Summary
Murderbot comes together really well in Episode 6, avoiding a lot of the issues that have plagued the series thus far.
I’ve been cattily picking at Murderbot ever since it debuted, but in Episode 6, I felt like it was finally learning its lesson. After a lot of the previous instalment didn’t work, “Command Feed” had its back to the wall, narratively speaking. Yet it delivers in multiple key areas, with the best interplay between Murderbot and Mensah, the best practical effects, a factory reset of Leebeebee’s annoying caricature into a source of genuine (albeit temporary) tension, and a splurge of violence that not only works as a tension release but also creates new interpersonal issues between Murderbot and the rest of the PresAux crew. Not bad for 20 minutes.
Oh, this episode even has the best usage of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, just for good measure. With Murderbot and Mensah stranded after the explosion of the beacon, Murderbot draws some explicit parallels with a key episode of the show that highlights an unconventional romance between John Cho’s Captain Hossein and a robot. This isn’t a budding romance, of course; it’s played for laughs as the revelation that Murderbot deleted the repair manual for the damaged hopper to make room for the nineteenth season of his favourite show sends the usually tolerant and understanding Mensah into a fit of rage.
That anger causes a panic attack, and Murderbot once again turns to Sanctuary Moon, projecting a “soothing” episode onto one of the hopper’s screens so that the synchronized breathing can help Mensah calm down. This, silly as it sounds, it probably the sweetest character moment in the season thus far, with a real warmth between Murderbot and Mensah but also some subtle suggestions about Murderbot’s burgeoning humanity (the fact he knows the calming mantra by heart suggests he might have used it himself on more than one occasion.) This is how you fold comedic eccentricity into the human drama properly.
The tables are turned after Murderbot collapses from his injuries during the crash and then wakes up to find Mensah ministering over him, having MacGuyvered a fix for the problem by siphoning the hopper’s lubrication supply into Murderbot’s body. This gives Murderbot an idea to use his own neural wiring – cloned human tissue designed for high-speed data processing – to repair the hopper, but it requires a very squeamish Mensah to slice open his back, expose his spine, and pull out a fistful of fleshy tissue while Murderbot drily guides her. I’m not sure to what extent this is all practical, but it certainly looks it.
David Dastmalchian in Murderbot | Image via Apple TV+
Murderbot Episode 4 builds tension around Murderbot and Mensah’s repair efforts by having Leebeebee predictably but welcomely turn on the other scientists back at the habitat. It does take a while to get there, though, and for a chunk of “Command Feed,” she redirects her over-the-top flirtation at Bharadwaj. But even this ends up providing valuable world-building titbits, because it leads to a conversation about how Corporation Rim requires prospective parents to obtain a license before having children because they’re such a drain on resources, whereas the Preservation Alliance funds childrearing through community solidarity and scientific expeditions. As well as being interesting on its own terms, this information also goes some way towards explaining why someone like Leebeebee would turn on the others for her own self-advancement, which is precisely what she does immediately afterwards.
I was surprised to see this work as well as it does, because Leebeebee was such a ridiculous figure in the previous episode that I couldn’t imagine her presenting any real danger. But the fact that she’s not in the source material gives the sequence a bit of unpredictability, and her immediately shooting Gurathin in the leg when he refuses to grant her access to the HubSystem is an effective shortcut. Leebeebee does reveal that she’s working for the mysterious third party who has been manipulating events on the planet, but she doesn’t have a chance to reveal much more before Murderbot and Mensah arrive.
In another funny but moderately shocking moment, when Leebeebee grabs Gurathin to use as a human shield, Murderbot immediately blows her head clean off. It’s a sudden moment that has a lot of different elements bundled up in it. Did Murderbot’s general dislike of Gurathin affect his risky decision-making? Can the PresAux team reckon with the idea that, despite the fact that he was acting to save them, Murderbot’s callous attitude to murder makes him fundamentally non-human? And, perhaps most crucially, does Murderbot’s disappointment about not being treated as a hero for rescuing the others, and his realization that killing Leebeebee “felt good”, bode ill?
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