Friday, June 27, 2025

Viewer Log: Murderbot ep 8

 Prepping for emergency surgery!

Last time on Murderbot, everyone was processing. PreservationAux and Murderbot fled their habitat to evade whatever third party is trying to kill the groups on the planet. The humans are all uncomfortable around Murderbot after it… ya know… murdered a lady in front of them. Murderbot is deeply hurt that no one had even thanked it for saving them and does a perimeter checks (aka be away from the people). When it gets back, Mensah tries to get everyone to see work together and tries to initiate a sharing ritual their group does. Before anything could happen, though, a centipede monster attacked them. The group fell back to the hopper and prepared to fight. A second monster arrived and for a second everyone though they were fighting… until Arata realized that, despite their very different morphology this was an example of sexual dimorphism. Ya, the monsters weren’t fighting they were… monster mashing. The two eventually leave and the group find a pair of egg sacs stuck to their hopper. Distracted by all the biology around it, another SecUnit attacked and nearly killed Murderbot. Murderbot with attempted help from Preservation Alliance almost die, but the SecUnit punched one of the egg sacs. This draws the centipede monster who brutally killed it before grabbing their egg sac and fleeing. Gurathin then collapsed. He’d been ill since Leebeebee shot him last episode and he needs a medbay badly. Murderbot is against going back to the habitat for safety reasons but is told the humans are going back so it can either stay alone or go with the group. Enough recapping. Let’s get to it, shall we?

 

Ep 8: Foreign Object

 

We begin with a Sanctuary Moon episode. The first officer has just announced that the memory wipe on the navigator unit was 100% successful. They had to wipe its mind after it decapitated its lover, the captain. The headless John Cho was a bit much for me, personally. The helmsman asks if this is a good idea, and the first officer asks the Nav Unit to decapitate him to prove its not dangerous. It says that it cannot comply with an order that would endanger the crew. The helmsman is still not certain, but the first officer insists that everything is fine. He orders the Nav bot to fly them through the wormhole, and tells it to smile. The alarms start blaring and it’s revealed that the Nav bot is piloting them through the event horizon of the wormhole, which will basically trap them. Ya, the memory wipe didn’t work and now it’s on a kill spree. The Nav bot murders the security officer and then kills the first officer, crushing his head between its hands. Murderbot is shocked by this turn of events and really wants to see what happens next but instead has to deal with the shit its humans are putting it through. They’re on a cliff overlooking their habitat. They don’t see any vehicles or signs of life by the habitat, which doesn’t mean much. Ratthi suggests that he get to go in first, maybe with a bigger gun, and scope things out all stealthy. He tries to get a fist bump from Murderbot but its not interested. Murderbot reveals it left some transponders before they left and they’ve been recording everything that happened at the habitat. Ratthi and Mensah both praise “Seccy.” Terrible nickname.

 

At the hopper, Gurathin is getting worse. He’s got a high fever and is barely conscience. They watch the playback and find out that three SecUnits were in their habitat. They get a look at the logo on the SecUnits and learn the third party killing folks on the planet is called GrayCris, a mining conglomerate from the Corporation Rim. The leader of the GrayCris team find Murderbot’s camera and addresses the team. She compliments them on realizing that they were coming. They say that they disabled the beacons and have the only means of getting off the planet. She insists this is a misunderstanding and as a sign of good faith promises to leave their habitat alone. She gives them a rendezvous point and a time and says she’s willing to deal. The team are all willing to go down to the habitat immediately, but Murderbot is very certain they’ll all die if they go down there. It tells them to not move until it secures the area. Especially Ratthi.

 

Murderbot approaches the habitat, it’s combat module saying everything is clear. It enters and looks around. Its scanner doesn’t pick up anything right away and searches the ground floor. It finishes it’s sweep and finds nothing so calls everyone in. They do a medscan of Gurathin and realize he’s got a form of gangrene from the gun shot wound. Bharadwaj is running the examination, Murderbot reminding us she’s not a medical doctor, but doesn’t remind her of that. They prepare to get started but Gurathin flat out refuses the painkillers. Remember, he was an addict for years and he’s terrified that even some meds for surgery will get him hooked again. He asks Murderbot to restrain him, which Murderbot agrees to do… but then they both realize that they can use Gurathin’s tech implants to potentially remove his ability to feel pain. Murderbot just needs to plug into him. Mensah asks the important question, if this was a real thing or if Murderbot got it from Sanctuary Moon. Murderbot insists that it didn’t get it from there… not revealing he got it from Medcenter Argala, episode 502, another show, but it insists the cases are based on real life. They plug Murderbot into Gurathin’s brain.

 

Murderbot is weirded out initially by this, as it is looking at itself through Gurathin’s eyes. It shuts off Gurathin’s sense of sight, as it is sure that it’s better that Gurathin doesn’t see the surgery part of this. Bharadwaj get to work slicing the necrotic flesh from Gurathin’s leg. Murderbot decides to use this time linked to Gurathin’s brain to do some snooping of its own, rationalizing that turnabout is fair play. It gets lost searching through Gurathin’s brain. It gets stuck on a memory, or maybe a feeling, of Gurathin processing how he feels towards the group. He says that he loves the other members of the team like his own children, but he loves Mensah as an equal. He mutters over and over again asking why she can’t love him back. Murderbot ends up saying this out loud, which shocks everyone. Gurathin wonders if he’d said something, but Murderbot tells him nope. Bharadwaj gets the bit out and prepares to seal his knee. Bharadwaj says they can unlink, but Gurathin asks for another moment. It’s then that it realizes that Gurathin used the connection to and got past his defenses. Gurathin announces to the group that their SecUnit calls itself Murderbot and reveals it does so because it murdered 57 people on a mining expedition. Murderbot says that isn’t true. It says that’s not true, that that’s not the reason it calls itself Murderbot. It insists that it has only ever killed to protect clients. It says that that might be an implanted memory or it had had it’s combat module hacked. But Gurathin says the obvious idea that maybe it is just defective. And it has to admit that’s true. Murderbot leaves.

 

The group try to figure out what to do. Half are cool with Murderbot leaving and half want to go after it. Mensah closes the door and says they need to figure out what GrayCris is. Ratthi asks if they’re just going to leave it out there and a frustrated Mensah yells that “It is not your pet!” at him. They fall back and start discussing GrayCris. They reason that they’re not part of the Company, but that the Company probably took a bribe to not tell anyone a third survey team was on the planet. They’re pretty sure GrayCris wants the alien remnant that they saw earlier, realizing that GrayCris would totally be willing to break interstellar law to move it. They think that DeltFall found out about GrayCris’ on the planet and were killed for it. And rationalize that they’re only still alive because they know where the remnant is and GrayCris wants to get it out of them. Murderbot, marching away, knows that the PreservationAux team is dead without it. It asks itself if that’s really its problem.

 

Back on the ship, while everyone is freaking out slightly, Ratthi comes into Arata and Pin-Lee room. Despite the insanity of the situation, they need to deal with the Throuple situation. Ratthi admits to them that he wants to live life as honestly as possible with what time they have left and says that he can’t date both of them if he’s only falling for one of them. Pin-Lee and Arata are both a little shocked when Ratthi admits it’s Pin-Lee he’s fallen for and not Arata. There’s a bit of a fight over their situation again, which the trio agreeing to talk about it more after the whole ‘we’ll probably die soon’ thing is taken care of.

 

Murderbot tries to sooth itself with Sanctuary Moon episodes but it can’t focus. It thinks that the ‘show’ that is its interaction with its clients is drowning everything else out. It realizes that even if the humans are doomed, it might not be. It returns to the habitat and announces that it has a plan. To which Gurathin shouts F***.

 

That was a great penultimate episode. Gurathin’s injury is a reasonably high stakes situation, high enough that I can believe Murderbot would be willing to risk plugging into Gurathin’s brain. Murderbot got cocky and Gurathin capitalized, which I mean, props to him for doing that. Gurathin has to feel pretty smug that his paranoia ended up being correct. Gurathin having feelings for Mensah is only expressly stated in the show. He might be attracted to his boss in the books, but I’m bad at sensing subtext so I’m not willing to say that with certainty. The reveal of Murderbot’s name and history was suitably dramatic. If I recall correctly, all of this was revealed earlier in the book, but ya gotta spread reveals like that out in a show. Murderbot not being sure if it was involved in a massacre is true to the book as well. Just like in the show, it got a memory wipe before it hacked its Governor Module. The uncertainty of if it killed a whole bunch of people due to a malfunction or being hacked, or from just going berserk haunts Murderbot until it gets a chance to investigate what had happened. GrayCris is indeed after alien tech and is the criminal element in this story. They killed a lot of people to cover up their survey. Granted, killing for alien tech makes sense to a certain degree to me, but damn did these guys go overboard. And I’m hoping we get a good resolution to the love triangle. Theres a lot of tension in that throuple, and while the air has been cleared, it’s clear Arata and Pin-Lee need to process some of their relationship troubles. It was incredibly funny when Arata tried to move into Ratthi’s line of sight while he was confessing his love to Pin-Lee and he just gently pushes her back. Murderbot deciding to look after itself over its humans is an interesting idea. It does want to get off planet and nothing is forcing it to obey the humans, so it totally could if it wanted to. Hm… is Murderbot as heartless as that? Maybe. We’ll have to see later. So, ya, a fun finale. Still figuring out what we’ll do next time as we don’t finish Murderbot until next month. See you later. 

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Bluesky: ‪@basicssuperhero.bsky.social‬


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