Three episodes in, it’s easy to catch the surface rhythms of Murderbot’s most basic pleasures: A human does something extremely cringe, Alexander Skarsgård’s narration calls out the cringe, and we laugh and wait for the human to continue trying to project their own deeply insecure feelings onto Skarsgård’s impassive face. “Risk Assessment,” the show’s third installment, is, for instance, a very “good” episode for actor Akshay Khanna, in so far as I wished to see his character Ratthi die violently on multiple occasions. Khanna quite deftly demonstrates all the ways a certain kind of “nice guy” energy can be a mask for a mixture of neediness and low-grade hostility, and it’s genuinely gut-churning to have aimed at both us and our synthetic pal. The result is so recognizably awful that it had me admiring the actor, while hoping the character would end up in the gullet of a space bug (more in the episode’s back half, admittedly, as Ratthi’s irritating traits got more deliberately over-the-top).
Plot-wise, meanwhile, we’re in extremely simple territory. Over the objection of the two smart people in the room (i.e., Murderbot and his foil Gurathin), the PA team have decided they need to go visit the other human expedition on the planet, who’ve gone radio silent. (Biologist Arada brings a welcome gift that appears to be an extremely hippy-dippy windchime, just in case you were feeling inclined to take these characters too seriously.) Once they get there, Murderbot enters the compound solo, discovers the grisly scene we saw at the end of the last episode, and then gets ambushed by a hostile SecUnit. Our older, but less injured, model has just enough time to take down its fellow bot and then realize it’s been hijacked by an outside control module before the presumed perpetrator of said hijacking gets the drop on them. Cue credits.
It’s pretty simple stuff, with the bulk of “Risk Assessment” happening in the emotional gray areas that crop up during the trip over to DeltFall and the various ways the humans aboard interrupt MB’s precious TV time. There’s some intrigue as the Preservation Alliance folks realize that The Company is spying on them and take some of their hostility out on the hapless, and largely disinterested, SecUnit. But the really interesting stuff continues to happen between our leads, and in the margins of the plot, as Skarsgård and Noma Dumezweni navigate around each other in a series of intriguing mini-confrontations and David Dastmalchian’s Gurathin demonstrates the depths of his misery.
Dumezweni’s Mensah continues to fascinate as she dances back and forth over the line between “sensitive leader” and actual steel. It’s interesting, for instance, to track the ways she both does, and does not, choose to invoke her ability to issue inviolable direct orders to the SecUnit (at least, inviolable if it doesn’t want to get caught and melted down as a rogue bot). Direct orders come out, calmly, in moments of stress or danger; elsewhere it’s all “I think it’d be better if,” or “I’d appreciate it if you would.” It is, presumably, the way Mensah herself would want to be treated (if she had a governor module buried inside her head). The issues that arise when applying principles of empathy to a brain that genuinely works differently from your own is one of the more interesting ideas Murderbot is playing with here, and seeing a character attempt to connect with an intelligence it isn’t really equipped to understand is the headiest stuff “Risk Assessment” has on offer.
Meanwhile, we get a different window into the episode’s themes of projection when Murderbot uses its satellite feed to snoop on the team members left back at the habitat. If it’s sad to watch Gurathin haplessly offer “therapy modules” to the PTSD-afflicted Bharadwaj, what follows borders on genuinely tragic. Murderbot clocks Gurathin sneaking into Mensah’s room while she’s away on the mission as a threat, and the funny thing is that it isn’t actually wrong. It’s just that MB’s TV-soaked brain is literally wired for physical threats—bombs, spy cameras, conspiracies—and not for the far sadder truths that we in the audience can easily see and which come into sharp focus once David Dastmalchian leans down to tenderly sniff and nuzzle Mensah’s pillow. It’d be mildly absurd to state that the emotional tensions running beneath the cheery attitudes of the PresAux team are more dangerous than any physical threat arrayed against them, because there sure are a lot of actual, very messy corpses in this episode of television. But the agonizing loneliness contained in Gurathin’s furtive, deeply creepy action is still a kind of danger all its own.
As with Murderbot’s first two episodes, “Risk Assessment” is generally better when it dials into the real emotions underpinning the discomfort that powers both its comedy and its drama and much harder to take seriously when it coasts on surface-level signifiers. The awkward fumbling of the nascent Ratthi/Aradia/Pin-Lee polycule is only barely tolerable, for instance, because of an observing Skarsgård’s delivery on “I don’t have a stomach, so I can’t throw up. But if I did, I would.”
Skarsgård himself remains a soothing and charismatic presence, with Murderbot a very enjoyable companion for watching all these unpleasant social interactions and occasional bursts of violence play out. There’s less toying around here with the idea that our hero might just snap and kill its charges in a fit of deeply uncomfortable frustration and more focus on all the ways it reveals itself as more invested than it lets on. (See, for instance, the way it pushes deeper into DeltFall out of pure curiosity about whatever awful shit went down there.) You couldn’t run this kind of show with a protagonist as checked-out as Murderbot pretends it is, and Skarsgård lets us see and feel the lies it tells itself (and us) in myriad little ways like the flick of an uncomfortable eye or how MB obsessively watches its charges when it thinks they aren’t looking. Three episodes in, Murderbot remains distractingly jokey in places, with minor characters that feel like caricatures, not people. But its central performances, and its willingness to tackle deeper ideas, continue to be more than worth watching.
Stray observations
- • “Who the hell ever said I was part of the team?”
- • We get a new fake TV show for Murderbot to obsess over: Strife In The Galaxy. Gotta say, it doesn’t look appreciably worse than The Rise And Fall Of Sanctuary Moon. (Mostly, I’m just happy these shows-within-a-show aren’t all cameo-fests, though. That’d get distracting.)
- • “Does that mean you have human feelings, too? Because it really seems like you do.” “It does? Shit.”
- • There’s a mountain of implication in the way Gurathin calls being quiet an “old habit.” Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries books don’t go deep into his backstory, but it’s pretty clear that his time in the Corporation Rim wasn’t a happy one.
- • “Why don’t these people lock their fucking doors?”
- • “Aw, thanks. Should have let that thing eat your wife.”
- • Nobody seems to clock that Ratthi issues Murderbot a direct order (“Get in here”) that gets ignored.
- • “You’re welcome; can I go back to my show now?” I realize a lot of these strays are just Murderbot saying funny things when humans say inappropriate stuff to them, but, hey, that’s the show. Skarsgård’s rushed delivery on this line is at least a lot of fun.
- • Pin-Lee looks very weirded out to have Ratthi’s hand on them as they’re coming in to DeltFall.
- • The quick action scene is well done, if brief. I could have stood to get a more detailed look at the whole “predicting what the very similar opponent is going to do” aspect of the fight.
