In the latter case, Leebeebee finally finds the perfect target in Bharadwaj, who lacks Gurathin’s prickly paranoia and has issues much more readily exploitable by simple offers of kindness. (Konkle is giving a deliberately oddball take on a spy, but it’s still interesting to watch her shift approaches as her character probes the PresAux members for weaknesses, zeroing in on Bharadwaj’s PTSD as soon as she scents it. Check out the way she alters her cover story to incorporate elements of her mark’s trauma.) In general, I find this character works better the more obviously manipulative she’s being. Her behavior is much less jarring once it becomes readily apparent what role she’s meant to fulfill. (She also gives some new, interesting glimpses into the Corporation Rim mindset in passing, casually mentioning “You bought it, you own it” as the standard attitude toward sexually assaulting constructs.)
The real meat of the episode, though, is happening out in the broken hopper. (This is not surprising when you sequester your show’s two most interesting and best-acted characters off alone together.) Struggling to survive, Murderbot and Mensah see their relationship pass several big milestones in quick succession. First, we get our First Fight (when she discovers that it can’t fix the hopper because it deleted the instructions to make space for more episodes of Sanctuary Moon), which is followed swiftly by the even more important First TV Binge, as MB uses one of its favorite episodes of the series to calm her down when she has a panic attack over how screwed they are. And then, of course, there’s the First Surgically Opening Up The Other Person So You Can Graphically Crack Their Spine And Extract Their Nerve Fibers To Use As Makeshift Wiring. What budding relationship hasn’t gone through that?
Does it feel a little odd that I find myself drifting toward romantic language to describe this pairing? The show primes us for it, courtesy of both Leebeebee’s sexual fixations and Sanctuary Moon, which gives us scenes this week focused on the parallel relationship between Captain Hossein and Nav Bot 337 Alt 66. But that’s a simplistic, cheesy soap—for all that MB itself might agree to disagree—while Murderbot is a significantly smarter series. Regardless of labels, the strange gray area forming between Murderbot and Mensah is irrefutably intimate, though, as Alexander Skarsgård and Noma Dumezweni subtly sketch out a growing willingness to be vulnerable on the bot’s part. Skarsgård is so obviously good at this, modulating MB’s “humanity” from moment to moment in ways that sell both the feelings and the comedy that it feels redundant to write so much about it. But Dumezweni is just as fascinating: In her hands, Mensah is complex and faceted in ways that she couldn’t be in Martha Wells’ original books, which are rooted so exclusively in Murderbot’s viewpoint that Mensah’s mental state can usually only be loosely inferred. It’s one of the few spots where the show has inarguably taken the books and improved upon them, giving us a story with two genuine main characters instead of one. The visceral horror of her impromptu surgery on the bot is one of the best sequences the show has done yet precisely because of this work: It’s gross, yes, but also funny, scary, and emotionally affecting to see it trust her to get the job done.
Meanwhile, back at the habitat, Leebeebee finally gets bored of trying to manipulate Gurathin into giving her PresAux’s data and instead pulls out a gun. The following hostage scene is mildly dampened by the presence of Arada, Pin-Lee, and Ratthi—would it surprise you to learn that all three of them act in broad, overtly comedic ways that serve as little more than filler and a drain on tension?—but Konkle, David Dastmalchian, and especially Tamara Podemski, as Bharadwaj, manage to keep the ball in the air. Konkle, for her part, gives Leebeebee just enough lee(beebee)way to seem like she might not be a complete sociopath, so that we can all be suitably shocked when Murderbot wastes exactly zero time in blowing out her brains when it and Mensah finally make it back.
The hysterics that follow—combined with the quasi-villain monologue Murderbot gives itself as it reflects on the pleasure it got from either a.) killing a person, b.) protecting its charges, or c.) simply reminding everyone in PresAux to stop treating it like something it’s not—ends the show’s best episode so far on a bracing, ominous note. It’s another divergence point from Wells’ books, which get so cozy so quickly that Murderbot is impossible to view as anything but inarguably heroic from about five pages in, no matter how often readers are reminded that it frequently presents as a faceless soldier with extremely lethal guns implanted in its arms. What we get here is far more interesting: a harsh reminder that intimacy is a knife that cuts both ways and that, sometimes, being vulnerable with people just means they’re in a prime position to hurt you.
Stray observations
- • Murderbot is doing a good job of deploying the Sanctuary Moon clips and tying them into the story—but I’ll admit that I check my phone while they’re actually playing. (I have had the theme song stuck in my head for the past week, though, so it gets its revenge.)
- • “I don’t watch serials to remind me of the way things actually are. I watch them to distract me when things in the real world are stressful as shit.”
- • Skarsgård’s little “agree to disagree” when Mensah attacks Sanctuary Moon is cute—but not as cute (or hilarious) as Murderbot’s instant, clipped “It’s canon” when Mensah starts questioning the plausibility of the show.
- • “We would just as soon attach a penis to an unwilling SecUnit as… Uh, yeah, no, my mind fails to find an analogy.”
- • “Sanctuary…fucking…Moon.”
- • Gurathin is great in the interactions with Leebeebee, because he clearly still has traces of a Corporation Rim mindset—answering “Debt” when she asks how Preservation Alliance pays for its social services—while being protective of his new home.
- • I generally don’t enjoy Ratthi, but him pissing off Leebeebee by genuinely thinking her name was Leebee was an effective illustration that the show knows he sucks.
- • Mensah during the surgery. “I’m a vegetarian.” “You don’t have to eat me. Just cut me.”
- • Huge kudos to the show’s effects team: Murderbot generally looks pretty good, but that view of MB’s exposed spine was gnarly in all the best ways.
- • Leebeebee promises that her true employers will be making their way to the PresAux habitat very soon.
- • Okay, I’ve been being too nice: That last Sanctuary Moon bit, about feelings (a.k.a. “the commands from inside”) is a genuine momentum killer and a waste of time. Apologies to DeWanda Wise and John Cho, but putting bad things on the screen on purpose is still putting bad things on the screen.
