Caemeron Crain
The following recap contains spoilers for Murderbot S1E6, “Command Feed” (written by Chris Weitz & Paul Weitz and directed by Aurora Guerrero)
Murderbot S1E6 picks up where last week’s episode left off. The explosion of the emergency beacon has damaged the hopper, leaving Murderbot (Alexander Skarsgård) and Mensah (Noma Dumezweni) stranded.
They need to repair the hopper in order to get back to the others, but Murderbot deleted the repair manual from its memory to make space for more episodes of Sanctuary Moon. Further, it is leaking lubricant after being stabbed by a shard of metal in the crash. Murderbot tries to brush this off as no big deal, but ultimately collapses in the middle of telling Mensah as much.
She hooks Murderbot up to a line of lubricant from the hopper, taking a chance that the substance will be compatible with the SecUnit. The fact that it is leads Murderbot to an idea—they can take some of the wiring from its spine to repair the hopper.
The only problem with this plan is that it requires Mensah to cut open Murderbot’s back, and she’s pretty squeamish about doing so. Murderbot manages to guide her, pulling on plots from the TV shows it watches, and even makes a joke about whether she’s sure that was her first time when she’s done.
Along the way, we learn that the neural systems of SecUnits are constructed using cloned human flesh, so that’s fun. I had wondered if the Corporation was taking body parts from the dead, and I guess cloning is a little less gruesome than that, though I’m not entirely sure we should take this at face value. And even if we do, we might wonder who this biological material is being cloned from.
Regardless, Murderbot and Mensah manage to fix the hopper in order to head back to the habitat. When they get there, Leebeebee (Anna Konkle) has everyone at gunpoint, and Murderbot quickly shoots her in the head in what is probably the funniest moment of the episode. But before I talk about that, let’s go back and recap S1E6’s B Plot, or A Plot… I don’t know which of these is first among equals.
The team is packing up, with the expectation that Mensah and Murderbot will return having released the emergency beacon, which will lead to their rescue. Ratthi (Akshay Khanna) inserts himself into a massage session with Pin-Lee (Sabrina Wu) and Arada (Tattiawna Jones), keeping their throuple as awkward as ever, while Bharadwaj (Tamara Podemski) shows Leebeebee some minerals the team has collected from the planet. It turns out the Preservation Alliance does this kind of mission primarily to sell such minerals to evil corporate folks, which adds a nice layer of complication with regard to their ability to live outside of the Corporate Rim, but isn’t really something the episode dwells on.
Gurathin (David Dastmalchian) is trying to hail the hopper and gets increasingly freaked out about his inability to do so. Meanwhile, Leebeebee starts pushing for information about what the team has found, their experience with glitches in their maps, and so on, to the point where Gurathin gets suspicious and refuses to answer more questions.
So, Leebeebee pulls out a gun and gives a little James Bond villain monologue. She wasn’t working at DeltFall; she works for the group who attacked it. She blew up the emergency beacon to kill Murderbot and Mensah. And she hates babies. She tells Gurathin to give her the information she wants or she’ll kill someone.
It’s at this point that Murderbot arrives and tells Leebeebee to drop her weapon. Instead, she points it at Gurathin’s head, but her own head has exploded before she can finish the line coming out of her mouth. And the Preservation Alliance folks are freaked out.
Gurathin points out that Murderbot could have killed him, which it acknowledges but brushes aside as something that didn’t happen. Meanwhile, Bharadwaj (with blood splattered all over her face) screams, “You killed her!” multiple times. The others retch and wail, and so on.
Murderbot is confused because in the serials it watches, when someone saves the day, they are usually greeted with cheers and hugs, while that isn’t at all what’s happening in this real-life situation. It starts to understand, though, as it reflects in its repair pod.
These people had started to feel like they knew Murderbot and like it was one of them. Then it exploded Leebeebee’s head without so much as a second thought. It’s not something any of these humans could imagine doing. But this doesn’t lead to Murderbot wanting to be more human. Instead, the episode ends with Murderbot acknowledging to itself that killing Leebeebee felt good.
See you next week.
