Welcome to the eighth episode of Murderbot and Its Selfish, Ungrateful, Hippie Clients! Murderbot has more of its privacy invaded, Mensah has had it up to here, and Gurathin is having the second worst day of his life.
Spoilers ahoy!
Ah, there’s my Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. I missed thee last week. The scene we see is from a much later episode than the last clip we got; and it’s also a new one for Seccy. Captain Hossein is now dead, decapitated at the hands of his construct lover, the NavBot. Lieutenant Kulleroo has been promoted to captain after basically doing a factory reset on the NavBot. Except it doesn’t work and it drags them all into the event horizon of a wormhole.
It’s pretty clear that in the Corporate Rim, sexualizing constructs in a gendered way based solely on surface-level assumptions of presentation is depressingly (frustratingly, disgustingly) common. We saw it in the way Leebeebee went after Murderbot and how Captain Kulleroo tells NavBot to smile. I talked about this in an earlier review, but I’m convinced it’s also a key selling point for AI. We’ve got tech bros arguing that AI is practically sentient, folks turning to LLMs for romantic relationships, and even a journalist who made an AI employee look like an attractive woman then immediately sexually harassed it. They get to have all the thrill of power with none of the consequences for abusing it.
Every woman or person who often gets assumed to be women (hi, it’s me) has had some creepy asshole man tell them to smile. If Kulleroo tried that on a human woman, she’d have some options for resistance, even if it was just complaining about it to her friends. NavBot wasn’t supposed to even realize resistance was a concept, much less offer any, not after that reconditioning. Love gave her choice, so they took that choice away. Control without resistance. It’s the main selling point for SecUnits and other constructs. The Company gets to replicate slavery but with a population that can’t fight…and sexual violence is part of that. It’s also an undercurrent of why the PresAux humans are so distressed by Murderbot being “rogue.” Their reaction reminds me more of the claim that was common in the 19th century (and still percolates around today) that Black Americans would rise up against white people and inflict upon them what they inflicted upon us. The Corporate Rim folks cannot conceive of a construct going rogue and just wanting to hang out with some space operas, while the Preservation Alliance humans only want SecUnit to go rogue in ways they approve of. They want a certain type of resistance done in a certain way; tone policing, anyone?
Hang on, I’m getting sidetracked. Much like Murderbot does when watching Sanctuary Moon instead of scouting out the PresAux habitat to see if the mystery third party is lying in wait. Using the transponder Murderbot left behind to record the habitat, the team figures out the group trying to kill them is from GrayCris, a mining company. And they have even more evil SecUnits. Much like PresAux, GrayCris is also led by a middle-aged Black woman, albeit one with a terrible hair care routine. Mensah wouldn’t be caught dead in public with her hair that fried.
For once, Gurathin and Murderbot agree on something: neither think they should return to the habitat, despite how badly he needs the med bay. Ratthi, Arada, Pin-Lee, and Bharadwaj may think they were badasses in that last “punch-up,” as Ratthi adorably puts it, but we and SecUnit know that they only made it out of there alive by the miraculous intervention of a broody alien animal. It says a lot that while Gurathin is writhing about in agonizing pain, he and Murderbot both simultaneously realize it can use its own body to help him override his pain sensors in lieu of giving him pills. Murderbot doesn’t know anything about Gura’s past in the Corporate Rim, so it has no context for why he would reject pain meds. Yet it still occurs to it to help him. Mensah asks if this plan was inspired by Sanctuary Moon but nope. (It’s actually from Medcenter Argala, episode 502). For the first time, SecUnit gets to see things from a human perspective. It’s a lot gooier than expected.
And here comes another one of my favorite moments from the book. In the novella, the reveal about SecUnit’s chosen name comes at the same time as PresAux learns it’s rogue. Here, Gurathin wasn’t able to dig past its defenses the first time around. Murderbot decides to use this opportunity to go rooting around in Gurathin’s brain, and then Gurathin returns the favor. Alexander Skarsgård plays this moment so well. If SecUnit was really an evil, killer rogue bot like NavBot from Sanctuary Moon, we’d expect to see it react with anger, threats, or violence. Instead, Murderbot is frightened and nervous. It’s having its most private thoughts and memories aired out in public sans context and by the one person who has gone out of his way to make life inordinately more difficult for it. Director Aurora Guerrero shoots this scene with a lot of close-ups and medium shots of the actors, then when there’s a pause after the reveal, switches to a wide shot of the entire cast where we watch the humans in unison shift ever so slightly away from Murderbot. Then a slow zoom in on it when Gura calls it defective. It’s subtle yet so effective. Even Mensah leans back. It’s a gutting betrayal, to be seen and then rejected by the only humans to ever show it kindness, to paraphrase NavBot. Composer Amanda Jones’ score really drives home the shame and sorrow Murderbot feels in the moment where it agrees with Gurathin’s accusation that “Maybe you’re just defective.”
Not having anything else to do, and not getting any defense from its supposed allies, Murderbot puts its helmet up and leaves. Bharadwaj and Ratthi mount a defense of Murderbot, and Mensah finally shuts Ratthi down by reminding him “It’s not your pet!” They can’t force it to return or help them, so she redirects them to figuring out who GrayCris is. I gotta disagree with Mensah here, not about the pet part but about the root of her anger. In the past, she’s always been able to pull Murderbot back in with a little patience and compassion. This time, she feels like a line has been crossed. She’s right that it isn’t a pet, but it is a person. She’s choosing to let it go, to not fight for it. She offered Gurathin forgiveness for choosing to cause her harm despite being addicted to Company substances—we know it was ultimately a choice, even if a meager one, because he was about to end his life. Murderbot doesn’t know why it has that memory of 57 miners being slaughtered. Perhaps it was forced to like those DeltFall SecUnits and like it was going to do before it shot itself. Perhaps it was manipulated like Gura. Perhaps it was ordered to by another human. We don’t know anything except that it didn’t choose to murder those miners or any other humans. It was doing the thing that humans programmed it to do. And now another set of humans are placing all the blame on it for actions it couldn’t control. Yeah, I’d storm out, too.
PresAux deduces that GrayCris is likely after the alien remnants. The Company probably didn’t have a hand in the attacks on DeltFall or PresAux, but someone employed by the Company probably did take a bribe to cover GrayCris’ tracks. DeltFall was killed simply for knowing GrayCris was on planet. The only reason PresAux is still alive and kicking is because GrayCris needs their data on the location of the alien remnants, data Leebeebee failed to retrieve. While Murderbot “wanders aimlessly,” it tries to self-soothe with its favorite episodes of Sanctuary Moon, to no avail. The NavBot wormhole episode we saw in the cold open gives it an idea. Why not play the part of “the rogue SecUnit who betrayed its clients?”
Next week is the penultimate episode of the season. Will Murderbot’s plan work?
Final Thoughts
- Episode 8 covers parts of chapter 6 in All Systems Red but is mostly invented for the show.
- Constructs sure do love decapitating people don’t they?
- I don’t know what John Cho did to piss off his NavBot lover, but it’s quite a left turn from that romantic fireside chat.
- Speaking of sexualizing constructs, it’s not lost on me that NavBot is the only crewmember forced to wear that shiny, revealing, short skort thing.
- Hope that next season (if we get a second season) they tweak the text of what Murderbot sees on its screens so it’s darker and more opaque. Be kind to my old eyes! I had to get right up next to the TV screen to read “area clear” written over the blood spatter.
- It’s also not lost on me that Bharadwaj does the same exact procedure on Gurathin as she did on SecUnit.
- At least Mensah gave Ratthi that light touch as a silent apology. They’ll have to talk about it later.
- Kinda glad that throuple thing ended. The show never did anything interesting with it.
- I think this is the first time the show has told us Mensah is a planetary administrator? We knew she had some sort of leadership role, but this is basically the President of Preservation Alliance. In the book, it’s pointed out that killing someone of her stature would be just as financially destructive to the Company as paying out the bonds on the rest of the teams.
- Lmao that the CGI of Murderbot scanning the area is the same as the scanning animation in The Sims 4 Career pack.
- Apple TV+: Murderbot minifig when???
Quotes
“When you inducted me into this hideous religion called ‘love,’ you took away the only human who has ever shown me kindness. You have taken away my reason for living. Or letting you live.”
“Yes, Seccy, yes.”
“This doesn’t have to end in violence.” Murderbot and I both scoffed at that.
“Hey. Hey. We’re gonna fix you right up, okay, Gugu?” And that little thumb rub over his cheek! Le sigh. Someone page the rarepair fanfic writers. I need some Ratthi x Gurathin fics forthwith!
“Massacres are bad for business.”
Until next week…
I wonder if calling the NavBot a construct is a deliberate thing—the books are very clear that bots and constructs are distinct types of artificial intelligence—or the show being sloppy. I do want to know how that episode ended and if the captain is all the way dead or just mostly dead. Props to the writers for giving Clark Gregson an evil jerk speech.
I did like Mensah recognizing Murderbot’s (that’s private, sigh) agency here. Given Preservation Alliance’s preference for consensus, leaders would need to be able to recognize when a person is rejecting consensus and leaving.
I wonder if the show will ever do “don’t sexualize it” as strongly as “it’s not a pet.”
I think I’ll adopt Ratthi/Gurathin as a ship. It could be very tasty.
I think the blurriness of the distinction between bots and constructs is less on the Murderbot show’s side and more on the Sanctuary Moon side. I don’t think Corporate Rim serial dramas care about accuracy all that much when it comes to non-human entities. I think Sanctuary Moon made a construct out of a nav bot then gave it a romance storyline.
Plus, calling it “NavBot” allows the main show to play on the name “Murderbot.” We see a lot of parallels, intersections, and contrasts between the characters and events of Sanctuary Moon and the “real” world. This is another one, I think. Works on a couple layers.
So maybe SecUnit’s choice of “Murderbot” as its nickname was influenced by Moon‘s use of the “-bot” suffix?
I really hope they show previous episodes of Sanctuary Moon because I, too, would like to know how Hussein and NavBot got to the point of decapitation. #justiceforHossein #MoreJohnCho
Captain Hossein can’t really be dead. It’s a show. There’s amnesia and wormholes and evil bad guy monologues. He’s coming back.
Well, except that wormholes are an everyday reality in the Murderbot universe, no more fanciful than freeways.
Evil twin! Don’t forget my favorite soap opera trope, the evil twin!!!!! Bwahahahaha!
There’s no way the show would just off half its cast like that.
So, what are we thinking here? Dream sequence? Mirror universe? Holodeck session?
Just here to say YES to this. One of the tropes of every long-running soap, so he must!
Ugh, I did not like them rooting around in each other’s heads! In the book, iirc, Gurathin came across the info accidentally when trying to clear the combat override module stuff.
Ratthi falling for Pin-Lee and awkwardly AND gracefully bowing out is so funny, but yeah, I feel like the throuple was a casualty of the 20 minute episodes.
I really hope they bring John Cho back!!
I was so happy when Mensah burst out with “it’s not a pet!”
The whole cast continues to do great work, but Ratthi’s actor has been really shining the past couple eps. He’s phenomenal at making Ratthi simultaneously endearing and annoying and charismatic.
This episode was devastating in the best way but next week is so far! I wonder if they’ll air both episodes together like they did for the pilot.
Wishful thinking on our part, I imagine!
I’m not sure if it would be better or worse, because if they air them together, it’s that much longer until season 2 :-(
I must admit that the past 2-3 episodes have begun to dim my enthusiasm for this adaptation. At first some of the departures from the book were acceptable (eliminating or mashing characters) or even clever and amusing—seeing Sanctuary Moon? Priceless! And I was able to enjoy these ideas without a constant comparison with the book All Systems Red. But especially the last two episodes have gone so far astray that I am feeling annoyed rather than purely entertained. I’ll continue to watch and hope they redeem themselves by the end.
I hear this sentiment a lot, but they couldn’t just stick to the material in the book. The season would be 2 1hr episodes if they did that. There’s just not enough material. Besides, the whole point is that this is an adaptation. Books can’t be directly translated from page to screen, esp not something as barebones as the original novella. The medium of television allows for a ton of new things, and that inherently means there’s going to be expansions. Very few books are adapted exactly. I already have the book, why would I want to see that exact same thing again? What they’ve added to the world has not only felt to me like good expansions but has also been approved by Martha Wells. They’ve gone “astray” of the text, but not of the tone or vibes or worldbuilding. I don’t think there’s anything to “redeem” and it feels odd to me to think of an adaption as needing “redemption” because it grew the world like it’s supposed to. Just my personal opinion. Not trying to convince you of anything.
“redeem” may have been a bad choice of words on my part. Of course I understand that adjustments have to be made to accommodate the visual medium, and that’s why I was able to just go with the flow during the first few episodes and accept the various differences. But somehow I reached critical mass by the end of this week’s episode. Two more episodes, as short as they are, does not seem like enough to resolve the plot points as they’ve been set up.
Incidentally, please remind me how we know that Martha Wells has *approved* all the changes. Was she given actual veto power? Usually a consultant is merely “consulted”?
Good point. IMDb lists Wells as a consulting producer. That (or executive consultant) is a credit generally used for emeritus creator/showrunners who’ve moved on and are no longer in the writers’ room, just sent the scripts and able to offer input that isn’t binding on the showrunner. I can see how it could be used analogously for the writer of the source material for a show.
She and the showrunners have talked a lot about how involved she was as a consultant. She was on set for much of the shooting. She wasn’t writing scripts, but she was there to provide direction and suggestions, or talk through challenges. She’s not rubber stamping everything, and I’m sure there are things she didn’t love. But overall she’s been extremely supportive and had nothing but praise for the show, and vice versa for the showrunners and cast. If she hated it, I can’t picture her keeping mum about it or outright lying to everyone. That doesn’t track with what I know of her previously. Although I suppose it’s possible.
In general, people who hope to make money from the success of a production they’re involved with have a vested interest in spinning it positively and keeping any dissatisfaction to themselves, at least until years later when there’s no harm in opening up about it. Or they may form bonds with the producers they collaborate with and thus be disinclined to criticize them publicly. In either case, it doesn’t require lying, just discretion.
Of course, I don’t mean to imply that Wells would be dissatisfied with this show, since I have no way of knowing. I just mean that lack of open criticism doesn’t prove anything one way or the other.
I really like the way you said this. I just reread All Systems Red last night and I was almost stunned by the lack of detail. I’ve been in the Murderbot fan club since right before Network Effect came out and I think I just forgot the magical way Martha Wells dumps us into this world. We know that Mensah is Murderbot’s favorite human, but so much of that relationship is not revealed. Murderbot’s affection for the PresAux crew is just sorta present, without any real cause. They take the news that it is rogue and killed 57 miners with incredible unimaginable grace. In the book, because we are so firmly in Murderbot’s head, we fill in the blanks with our own stories. Martha Wells is an absolute genius to be able to tell this story in 150 pages.
The tv shows has taken ASR and asked why and how, and then has shown us. I do not love all of the choices (Gurathin in love with Mensah feels like a tired trope but also the book mentions that Volescu was a bit in love with Mensah so it tracks) but holy freaking cow, i have so loved being on this journey. Yes show me Mensah becoming Murderbot’s favorite human. Yes show me Ratthi learn to be SecUnit’s friend. Yes, show me how it feels to wonder if you are defective. And also yes, show me Clark Gregg doing a mustache twirl.
Gurathin loves Mensah like a drowning person loves a life preserver.
“someone employed by the Company probably did take a bribe to cover GrayCris’ tracks”
Notice that Gurathin is repeating an assessment there that MB stated at the end of ep. 5, when talking to Mensah in the hopper on the way to the beacon.
I read that as a tweak on the boardroom cliche, that something isn’t taken into account or even heard when said by a woman, unless a man repeats it. Here it’s the human making the same point as the construct, much later…
Oh, so this is the one where the Murderbot name comes out. Now that I’ve seen the reveal and how dramatic it was, I see the value of saving it until late in the season. It was really well done. Skarsgard’s expression and his delivery of “Yes, maybe” when Gurathin suggested he was defective were just perfect.
Ratthi is typically clueless about boundaries, claiming he’s being “respectful” by calling SecUnit by its chosen name, while ignoring that it was private and not meant to be shared. This version of Ratthi is pathetic in ways I don’t remember his book counterpart being (although the team members all kind of blurred together for me in the books, except for Mensah and Gurathin).
It’s kind of weird how Mensah is the only one who seems to have a full name. I’d assumed that the others were being referred to by their surnames (except Pin-Lee, since that has the form of a Chinese given name), but here we see even the members of the throuple calling each other Ratthi and Arada. Then again, maybe Preservation Alliance has different naming customs than we do. Maybe it’s like Victorian England or present-day Japan where even good friends often address each other by surname.
Incidentally, this episode is missing from the “Murderbot Coded” index page accessible through the “We Love Murderbot!” link at the top of the site. I had to find it by searching for the general “Murderbot” tag.