happens? He runs back into PresAux’s suite and pukes into the sink from the physical strain, and Mensah, of course, thinks he’s relapsed. His friends are so shocked by what’s happening, and by seeing Murderbot come back to itself, that no one even thinks to thank him at first.
He wants so badly to be Murderbot’s mentor, to help it learn how to live in Preservation Alliance, as Mensah helped him six years before. And of everyone on the team, he might be the one human who could. But he’s also the only one who can really understand why Murderbot needs to go. It has to be in its own head for a while, and figure out what it wants on its own terms, not by talking about it with humans who, try as they might, literally can’t imagine what it’s been through. He hasn’t just seen inside Murderbot’s mind, he’s held it inside of his own, and learned its language enough to let it go by agreeing that, “You need to check the perimeter.”
In the end we watch the person who was the most twisted by Corporation Rim’s capitalist machine define himself by the gifts he gives freely to his friends. He chooses to tell his friends his story. To trust them. To let them in. He chooses to dive back into his past, and face his worst fears, to rescue Murderbot’s consciousness. He takes Murderbot into himself, gives it the gift of space in his own mind, to give it a shot at a new life. And he gives it the gift of letting it go without an argument, something I don’t think Mensah herself would have been able to do, if she’d been the one to wake up.
Lately I’ve been thinking even more than usual about What Art Can Accomplish Right Now. I doubt I’m alone in that. I think it’s this. The Weitzes looked at Dr. Gurathin, and saw an opportunity to layer in a backstory that didn’t just add depth to the character, but also became a prism for the themes of the books and the show. Murderbot is about free will, but through Gurathin the show is able to ask: how much free will can even a human person really have under a system that sees them as only as a resource to be exploited? Rather than giving us info dumps or exposition, they found a way to talk about this giant capital-T THEME through an irritating, hilarious, deeply lovable character.
Ugh this itself is a bitter-sweet thing for me, because I agree – I love the expansion of Gurathin as a character, and I think it works really well as a parallel for Murderbot itself. However I think as well as they did expanding that part, they did a disservice to the original work by reducing the visibility of Murderbot’s emotional arc from the book of accepting PresAux’s kindness and acknowledging it’s own affection for them (especially its attachment to Mensah). And I wonder if they found it easier to show that through a human character like Gurathin rather than working within Murderbot’s comedic snark to show vulnerability.
Either way, David Dastmachian is a wonderful actor and really brings it all season. I ended up really enjoying his interactions with all the other characters.
Thanks for this, you really expanded my thinking on Gurathin. I was already impressed by David Dastmalchian’s performance as an antagonist who is sympathetic — that is a really difficult part to play for an actor and he brings it off beautifully.
“When I learned that David Dastmalchian had been cast in the Murderbot adaptation, I figured he was playing Dr. Gurathin”
Me too. Kind of a no-brainer, since Gurathin’s the only one besides Mensah who really stands out from the pack.
And yes, this piece sums it up nicely. They did terrific work with him in the finale, taking this character who’d been SecUnit’s antagonist and turning him into a true and selfless friend, the only one who really understands it. I don’t agree with the opinion that this diminishes SecUnit in any way, because it’s not about SecUnit versus Gurathin, it’s about the relationship between them.
Wow what a fantastic article and what made me stop and read it was the title. The scene you wrote about when they were playing the game and Gurathin reveals his truth hit me very hard.. in fact i was kind of in tears.. that raw emotion.. those tears that he displayed.. felt so real and I knew that Dastmachian was in fact feeling those emotions and i dare say took on the role because it was very personal to him. He is a recovering heroin addict. Im a recovering meth addict and personally have know many recovering and using heroin addicts. I know very very few who are still clean or sadly alive. He is a fantastic actor and a great person who I admire greatly. I could see real emotions in that scene. I wasnt even aware of the books i intend to check them out but i love the show very much.
I agree Gurathin has more depth and is written in an interesting way on the show, but “deeply lovable” is not how I feel about him. Not trying to be negative towards people who enjoy him, but his behavior towards Mensah was very hard to watch for me, especially since men we are meant to like are never shown behaving like that in the books. His treatment of Murderbot being so much harsher felt like a strange choice to me, too, since Murderbot is enslaved and the book version of Gurathin is never so excessively cruel to it, which helps sell the idea that Gurathin is liked by the wider team and generally a decent person. Beyond that, him treating it like that in front of the team and them all letting it slide hit wrong for me in contrast with the book version of the characters, their values, and their integrity. We see the gentler version of Gurathin get shut down pretty hard by the humans in the book. While the TV version of him gets an arc (more of an arc than either Murderbot or Mensah get on the show, I’d say) and seems to evolve, I’m not sure I really forgive the TV version of Gurathin for how he treats Murderbot since it was so over-the-top cruel.
How he treats Mensah is also upsetting, and I’m not sure why the audience is expected to let it slide. I couldn’t stop thinking about him bossing her around, yelling at her, and sniffing her bedding while watching all the added Gurathin stuff in the finale (maybe compounded by the fact that in the book, Pin-Lee and Mensah are much more important in the closing chapter. So with the expansion of Gurathin’s role in the TV finale, I couldn’t stop also thinking about how ceaselessly the non-male characters’ plot importance and emotional beats are minimized or undermined by this adaptation). While the writing around the character is interesting, this is not a male character I like as a person or find endearing after how he behaves for the bulk of the show. Him being heroic and taking up so much screentime made me think the TV writers expected us not to care about the black female lead’s emotions, boundaries, or autonomy, frankly. If that’s the case, maybe they were largely right. It seems like a lot of the audience forgot about how he treats Mensah or maybe just didn’t care, which disturbs me.
On a meta level, I wish non-male characters (e.g. ones who matter more than Gurathin later in the book canon like Arada, Bharadwaj, and Pin-Lee) had been expanded more than him or at least more equitably. The decision to expand and center Gurathin of all characters, undermine Mensah (paring down the number of Mensah scenes compared to the book), and not significantly expand the non-male characters in the cast felt iffy to me given how women are written and framed in the source material. As much as I think the adaptation’s angle on Gurathin is fun, writing-wise, it’s hard to ignore the sexism behind the choice to expand him. Plus, I don’t find him appealing or laudable given how he treats marginalized characters. I assumed we were not meant to, not that it’s wrong to personally find him lovable. Everyone’s drawn to different things, but a lot of people are turned off by seeing men behave how Gurathin behaves, for obvious reasons. After seeing how he treats Mensah with no sign of improvement, I don’t think he’s even likable. He also says he believes all the other human characters are beneath him… I don’t know how to forget about that.
Moreover, it’s hard to overlook how the other human characters were treated by the script. In the source material, men are not the star of the story. It’s a narrative and world where women are important and patriarchy seemingly doesn’t exist. Gurathin is not this important in the books, and it feels like the main reason he was expanded is because he’s male and someone assumed audiences would not care about a story where a middle aged black woman is as important as she is in the books. And I guess they were right, right? Because all anyone talks about is Gurathin. Most people are happy to have an adaptation that centers a man to this degree. The fandom spaces are full of people who refuse to acknowledge the existence of the female characters despite how female characters are handled by the source material. The adaptation pared down Mensah and the central dynamic of the book (Murderbot’s developing friendship with her), undermining many of the emotional beats between them and seemingly decentering Mensah at every opportunity in favor of expanding Gurathin. And most people are happy with the adaptation’s choice to cast Mensah aside. They would much rather see a story centering Gurathin.
I think he is interesting, but I would not go as far as to say he’s “lovable” or that I like the decision to make the Murderbot story center a male character to this degree, especially at the expense of the black female lead. Writing-wise, it’s obvious the TV writers put much more thought into him than any other character, Murderbot included, so it makes sense that he is more layered and more pathos-laden than virtually any other character. But for me, that does not make him my favorite part of the show, more the opposite—especially because how he behaves is so unpleasant, gendered, pushy, and boundary crossing in a way nothing from the PresAux humans is in the books, and his arc is insufficient for any viewer who was bothered by that. And like I mentioned, I was disappointed by the extent to which Mensah was decentered and pared down. While she’s certainly not flat in the show and there were some nice additions to sell her interiority and motivations, the TV writers cut countless Mensah moments that helped sell the book character’s personality and emotional complexity via her interactions with Murderbot and the wider team, and instead they added in many moments expanding Gurathin and his dynamics with the protagonist and wider cast, plus some OCs to boot. An adaptation virtually tossing aside the black female lead to expand a minor male character to this extent is depressing, especially given how uniquely Wells frames Mensah.
In the books, Gurathin is not very important to Murderbot going forward. Mensah is. There are an assortment of supporting cast PresAux characters who become larger players in the book narrative as well, and Gurathin is not one in a way that justifies the disproportionate expansion of his character. But the show has changed things a lot interpersonally and beyond. The expansion of Gurathin at the expense of Mensah gives me the impression things will continue to be shifted around quite a bit as the show progresses to continue to center him and diminish the importance of non-male characters. I also get the impression the show will continue to present male characters being controlling and boundary crossing (and framed as lightly as those elements were framed in season 1), which I dread, especially since it is such a contrast with the interpersonally welcoming source material. If I didn’t like the books, I would have tapped out of the show because of how the male characters behave and how lightly the narrative frames it. It’s even worse that it’s from male characters who are much more respectful and gentle feeling in the source material. If they wanted to tell a story with this kind of behavior from male characters (and one starring male characters, for that matter) why did they choose to adapt Murderbot Diaries?
I was on board with Gurathin’s expansion initially, because I thought it was fun and interesting. But it became my least favorite part of the show when I realized the writers had no resolution for his behavior towards Mensah and intended to frame him as more important than her, story-wise and emotionally. It was most egregious in the finale, where he does more than her, speaks more than her, and even interrupts emotional beats that are nominally about her. Looking at the season as a whole, what a stark contrast compared to the book’s handling of marginalized characters (particularly the female, GNC, black, and queer characters) and the tone of the interpersonal. Gurathin speaks more than Mensah in many episodes despite speaking less than many of the supporting cast characters in the books, and among the show’s supporting cast, Ratthi speaks more than Arada, Pin-Lee, or Bharadwaj. The show’s script sends a message that only male characters matter, after the protagonist. We also get an unflattering and unhealthy seeming dynamic in the show’s one on-screen queer poly relationship (and implication Mensah’s polycule is struggling, too) despite the book presenting multiple queer and/or poly relationships which are framed positively or neutrally. And the main characters are pointlessly mean and disrespectful to each other in ways they are not in the book. It feels like something truly special was lost in the adaptation because of the changes on these fronts.
On the new male lead front, especially, it feels stark. This is an adaptation which intentionally undermined the black female lead to shove a minor male character into the spotlight instead. I am glad you liked it. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with liking it, the expansion was interesting, but I think we should acknowledge the nature of the changes the adaptation made instead of praising Gurathin to this extreme. There was no need for the TV writers to introduce him behaving like that towards Mensah (nor any payoff to justify or resolve it). And there were many other characters in the cast that deserved more attention from the show’s script and didn’t get it just because of their gender. There were many things lost from the book because of the extent of the cuts to scenes and smaller interactions centering female characters. The decision to prioritize adding new Gurathin scenes and lines at the expense of the other characters changes everything, even how Murderbot’s characterization comes across. The emotional beats that got weight in the book were undermined, and I can only assume the upcoming story is going to be much more Gurathin-centric than anything the books had. I assume Exit Strategy and Mensah’s trauma recovery will somehow be all about Gurathin now. The fact that it’s 2025 and this of all IPs has an adaptation that does this kind of thing is depressing. I was not expecting a 1:1 adaptation, but I would have loved to see something more in the spirit of the book.
While I understand your point, I also should point out that the reason people remember Gurathin is because he’s a complete mess and disaster of a human being. The things that make him deeply unlikable, awful to his fellow crew members, awful to Murderbot, and awful to Mensah are the reasons he’s an interesting character.
If he was a female character he’d have to be all the disaster that Gurathin is to be someone worth talking about from the sexual harrassment, stalking, racism to non-biological beings, and worse.
It’s why Namor was one of the most popular Golden Age heroes. Because his being an enormous jerk made him stand out from everyone else.
I think it’s reductionist to accuse the show of focusing on Gurathin only because he’s male. As I mentioned elsewhere, he’s the only Preservation Alliance character other than Mensah who stands out from the group in the first book. He’s the one character who has significant friction with SecUnit, so it’s natural that the writers of an adaptation would focus on that friction, since conflict is the driver of plot. The reasons why he was a logical character to focus on have nothing to do with gender.
I also don’t agree that Mensah was marginalized in any way. She was very much the lead PresAux character, with Gurathin second. Both characters had the closest and most complex relationships with SecUnit, but Mensah’s was more positive and Gurathin’s more adversarial. Mensah was given a lot of new material with SecUnit that wasn’t in the book, so it seems counterfactual to say that the show pared down the arc of their forming friendship. If people are talking more about Gurathin, it’s not because he’s more important, just because the show added more to him that’s worth talking about, while its Mensah was pretty true to the character we already knew from the books.
I agree that it would be good to see Mensah and the rest of the team developed more, and more seriously. That would have grown some women and non-binary characters as more multidimensional people, as well Preservation’s culture, which is so alien to us.
I also think Gurathin’s characterization is really valuable because it represents some other, less-extreme, ways the CR harms people — induced addiction, depression, anxiety, coerced labor, betrayal of friendship — and one possible response: be honest, accept help from others, and do your best as a member of a healthier community. He isn’t always successful, but the people he is around believe him to be safe — or to represent a level of risk they can accept — and they support him. I think that’s also an important story to explore, and one that a lot of people can connect with / would like to experience. I think it’s also a big reason he has elicited such a strong response from viewers such as myself.
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Couldn’t agree more
I’ll have to watch this. Thanks for your cool article!
I loved the way the showrunners treated Gurathin’s character. I remembered that he was not (specified to be) from Corporation Rim in the books (but the books don’t contradict this), and as soon as it was revealed on the show that he was, I thought it was a brilliant move.
Also, I have rewatched the entire show several times, and I have noticed that there is something in nearly every episode to show that Murderbot and Gurathin are thinking along the same lines, that they are very similar in spite of their dislike of each other. Sometimes it’s blatant, like the moment where they both realize how to mute Gurathin’s pain without medication, and sometimes it’s a more subtle moment. This detail makes the overall arc even more satisfying on rewatch.
Love this analysis so much. It put into words some of the key moments and ideas from the series in a way that made me get choked up. And also made me sit down and write a long Tumblr post reaction about the parts that hit home, which I’ll link to since it’s a bit long to fit in the comment box :)
https://www.tumblr.com/murderbot-moodboard/789999496357724160/i-didnt-expect-dr-gurathin-to-be-my-favorite?source=share
I read this article at San Diego Comic Con, waiting for David Dastmalchian’s panel about his new book to start. I couldn’t do his comments justice, but he spoke with courage and compassion. Also his forthcoming book sounds amazing. Anyway, this article had some great insights.
One thing I noticed was that the three characters from the Corporation Rim all have deep issues with physical touch.
Murderbot, who has never had much physical autonomy, does not want to be touched at all. I think it is pretty consistent with the book there.
Gurathin, who clearly didn’t have much physical autonomy either, does want to be touched, but only in limited and planned ways, and recoils from anything else.
Leebeebee (who I think is a great addition to the story), is desperate for touch. She kisses Bharadwaj’s hand and Murderbot’s chin, without asking, and fantasizes multiple times about having a sex partner she could control completely.
The PresAux team, in contrast, doesn’t always get it right, but they understand and care about consent and boundaries and communication and forgiving. Of course the Corporation Rim makes no sense to them.
Thank you for putting into words my reaction to Gurathin.
Leah,
You not only nailed the narrative but added a lot of beautiful contributions to the story.
Some of the best writing connecting commentary on the times and storytelling of late.
Thank you.
I’m glad you enjoyed him. For me, this take on Dr. Gurathin nearly ruined the whole show from me. The way he convinced the rest of Preservation to turn its back on Murderbot, his constant doubts about it, the way Preservation never pushed back on how he was treating it, how he was constantly ordering it about and treating it unkindly.
Then in the last episode he still doesn’t see it as a person until AFTER he has gotten to view its entire life.
It felt like the narrative was rewarding him for being a horrible person and giving him what he wanted all along – Murderbots memories. And they made the finale be about him, instead of about Murderbot.
He had more complexity and background, but all the complexity was about making him a horrible person who does horrible things to a slave and then convinces other humans to be okay with how he keeps on treating it.
Maybe if at some point Preservation pushed back on him? But they don’t, they seem okay to just let him be horrible over and over.
It was so very distressing to watch and theres no resolution on his behaviour. By the end of the series I was thoroughly sick of him and all the screen time he kept getting.
I hope they don’t keep making him the main character after murderbot and go back to the reference material. The books are about Murderbot and its biggest human connection is Mensah. Not the guy who repeatedly violates its mind and treats it so horribly. I enjoy the books and I don’t know how they can reconcile this horrible cruel version of him with the almost-friend in the books.
To me, the way Gurathin initially treats Murderbot is completely rational. After all, it is a heavily armed piece of equipment (as far as he knows) with unknown motivations, foisted on them by insurance requirements from the Corporation Rim. People from Preservation treat Murderbot as a person just from reflex, but Gurathin hasn’t had the time, and possibly never will, to develop that same reflex. And he wasn’t even horrible to it, just suspicious. I don’t see how you can equate that to outright cruelty, especially given he doesn’t even know that Murderbot has feelings.