Caemeron Crain
The following recap contains spoilers for Murderbot S1E7, “Complementary Species” (written by Paul Weitz & Chris Weitz and directed by Roseanne Liang)
Murderbot S1E7 opens with a flashback to our Preservation Alliance friends sitting around a table playing a game that requires the called-upon person to share something sweet and something bitter. Bharadwaj (Tamara Podemski) talks about giving a lecture and being supported by Pin-Lee (Sabrina Wu) being in the audience, then follows that with an apology to Pin-Lee for expressing unreciprocated romantic sentiments.
“We can talk about it,” Pin-Lee says, and everyone snaps their fingers. Gross.
Next up, it’s Gurathin’s (David Dastmalchian) turn, and it’s clear that he is far less comfortable with the whole situation than everyone else at the table. Perhaps that’s because he’s relatively new to the Preservation Alliance. He recalls how he came to join the group after having been a spy for the Corporation Rim, but then can’t come up with anything for bitter. Mensah (Noma Dumezweni) takes him aside to tell him how the positive and the negative hang together, and he says that he thinks she’s naïve about their upcoming expedition.
That strikes me as a little too tidy, since Gurathin has consistently been paranoid over the course of the expedition, but I do continue to enjoy how Murderbot characterizes the Preservation Alliance folks. They are the perfect foil to Murderbot (Alexander Skarsgård), presenting as a group that believes that everything will be alright if we can just talk things through.
Cut to the present, and that sentiment is at play with how the group is reacting to Murderbot’s execution of Leebeebee (Anna Konkle) in last week’s episode. They’re just stunned by it, and they don’t know how they could trust someone who could do such a thing. Of course, Murderbot is not a human being, but they are equally incapable of grasping that. Maybe Gurathin can, but that just makes him all the more distrustful.
Meanwhile, Murderbot is annoyed that these humans are ungrateful for how it saved their lives and doesn’t understand how they are behaving in the aftermath of that. It’s another example of how the show plays with the tension between rationality and common human sentiment. Rationally, Leebeebee was a threat that needed to be taken out. That doesn’t keep the humans from being freaked out about it, but that’s not something Murderbot can understand at all.
The task at hand is to leave the habitat because the bad guys are surely coming. Gurathin, who was shot in the leg by Leebeebee, could use some attention from the medical bay, but Murderbot rushes everyone along.
They fly to an isolated spot. Murderbot thinks about abandoning the humans but decides not to—something which it perhaps starts to regret when it’s harassed by the group wanting to talk about what’s happened—before a sandworm appears to threaten them all. They take shelter in the hopper, only to discover another creature arriving to mate with the sandworm on the top of their ship. Arada (Tattiawna Jones) thinks it’s beautiful.
The pair leaves an egg sack on the outside of the hopper, which Murderbot wants to get rid of, but the group decides it’s no harm for the moment, so they leave it be. And it’s a good thing, because while an advanced SecUnit arrives to try to kill them all, that bot is taken out by the sandworm returning for its eggs, so everyone survives.
Unfortunately, Gurathin proceeds to collapse, and Mensah is adamant about taking him back to the habitat for treatment. Murderbot insists that they will all die if they go back there, but its argument is brushed aside. They’re going. It’s up to Murderbot whether it wants to come along.
That’s the end of the episode, and while I’m curious about where things go next and who is threatening the team, I’m more struck by how this series is exploring the relationship between Murderbot and the humans it is supposed to protect. At the beginning of the series, Murderbot was hiding that it had free will, but then that was exposed. That bolstered the idea of it being a person, but now that person has exploded Leebeebee’s head. Does it even feel regret? No, because that wouldn’t be rational. And insofar as this series puts us in Murderbot’s perspective, it offers an opportunity to think about just how messy and irrational human beings can be.
See you next week.
