‘Murderbot’ Episode 9 recap: You can go your own way

It’s hard to pull off bittersweet, but I’m not surprised that Murderbot managed it. In that flashback a few episodes ago that showed our team of humans out for dinner the night before their expedition, we saw them playing a game in which they had to share both bitter and sweet feelings about one another. The bitter stuff had real bite to it, from what we heard — Bharadwaj talking about her painful rejection by Pin-Lee, Gurathin criticizing his beloved Dr. Mensah for her naïveté. Bittersweet is not a synonym for mawkishly sentimental, after all. It has to leave that bitter taste in your mouth.

So credit to writers/creators/directors Chris and Paul Weitz and their collaborators for sneakily crafting a very silly and gory story and happy resolution (or is it?) for the story that takes a sudden left turn for the genuinely sad — all the more sad because everyone involved knows it has to be this way.

When the episode begins, things have changed, as Murderbot can sense right away. So can we. We’re no longer on that wild planet full of centipede monsters and rogue robots — we’re back in civilization, or its outer-space equivalent. Murderbot is being memory-wiped and sent on new missions as a Security Unit…well, one, anyway, which ends in disaster as its suppressed memories of that long-ago massacre come flooding back, allowing the human strikers it’s attacking to get the best of it.

But hopefully not for long. Led by Dr. Mensah, who turns out to be the freaking president of the Planetary Alliance, and Pin-Lee, an ace legal mind, Murderbot’s teammates are frantically trying to free him. But when neither moral nor legal arguments work, they start talking in the Company’s language: cash. They buy Murderbot back, saving him from an acid bath at the last possible moment. 

The reunion that follows is touching in large part because of who’s at its center. Risking the integrity of his own brain, Dr. Gurathin schemes and blackmails his way into the Company archives, where he locates Murderbot’s “erased” memories. (The team correctly guessed the Company would never erase anything that might prove to be of monetary value.) He then reuploads these into Murderbot’s head, reawakening the old self they knew and loved.

Dr. Mensah excitedly tells the revived android that when it comes back to Preservation Alliance with them, it will truly be a free agent, able to do whatever it chooses with its life. With no need for armor now that it’s not working security anymore, they give it civilian clothes to wear. Now it looks like a plain-old augmented human, albeit a tall one.

But if it looks like a human, and can make its own decisions like a human, then it’ll also have to make its own way like a human. Though Gurathin desperately tries to talk the robot out of it, stressing how similar their backgrounds are and how great the Preservation Alliance people have been to him, Murderbot goes out to “check the perimeter” — i.e. leave its friends behind and seek its own fortune.

So the episode ends with a tearful Dr. Mensah watching her friend’s ship depart, and Murderbot on his way to a far-off mining colony, having made the trade-off of a life by the side of its “favorite human” for a life all its own. 

One of the smartest people I know once told me that falling in love with someone doesn’t guarantee you’ll be happy together. It’s a hard pill to swallow. Our entire culture tells us that when it’s safe for two characters to love each other, the story ends. What else is there?

A lot, as it turns out. Mensah and Murderbot are not in love per se, but they love each other, in a life-transforming way. “I will be your guardian,”  Mensah tells the robot when it’s revived, emphasizing every word. Murderbot sacrificed its life to save the team’s, and the team did everything they could to save it in turn, and now they have, and they love each other, and isn’t that enough?

No, as it turns out. As extraordinary a person as Mensah is, living under her guidance would be tantamount to another contract, another gig, another stint spent following some human’s rules. It’s better for everyone concerned if Murderbot strikes out on its own, making its own decisions and living by them. It’s painful for all of them to swallow in part because they know it’s true. You can read it all over Gurathin’s face and hear it in his voice as he repeats Murderbot’s lie about checking the perimeter back to the bot. Gurathin no longer bothers to argue, because he knows his side of the argument is wrong.

Unless they have a big reunion in episode 10. Which I wouldn’t be mad at. I mean, they do love each other, don’t they?

This is the surprisingly humane and complex note on which Murderbot heads into its season finale. This is what sci-fi on television can be: a simple idea, staged in a vividly imagined universe, executed with skill at delivering both the expected thrills and the unexpected complications.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.