Summary
Murderbot continues to suffer from its short runtimes in Episode 3, with characters bordering on caricatures and some its better ideas begging for more examination.
I’ve identified a key issue in Murderbot. To be fair, I mentioned it in my recap of the two-part premiere, and nothing has changed; it’s just twice as noticeable because Episode 3 is obviously half as long. These 20-odd-minute runtimes are far too short, and everything is trimmed down as a result, from the dynamics among the PresAux team to the action sequences. To compensate, “Risk Assessment” has to essentially operate on fast-forward, within extremely simplistic parameters, and there’s a frustrating feeling that amounts from wishing every scene was at least a moment or two longer.
You can see this in the characterization, especially. Like Gurathin in the premiere, Ratthi is promoted to the primary source of interpersonal conflict – albeit of a very different variety – and the arc is over-the-top to the point of being cartoonish, because there isn’t time for any subtlety and nuance. It’s irritating. The same idea is reflected in the most essential rhythms of the comedy, which rigidly adheres to a setup-punchline-reaction format as Murderbot comments on the overblown ineptitude of the hippie scientists.
But perhaps the most detrimental version of this problem comes in the plotting, which is so thin as to be near enough absent. There’s another human exploratory team on the planet who have gone mysteriously silent, and it’s decided against the risk-assessment-driven advice of Murderbot to go and investigate. The team heads over there, Murderbot nips inside alone to investigate, and finds a bunch of corpses and hostile SecUnits who turn out to have had their combat modules hacked by an unknown entity. And one of them is still operational. Dun, dun, dun.
Most of the interesting stuff happens at the end. But you can feel the potential that has been left on the table, especially in a conceptually cool fight between the SecUnits where Murderbot gets the upper hand by anticipating the exact moves the newer but damaged unit is going to make, but it lasts about five seconds total. I think the implication is that hacking into the governor module has given Murderbot a little more flexibility in thought that allows for this, but it isn’t very clear.
Alexander Skarsgård in Murderbot | Image via Apple TV+
To be fair, there’s interesting stuff elsewhere in Murderbot Episode 3, too. There’s a conspiratorial vibe to the idea that the PresAux team is being spied on, and it’s interesting how they try to process that information while directing a lot of frustration about it at Murderbot, given that he’s essentially company property. And this leads to the most obvious recurring gag of Murderbot getting annoyed by having his binge-watching constantly interrupted. Of note is that the show we get snippets of here is not The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon again, but a different, apparently worse show called Strife In The Galaxy that Murderbot nonetheless refers back to constantly.
There’s a better joke here, and it’s the one that really forms the meat of this show. Murderbot continuously struggles to understand and relate to humans because he’s genuinely wired differently and earnestly doesn’t want to be treated in the way they think he wants to be treated, which is with a human being’s sense of empathy and politeness. The fumbling efforts to not treat him coldly and unemotionally, and the way that those efforts completely go out the window whenever there’s cause for Murderbot to do something the others don’t want to or imperil himself in a way they’re not willing to, are most ripe for his mockery. It’s a really interesting idea that I wish there was a lot more made of, but again, the episodes aren’t long enough to allow for that.
Where the show is most intriguing, at least for me, is in those moments where Murderbot observes a snippet of human emotion that genuinely challenges his assumptions and expectations; not for the purpose of him cracking wise, but being legitimately surprised by the complexity and often tragedy of the human condition. You’ll have noticed that most of the characterization of the PresAux team is occurring in this way, second-hand, viewed at a remove, often within the fuzzy ambit of the security systems that Murderbot has persistent access to. Again, it’s a very clever idea, it just needs more space and time to be explored.
Maybe next week.
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