Easily landing in the “great scenes” pile: watching the Grown-Ups’ Table—my mental nickname for Murderbot, Mensah, Gurathin, and Tamara Podemski’s sparingly used but effective Bharadwaj—hash out exactly how dangerous Murderbot is or isn’t without a governor module running in its head. (“Not at all” gets shut down as an answer right around the time MB proves the habitat’s central computer can’t actually disable its movement by choke-slamming Gurathin into a wall.) Alexander Skarsgård gives a performance that’s riveting even by his own high standards as we watch Murderbot adapt to a new reality where it can operate as it wants in front of others, the actor letting shades of anger, contempt, and rare traces of amusement slip into the normal impassive mask. (That Gurathin-directed “I don’t like you” is genuinely chilling; we’re back to observing an alien intelligence operating around humans in a way that readily compels.) Watching David Dastmalchian and Noma Dumezweni navigate around each other remains nearly as powerful. Gurathin is both paranoid and a walking open wound of jealousy, but he’s also frequently right. And seeing Mensah parse which moments to take seriously is fascinating stuff. (Contrast how she shuts down his concerns later in the episode with the way she keys, instantly, to the severity of his reveal that MB’s hacked its governor module.)
Compare all that, though, with the “drama” of Pin-Lee and Ratthi arguing, back in the hopper, about whether they should name the baby they aren’t going to have “SecUnit” in honor of their not-actually-fallen comrade. There is, hypothetically, a level of realness and subtlety you could bring to this dialogue to get it to work: as a friction point in their triad, as an observation on the inane thoughts people reach for in moments too big for them to properly come to terms with, and simply as comedy. But that level is clearly pretty far beyond Akshay Khanna, who continues to play Ratthi as a parody of a cheerful frat bro and not much else. (The less said about nicknaming Murderbot “Seccy,” meanwhile, the better.) It’s not just that these characters are irritating, because if the whole show was operating at the cartoonish level Ratthi is being both written and acted, the whole thing would be lesser but still coherent. The problem is the disconnect between the two halves: We continually watch interesting people with internal lives rub up against a handful of stock gag characters.
Which brings us back to Leebeebee, the alleged Deltfall refugee who stumbles into the PresAux team in the (conveniently timed) immediate aftermath of Murderbot shooting itself last episode. Played with wild-eyed strangeness by PEN15’s Konkle, our newcomer is a genuine oddball, sexually fixating on the unmasked, comatose SecUnit, while simultaneously speculating that it’s going to kill them all. Narratively, I suspect everything she’s doing will eventually make a little more sense, since it’s pretty clear she’s deliberately distracting everybody involved—including MB via a deeply awkward attempt at a kiss that sends it scrambling halfway across the planet—in order to pull some kind of malicious shenanigans. In the moment, though, Konkle’s character serves as the apex example of the show’s sense of humor and its sense of stakes falling wildly out of line with each other. It feels like having a clown waltz through the middle of a really good, high-brow sci-fi drama.
In trying to parse this, I keep having to remind myself that the issue here isn’t a matter of comedy versus drama so much as subtle versus not. After all, it’s not like there aren’t plenty of funny moments over in the “great scenes” pile, either: The reveal of Mensah rambling to a clearly panicked MB about her kids is a good one, because Dumezweni has built the good doctor to feel like a multifaceted person who can be that kind of goofy one moment and much more canny the next. Giving her a bot who can finally react honestly to her, instead of just snarking in voiceover, makes for some of the best moments the show has deployed so far. (The two end up sequestered in their own smaller version of the show because everyone has decided it’s time to get the hell off “this shitty planet” and to send a signal that’ll summon The Company to come rescue them.) When Mensah and MB start speculating about how the unknown third party who’s been sabotaging everything on the planet got into DeltFall without signs of a struggle, it’s amazing to watch just a touch of rueful admiration sneak into Skarsgård’s eyes, as Mensah questions who would let in a crew of unknown, potentially dangerous strangers just because they were asking for help. “You would,” MB fires back with the tiniest, most precious trace of guarded affection. Mensah’s response to that, in turn, shades from self-aware humor to genuine, panicked horror as she realizes the attackers pretended to be the PresAux team in order to gain access and that her fellow explorers died because they chose to trust. (Neither one seems to realize that’s exactly what Leebeebee is doing to their team back at the habitat at that exact moment, but the drama here still lands.)
This is good stuff, as is the portion of the big-confrontation scene where Gurathin is forced to reveal that Murderbot spends most of its time doing nothing more than watching TV for dozens of hours on end. The honest truth is that Murderbot is very nearly always a funny series because it has the title character’s ironic viewpoint as its basic throughline. It’s just that it typically tries to be funny in two very different ways, from two very different portions of its cast, leaving the feeling of two very different TV shows that just happen to be running on the same set. The one with the better acting and writing in it had one of its best outings to date this week: tense, fascinating, and with some of Skarsgård’s finest work on the show so far. The other show, the one that’s a much more distracting kind of comedy, was, well, distracting, even if Konkle ensured that it was at least more energetically weird than it usually is. The show can’t seem to make these two sides of itself rhyme, though. So maybe it’s a good thing that Murderbot and Mensah just got shot all to hell in the hopper during their approach to the beacon, suggesting they’ll be off on some kind of isolated team-up adventure next week.
Stray observations
- • “Fix me? Why’d I even bother to shoot myself?”
- • “Do you think it has a pee-pee?” Taken in isolation, Konkle meditating on what a SecUnit’s penis could, or could not, do carries an undeniable comedic charge.
- • Bharadwaj gets some nice points to shine here, earning a “Huh! Maybe this hippie actually knew what she was doing.” That’s followed by her calm dismantling of Gurathin’s paranoia a few minutes later, noting that having free will and not killing everybody is, in fact, a vote in Murderbot’s favor.
- • A nice moment: Murderbot’s little glare when Gurathin calls Sanctuary Moon “crap.”
- • “Whatever happened to consensus, Mensah?’ “We’ll reach it…eventually.” Between this and the discomfort when she tells Gurathin that Pin-Lee will be “first among equals” in her absence, we get some interesting looks at the limits of PresAux’s play-nice ethos.
- • To be clear, my comments about Leebeebee are almost wholly about the script, not Konkle’s performance. In another show, her incredibly awkward attempt to kiss Skarsgård’s chin would be a highlight of comedic discomfort.
- • Murderbot lays out what The Company would, or wouldn’t, do to its clients. It wouldn’t murder them, because that’d be expensive and wreck its reputation. But it would potentially take a bribe to let someone else on the planet “because most humans are greedy bastards.”
