Caemeron Crain
The following recap contains spoilers for Murderbot S1E5, “Rogue War Tracker Infinite” (written by Paul Weitz & Chris Weitz and directed by Paul Weitz)
As Murderbot S1E5 begins, Murderbot (Alexander Skarsgård) is unconscious after shooting itself at the end of last week’s episode. That doesn’t prevent it from providing voiceover commentary, but I’m not sure how much we should read into that. Perhaps it’s aware of what’s going on, even when it’s on standby, or maybe this is just the structure of the TV series we’re watching, and we shouldn’t worry about it too much.
Regardless, Mensah (Noma Dumezweni) and the others intend to take Murderbot back to their habitat. Murderbot notes that this is very stupid because they know it just shot itself to keep from killing all of them.
Before they get Murderbot onto the hopper, however, they spot Leebeebee (Anna Konkle), who claims to be a survivor from the DeltFall group. What she says happened mostly matches what we already knew, but I do find it noteworthy that she refers to the bot the Preservation Alliance folks have just squished as a SecUnit, as I’ve had some doubts about that.
Everyone goes along with Leebeebee’s use of the term, so you might think that this is a model of SecUnit everyone in the Preservation Alliance is familiar with, but I got the impression in Episode 1 that they’d never seen a SecUnit before that, and they didn’t see one that looked like this during their meeting with the Corporation.
It’s clear that there must be some third party at play in the events at DeltFall, as Murderbot and Mensah discuss later in the episode. It wouldn’t make sense for the Corporation to be killing these scientists, as murdering your clients is generally bad for business in a couple of ways. Still, it’s hard to speculate who might have been behind the attack from the information provided.
Murderbot guesses that whoever it was posed as the Preservation Alliance in order to gain entry, because humans tend to be naïve like that. If that’s right, I find myself thinking that Leebeebee is the one who gained entry to DeltFall without the use of force, and that she then granted entry to the bot before fleeing.
Perhaps this is unfair, and Leebeebee really did just manage to escape the massacre, but I don’t trust her. Though that could be because she seems to be sexually attracted to Murderbot, which makes it want to have nothing to do with her. The show is basically from Murderbot’s perspective, after all.
I’ve gotten ahead of myself somewhat. After the team takes Murderbot back to their habitat (with Leebeebee in tow), they are able to fix it and remove the tendrils left by the override module. Gurathin (David Dastmalchian) then goes into Murderbot’s code to look for anything out of order and discovers that its Governor Module has been disabled the whole time. He also discovers the massive amount of TV that Murderbot has been watching.
Gurathin expresses doubts that Murderbot could possibly be so interested in consuming episodes of Sanctuary Moon, but Ratthi (Akshay Khanna) tests “Seccy” with a deep cut from the show and is impressed by the bot’s knowledge. Mensah and Bharadwaj (Tamara Podemski) contend that learning that Murderbot has had free will the whole time should make the group more prone to trust it—not less—and their argument wins the day.
Discovering that they cannot release the emergency beacon remotely (in order to get out of Dodge), Mensah and Murderbot head off in the hopper to do it manually. Along the way, Mensah tells Murderbot about her children—it doesn’t understand why—and the two engage in the conversation I referred to earlier about who might have attacked DeltFall.
As they approach the beacon, Mensah tries to initiate a discussion of Murderbot’s antipathy towards Gurathin, which distracts her a little as Murderbot notices that something is wrong. The emergency beacon explodes, and while the two seem to maneuver their way to safety, this is where the episode ends.
Who blew up the beacon (which would have signaled distress to the Corporation)? Who attacked DeltFall, and why? We’re halfway through Murderbot Season 1 and don’t have a lot to go on in relation to these questions. Here’s hoping we learn more next week.
See you then.
