Summary
Murderbot strips down to the bare essentials in Episode 9, delivering focused tension and action at the expense of some depth and cleverness. I think it works.
Murderbot is a weird show. I’m pretty sure I’ve said that before, but it’s worth reiterating, since even this deep into the season – Episode 9 is the penultimate outing – I’m still not sure what works best about it. The genre flip-flopping hasn’t been entirely successful. Sometimes I feel like it should stick to being a comedy with the odd action scene, and sometimes an action series with a bit of comedy. Sometimes its meatier thematic underpinnings deserve the focus and sometimes they can distract from the plotting, especially given the brevity of the episodes. It’s all a bit of a mess. But “All Systems Red” – titled after the Martha Wells novella this season is based on – settles into being a pretty straight-up half-hour of sci-fi action, and I, personally, think it benefits from the simplicity.
It probably shouldn’t. Something is definitely lost in cutting out everything except Murderbot’s tense – and hilariously dopey – negotiation with the GrayCris mercenaries. To be fair, I didn’t like a lot of that supplementary stuff anyway, but I did appreciate the moral complexity of the PresAux team not having any real idea what to do with Murderbot’s sentience. That’s out of the window now. He’s a hero in the traditional sense, and any claims to the contrary – a brief bit of this episode hinges on the idea of him betraying his charges – don’t hold any water.
After I spent all of last week moaning about the show failing to consistently pick a lane, I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t give credit where it was due. “All Systems Red” was more consistently engaging for me because everything that isn’t directly related to Murderbot’s efforts to get the PresAux team off-world is completely excised. There are gags, sure, but we don’t have to put up with tedious throuple dynamics. And the setup allows a lot of room to pay off some of the thematic and character development, albeit in pretty silly ways.
But if nothing else, Murderbot is consistent in regard to its view on humans. In Episode 9, the joke is told at the expense of the bad guys, but it’s still the same joke – human beings are morons. There’s no subtlety here, either. When Murderbot shuffles up to the GrayCris mercs and pretends he’s selling out the PresAux team to save himself, it’s so obvious that he’s running a con that it beggars belief the mercenaries can’t tell. He regularly quotes names and full lines from The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, he attempts to engage in terrible small talk, and he’s ludicrously pleased with himself when he buys a few seconds without realizing he’s acting insanely suspiciously.
This is where the moral ambiguity tries to creep in, since the PresAux team – and thus the audience, to a certain extent – have to confront the idea that Murderbot may be genuinely betraying them. It doesn’t take. Luckily, “All Systems Red” seems to pre-empt this and moves away from it quickly, with Gurathin and Mensah independently realizing what he’s up to and working to support him in their own ways, even if that means betraying their pacifistic principles to help Murderbot kill off their adversaries. Sometimes, needs must, perhaps best exemplified in a funny, albeit quite dark gag where Pin-Lee batters a merc over the head with a wrench and worries if he’s okay while he froths from the mouth.
The craft here is quite impressive. Episode 9 runs Murderbot’s silly negotiation in parallel with Gurathin and Pin-Lee trying to launch the beacon and Mensah being up to her own tricks, with Murderbot sometimes talking to both groups simultaneously from within the confines of his helmet. You know the carnage is coming but not exactly when it’ll arrive or from which direction, and that makes the comedy work better because it arrives as a little reprieve from the tension. There are no surprises – Murderbot is able to implausibly fight off several more advanced SecUnits, the beacon is launched, and MB sacrifices himself to save Mensah by taking the impact of a tumble from a cliff – but it’s all put together well enough that you probably won’t mind.
I’m tempted to believe that in many ways this was the “finale”, from a plot and action standpoint, and that the final episode itself will be devoted to paying off the themes and character arcs that have colored a lot of the previous episodes. But Murderbot getting all its ducks in a row worked here, even if it lacked some of the depth and intelligence it has shown at its best. With episodes this short, themes this meaty, and so many diversions, sometimes compromises have to be made. This was a worthwhile one if you ask me.
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