‘Murderbot’ Episode 5 Recap – A Misguided Focus On Comedy Undermines the Drama

Thus far, Murderbot has done a pretty good job of balancing its comedy with its drama. But it’s always a fine line. The key thing is to know which moments call for seriousness and which can be effectively lightened with gags. The climactic scene of the previous episode was a good example. Episode 5, “Rogue War Tracker Infinite”, pushes its luck in this regard though, treating the most potentially fruitful dramatic turn yet – the PresAux team realizing that Murderbot has been rogue the entire time – and using it to introduce a new character played by Anna Konkle (PEN15) who seems to have wandered in from the set of a different, even weirder show.

To be clear, Leebeebee would be a fine inclusion to Murderbot under almost any other circumstances, and she still gets a couple of very funny moments even here. And it’d be similarly misguided to treat the entire sequence with po-faced seriousness, since that isn’t what the show is about, and it’d also deny us the genuine pleasures of Alexander Skarsgård’s evolving performance. But you can see even in the difference between his gags – reiterating how stupid the team is for fixing him when he just shot himself to save them, for instance – and the wacky, slapstick-y style of Leebeebee that they’re starkly oppositional in tone. Episode 5 never quite recovers.

And it’s a shame, since this development is very interesting. The PresAux team is discovering that SecUnit hacked his Governor Module, having spent long enough in his company for it to dawn on them that he could have killed them at any moment and chose to protect them anyway. That knowledge colours the subsequent debate about how dangerous he may or may not be, and it’s compelling because there isn’t really a right answer. Sure, he hasn’t murdered them yet, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t capable of doing so under the right circumstances – a point he proves rather capably with Gurathin – and hasn’t already violated a bunch of safety protocols and expectations by taking the power to control him away from the PresAux team. It raises really interesting questions about the nature of sentience and control – given what the hacked SecUnits on DeltFall did, don’t characters like Gurathin have a point about why it’s in their best interests to be in charge of what is fundamentally a piece of tech? – that don’t have easy answers.

It also allows Skarsgård to adjust his performance. Now he no longer needs to cosplay as a standard SecUnit, he’s free to let more of his nascent emotions run rampant, which is doubly interesting since he’s still in the process of figuring out what those emotions are. There’s a bit where he grabs Gurathin by the throat and says he doesn’t like him, which pulls triple duty as a joke, a threat, and Murderbot seemingly confirming to himself that he has arrived at a very human-like conclusion about someone else. Given that most of his conclusions about humanity thus far have been broad assumptions informed by his familiarity with The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, this is significant because it’s one of the first examples of the cause-and-effect of real-world interaction trickling through. He’s waking up.

Alexander Skarsgård, Akshay Khanna, Tamara Podemski, Anna Konkle, Sabrina Wu, Tattiawna Jones and David Dastmalchian in Murderbot | Image via Apple TV+

My main problem with Murderbot Episode 5 is that you never get much time to think about these things in the moment because you’re constantly being pulled away for asinine gags and side stories involving characters who are deliberately too two-dimensional to grapple with the implications of what’s happening. This is especially true of Leebeebee, albeit – I think – deliberately, but it’s also true of almost every character who isn’t Murderbot, Gurathin, or Mensah.

Leebeebee’s presence seems like a red herring to me; I suspect her motives are more sinister, and she’s playing the bumbling idiot as a cover. She’s not in All Systems Red, the Martha Wells book this story is based on, and you can totally tell by how ill-fitting she feels. There’s also a contour to her interactions with Murderbot that is only possible because the SecUnits have faces in this retelling, which they don’t in the original version. Her attempts to pursue a sexual attraction to Murderbot are funny, but I also feel like they’re the text’s underlying chronicles of Murderbot’s efforts to understand human interaction played up to a too-silly degree.

You can see these ideas being explored much better elsewhere in “Rogue War Tracker Infinite”, especially in Murderbot’s interactions with Mensah while they brainstorm how whoever hacked the DeltFall SecUnits managed to get access without a struggle. Murderbot is perfectly positioned to identify that Mensah’s empathy and trusting nature, which have puzzled him the most thus far, are directly responsible. DeltFall assumed that the attackers were the PresAux team and let them in. Mensah realizes in that moment that they would have done the same the other way around. She doesn’t realize that they potentially already have done the same by granting egress to Leebeebee, who’s supposedly a DeltFall refugee. To survive this, they’re going to need to abandon their most human instincts. And who better to help them do that than Murderbot?

Murderbot Episode 5 reminded me that I generally like this show more when I’m writing about it than when I’m watching it, which can’t have been the intention. But it’s difficult to deny that so much of what’s interesting about the material is trapped within a silly arch comedy that is frequently too overblown to allow the viewer to actually see that interesting stuff. It only comes through later, when you interrogate what you’ve watched and have to spin a word count out of it. Most viewers don’t have cause to do that, though – and it’s them the show is supposed to be entertaining.

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