Summary
Murderbot feels ropey again in Episode 8, struggling with balancing its competing genres despite a great central conflict.
The segment of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon that opens Episode 8 of Murderbot goes on for so long that I genuinely worried that it would constitute the entire 22-minute runtime. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a funny segment in which John Cho gets his head cut off, but it’s also a deliberately ridiculous show-within-a-show that has already served its purpose narratively and is now cropping up at length distressingly close to the end of the season when there are other things to be focusing on.
The Sanctuary Moon stuff is thematically relevant, if nothing else, because it’s directly related to the kind of paranoia that characterises humanity’s relationships with sufficiently advanced technology. We know how this pertains to PresAux and Murderbot, of course, because a clear throughline of the very good and refreshingly pacey previous episode was the humans trying to figure out, internally and together, how best to approach their handsome SecUnit’s somewhat cavalier attitude to blowing off heads. And that’s still a major issue in “Foreign Object”.
This is an issue exacerbated by Murderbot getting a little too comfortable replicating things he has seen in shows he likes and not entirely thinking things through. So, his efforts to help heal an injured Gurathin – lest we forget, the person who has been by far the most mistrustful of him since the start – backfire considerably when their consciousnesses become linked. Remember, Murderbot has things to hide in his programming, including but not limited to the potential murder of 57 previous clients and the fact that he calls himself “Murderbot”.
Murderbot – the name is catchy, to be fair – has some excuses for what might have happened to those previous clients, but they don’t hold much water, especially since the PresAux team has seen him murder other people pretty indiscriminately if the situation calls for it. Skarsgård’s good in this sequence, especially his almost childlike “that was private” response when his internal nickname is called out, but Dastmalchian rules in it. Thanks to the texture afforded by that dinner game flashback in the previous episode, he’s by far the most nuanced character in the show, and you see that in the sudden lurch from terrified patient to aggressive know-it-all the second he thinks he has the upper hand on the construct who has become his nemesis.
Tattiawna Jones, David Dastmalchian, Noma Dumezweni, Tamara Podemski and Akshay Khanna in Murderbot | Image via Apple TV+
He might be right about Murderbot. Episode 8 would like you to contemplate the possibility that he is, and it builds to a pseudo-cliffhanger in which the idea of his betrayal is floated with performative earnestness, but it’s all baloney. There’s zero tension in this angle so deep in the season. But I don’t begrudge Gurathin’s surety that Murderbot is dangerous since the evidence is pretty compelling. It’s only our familiarity with basic storytelling rules and structures that reassures us the show won’t go down this path.
This conflict forms the spine of “Foreign Object”, but I wasn’t totally keen on the rest of it. Very little of note actually happens aside from a lot of quite heavy-handed exposition involving the bad guy corporate group that seems to be digging for alien artefacts – the ones Mensah found in Episode 2 – and covering up any evidence that they were doing so by killing all the potential witnesses. Thanks to a series of minor developments the PresAux team all figure this out and speculate about how best to proceed, which is a nice change from their bickering and throupling up… or at least it would be, if there wasn’t still a chunk of time spent on Ratthi, Pin-Lee, and Arada’s ridiculous three-way relationship.
It occurs to me that I don’t care about any of these characters except Murderbot and, now, Gurathin, at least to a certain extent. I’m not actively rooting for him, but I have a lot of sympathy for his position given that he actually comes across like a three-dimensional human being almost all of the time, whereas everyone else – with the arguable exception of Mensah – seems to exist to provide one or two “funny” scenes an episode that rarely ever work. Murderbot is a really good sci-fi-action series with a handful of genuinely provocative ideas, and it’s also a really run-of-the-mill sitcom, often veering between genres from one scene to the next. Hopefully, the final couple of episodes only have time to focus on the PresAux team’s dangerous escape with Murderbot’s inevitable assistance, and leave the misguided romantic stuff well alone.
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