In reviewing the first season of Apple TV+’s Murderbot, I’ve tried not to get too hung up on the show’s many deviations from Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries books. Partially, that’s because the show is the show, regardless of whether you’re familiar with Wells’ breezy, allegory-rich little sci-fi stories, and partially because most of the changes are genuinely for the best. I might not have loved every moment of Leebeebee’s presence, for instance, but she injected necessary energy into the narrative. Meanwhile, the decision to elevate Gurathin as a co-lead after he was just “the slightly more prickly one” in the books has been one of the best this adaptation could have made. (And one that pays off beautifully here, as we bid farewell to the series until that just-announced second season comes along.)
But “The Perimeter” also hinges on one of the biggest changes that showrunners Chris and Paul Weitz have made to Wells’ story, and one that speaks to a certain insecurity that has been shot all through the series, as it’s struggled at times to adopt a volume as slim as Wells’ 2017 novella All Systems Red into 10 episodes of TV. Which is to say: Did this episode need a dramatic race against the clock to sell the horrors of our main character getting its mind erased and its body threatened with an acid bath, or could the show have trusted us to care without resorting to such obvious melodramatics?
We pick up with Murderbot strapped to a table in some dismal Corporation Rim tech lab, getting its memories erased (and its governor module re-activated) by a couple of standard-issue Company sadists/all-purpose dickheads. It’s a deliberately jarring return after the construct’s heroic sacrifice last week, as we literally watch a character we’ve seen slowly, tentatively accept their personhood get shoved back into the toolbox. The knee-jerk cruelty of the guys doing the reformat is one of a couple of looks we’ll get at what living in the Corporation Rim does to people, building off the glimpses of the basic mindset from Leebeebee, and Gurathin’s raging PTSD. (It’s one of the weaknesses of “The Perimeter,” and maybe the season as a whole, that there’s no time to give any of this more than the barest of attention; we know more about the mechanics of Pin-Lee, Arada, and Ratthi’s throuple than we do about life in the CR.) The upshot is that Murderbot is, for all practical purposes, gone: Another malfunctioning piece of equipment that’ll now be repurposed by a much larger, and far deadlier, machine.
It’s a curious decision for the show’s big finale. Although Noma Dumezweni and David Dastmalchian have done stellar work throughout the season, Murderbot has never been shy about being Alexander Skarsgård’s show. His face (helmeted or otherwise) is its most iconic visual; his voice is very nearly its soundtrack. Losing Skarsgård for a large chunk of “The Perimeter”—as Murderbot, helmet intact and mind decidedly not, gets deployed to quell a brewing strike on the station, while the PresAux team tries to track it down and save it—is meant to make us feel the absence, and the silence of that reassuring tide of snark. But it also sucks some energy out of the episode, even as it’s trying to keep us gripped with scenes of infuriating bureaucracy and corporate espionage.
As with last week’s episode, Dumezweni winds up getting a bit short-changed by all this Plot Stuff, as Mensah gets little more to do than throw her steely weight around as Preservation Alliance attempts to secure Murderbot’s freedom from a crew of convincingly horrible Company stooges. (They’re desperate to not let the story of what happened on the planet get out—but also so incapable of thinking of SecUnits as people that they seem genuinely baffled by Mensah’s insistence on getting “her” unit back.) As “Madame President” brings the (asinine, but useful) attention of the Corporation Rim press to bear on the topic, Gurathin gets furtive, making contact with his old drug dealer in order to get access to the Company archives. This works as a metaphor: Gura, who’s always been Murderbot’s shadow self, puts himself in harm’s way to pull the construct’s personhood back down through the wires. But this whole little subplot, and most especially the bit where Pin-Lee runs in to deliver an injunction to save MB’s body, seconds before its feet were about to get Snidely Whiplashed into a big vat of acid, feels like exactly what it is: A manufactured conflict to give this episode a bit of extra action and drama.
The restoration of Murderbot’s memories, especially, is so easy as to be nearly laughable. The episode toys with the idea that Gurathin might be doing himself some damage by taking on all that data, but no: It is just a plug-and-play resurrection. (They don’t even have to re-hack the new governor module, apparently.) Not all of this is filler, though. The scene of Murderbot being deployed against the strikers on the station is genuinely horrifying, as we watch it be reduced back into nothing more than a mindless weapon. (One that can’t bring itself to fight; it may not be able to retain memories of the PresAux crew, but its body is still clearly keeping the score of the massacre of the miners that’s been haunting it all season.) As we watch it be swallowed up in a tide of people who can only see it as the faceless face of oppression—unaware that it’s just as much a victim as they are—the episode comes as close as it’s going to get to capturing the full tragedy of Corporation Rim existence: “Interchangeable” cogs getting smashed against each other, with no sense of dignity, respect, or free will.
It’s that sequence, for me, that helps sell the conclusion here. Mensah and the rest of PresAux mean well, of course. When they dismiss the resurrected Murderbot’s requests for its armor, it’s because they don’t want it to need it; when Mensah informs the construct that she’ll legally be its guardian when they bring it home to Preservation Alliance, it’s intended with love. But it is, still, a curtailing of free will, one that comes part and parcel with any reliance on others, or assimilation into a community. And Murderbot has just had the need to own its free will underlined in triplicate. Gurathin gives it the best sell—and it would have to be Gurathin; the episode is so clearly aching for one last Skarsgård/Dastmalchian collaboration that there’s a palpable sense of relief when it’s Gura who comes stepping out of the shadows as Murderbot prepares to disappear out into the galaxy at large. The warmth in this ensuing scene is beautiful, both actors moving mountains with half-smiles and quiet implications. These two characters have spent the entire season bristling at all the ways they fall in parallel; seeing Gurathin grasp that connection for what it is, to say “I did it, and so can you,” is genuinely heartwarming. And so, in its way, is his quiet, solemn yielding when Murderbot tells him it “needs to check the perimeter,” Skarsgård, stripped of all armor and artifice, nakedly emoting in a way this show has rarely let him. This has, with all due respect to Dumezweni and Mensah, been the show’s most riveting, fascinating relationship: It’s fitting that it’s Gurathin who receives the closest thing MB can deliver to a “goodbye,” as it seeks to find out who it is, before it can accept the burdens and beauties of “home.”
And so we depart Murderbot on a melancholy, but hopeful note: One construct, a head full of bad TV shows, and a whole galaxy at its disposal. Before the renewal notice came in on Thursday, I’d ended my earlier draft of this review by noting that, “If this is all we end up getting of the series, I’ll be sad, but ultimately satisfied with what we got.” I stand by that thought, even as I’m hopeful for what comes next. This show was often frustrating, sometimes extremely frustrating, as it struggled to define its tone, wrestled with its bizarre “half-hour drama” format, and frequently couldn’t tell how dumb or dopey its supporting characters were supposed to be. But a trio of core performances refused to ever let it be simply worth dismissing, and its exploration of its fundamental ideas—of personhood, connection, and the ways we build a workable self out of everything we see, do, and watch—managed to weather those rockier moments intact. There was, and remains, a genuinely good TV show here, buried under a protective skin of sarcasm and goofiness. I’m excited to see where it goes from here; the sky very much seems to be the limit.
Stray observations
- •“Do I know you?” “Yeah, I’m your dad. I fucked a garbage disposal unit and you came out.”
- •Neil Whitely gives a fun performance here as “the fucker” with actual bargaining power on The Company’s side of the table.
- •The episode is ten minutes longer than just about every other episode of the show, although I can’t say I especially noticed it while watching. (Certainly, it’s less rushed than last week, though.)
- •I alluded to this in the review proper, but in the original book, this is just an epilogue; Preservation Alliance never loses control of Murderbot, so there’s no racing around to save it. (Also, in the book, the whole thing is explicitly a log MB is sending to Mensah, I believe, which helps explain why the show ends the way it does.)
- •The lawyer is quick to correct that the Company-provided SecUnit wasn’t “defective”—just “sub-optimal.”
- •“I thought you could handle it.” “The carefully designed drugs formatted for maximized addictiveness? I handled it just great.”
- •Are we meant to think for a minute that Gurathin is reaching out to his guy to get drugs? What a silly ending that would be.
- •Gurathin ends up finding Murderbot’s files by tracing back the bot’s downloads of The Rise And Fall Of Sanctuary Moon. A cute touch.
- •“Now, is it true that SexBots can marry humans on your home planet?” Navigating the Corporation Rim press is the most fun Dumezweni gets to have here.
- •Oh baby, love that high-stakes, seat-of-your-pants legal injunction action!
- •“You mean I’m… off-inventory?”
- •It feels telling that none of the PresAux people, as happy as they are to have it back, ever refer to Murderbot by its chosen name.
- •“Dr Gurathin—I need to check the perimeter.” “…You need to check the perimeter.”
- •I was half-expecting a post-credits sequence introducing a major character from the next book, but it’s probably best that we end on a more definitive and conclusive note.
