Which is all to say that “All Systems Red,” the penultimate episode of Murderbot’s first season, isn’t necessarily going to go down as one of the show’s more thoughtful or heartfelt installments. That’s partly because a decent chunk of its early attempts at drama hinge on believing our favorite construct might actually be trying to sell out the PresAux team to save its own synthetic skin, an idea so implausible that the episode itself seems to be mildly embarrassed by it, rushing to get it disposed of instead of fully embracing the paranoia. (There’s a meatier moment when Gurathin and then Mensah realize that MB is actually hiding its true plans because they involve killing the entire bad-guy team, running in strong contravention to Preservation Alliance’s principles, but it mostly gets shoved into the background.) But just as much, it’s because so much of what goes on here is just kind of melodramatic and goofy: Murderbot dopily improvising its way through a plan while the GrayCris folks just go “Huh, weird,” various heroic sacrifices being planned with what’s clearly going to be very little payoff, and a moment that had me genuinely rolling my eyes when the script decided the original plan needed to be taken down by a giant Flintstones bird.
The pleasures here are all going to be smaller scale then, in little moments like Gurathin and Bharadwaj cottoning on to what MB is actually doing, Mensah’s wry little smile when the GrayCris leader asks what the leader of a whole planet is doing on this backwater shithole, or, of course, much of what we get from Alexander Skarsgård—at least when he’s not being forced to spackle over an overstuffed plot with line after line of creaky exposition. When not rattling off “We all get that this is what we’re doing right now, right?” dialogue, though, Skarsgård does his usual excellent job of holding this show’s various tones together, selling Murderbot’s desperation, its smug and dickish side (“I notice you have an issue with eye contact”), and even its doofy attempts at small talk with the hired killers it’s trying to con. Even in an episode that mostly keeps him trapped in the helmet, he keeps Murderbot itself compelling.
These grace notes tend to get drowned out by that steady drumbeat of plot, though. You wouldn’t think a TV show that took 10 episodes to adapt 160 pages of a single novella could fall prey to feeling rushed, but here we are, as the show forces itself to coordinate Gurathan and Pin-Lee’s efforts to launch the GrayCris beacon, Mensah’s secondary scheming, and MB’s confrontation with Team Bad Guy in the span of a scant half hour. A slightly extended runtime (by Murderbot standards, at least) helps a little, but this is still a sprint that barely gives itself room to enjoy those smaller moments, like MB distracting the GrayCris SecUnit busy killing it by filling its brain with a blast of Sanctuary Moon, or the little freakout Pin-Lee has when they kill a GrayCris guard with a big, heavy wrench. No, we’ve got to rush forward to the next minor twist, as the plot ties itself up in knots to get to the moment where Murderbot sacrifices itself to keep Mensah alive after the beacon finally detonates. (Don’t worry, she’s fine; the SecUnit “twisted its body the right way” to leave her photogenically bruised, but otherwise unharmed, after they fall off a cliff together.)
The fact is, plot has never been this show’s strong suit, and focusing “All Systems Red” almost entirely on wrapping up said plot doesn’t make that any less true. It’s an episode where almost every character seems moved to say exactly what they’re going to do before they do it, then has someone else ask them what they did just to make sure everybody in the audience is following along. It works best as comedy, as when one of the GrayCris guys (David Reale) keeps almost noticing that Murderbot is cribbing its lines from Sanctuary Moon, or MB desperately invites him to “Clasp hands?” in solidarity over their stated hatred of the planet. But those are small-scale, in-the-moment pleasures and sketch-comedy-style laughs. The episode has none of the emotional punch that powers this show’s best episodes, because it simply doesn’t give itself time to luxuriate in the feelings that produce those great scenes. I’m hopeful that next week’s finale, having dispensed with all these moving pieces, will have more time to actually focus on what the show is good at instead of just racing its way through the pages of Martha Wells’ first Murderbot book. For now, though, we’re left with a disappointing climax to the action of a show that was never all that interested in action in the first place.
Stray observations
- • Gurathin is getting better and better at clocking when MB is lying, forcing it to admit that its estimate of PresAux’s chances as “medium to low” is wildly optimistic.
- • The David Dastmalchian/Alexander Skarsgård Comedy Half Hour rolls along: “My plan is to come up with a better plan.” “That’s inspiring.”
- • “As usual, the humans were being hot messes.” This anachronistic bit of slang is brought to you by Pin-Lee suddenly lusting for Mensah’s implacability in a conversation with Gurathin.
- • Murderbot’s latest plan is pulled from “Sanctuary Moon episode 599, ‘Kogi Saves The Day.'”
- • Noma Dumezweni has less to do here than I’d like for the second episode in a row, but I do love her character’s cautious, non-judgmental “I heard…” when Murderbot starts openly talking about betraying PresAux.
- • “That’s murder.” “What did you expect?”
- • My least favorite line of the episode: Gurathin correcting himself to say there are four minutes and 46 seconds left on The Big Ticking Clock instead of four minutes and 47 seconds. We get it, he’s precision-minded and stressed. You don’t have to make him a cartoon.
- • For a crew of mass-murdering smugglers, the GrayCris team is surprisingly chill about letting a clearly-lying SecUnit stay alive even after it’s started acting insanely suspiciously.
- • “There’s a pebble in my boot” is a cute little delivery from Skarsgård.
- • Fun, dark comedy beat: Pin-Lee’s “Shit, is he okay?” about the guy they brained with the wrench—followed by an immediate cut to him frothing at the mouth as he dies.
- • “Crappy? How about you try to make 2,797 episodes of premium quality entertainment?”
- • Boy howdy, do those three GrayCris SecUnits suck at taking down one inferior model and a human with a gun, huh? (Meanwhile, for a second, I thought Murderbot had somehow exploded the one’s head by filling it with bad TV, but then I realized it just used its wrist guns while the other construct was distracted.)
- • From my notes: “Cool Murderbots don’t look at explosions.”
