Caemeron Crain
The following recap contains spoilers for Murderbot S1E9, “All Systems Red” (written by Paul Weitz & Chris Weitz and directed by Roseanne Liang)
Murderbot S1E9 begins with the Preservation Alliance preparing for their confrontation with GrayCris. Apparently, they’ve all agreed to the plan that Murderbot (Alexander Skarsgård) mentioned at the end of last week’s episode. Gurathin (David Dastmalchian) doesn’t like it, but his alternate plan doesn’t go beyond the idea that they should come up with something else, so everyone is proceeding with Murderbot’s plan.
This involves Murderbot going alone to the rendezvous with GrayCris, while Gurathin and Pin-Lee (Sabrina Wu) launch a drone so that Gurathin can hack GrayCris to set off their emergency beacon once Murderbot gets them access. Ratthi (Akshay Khanna), Bharadwaj (Tamara Podemski), and Arada (Tattiawna Jones) have stayed behind at the PresAux habitat to create this connection on their end. Meanwhile, Mensah (Noma Dumezweni) has the job of staying in the hopper, and it’s not clear that she’s supposed to do much beyond that, in terms of the plan as it has been laid out.
Of course, Murderbot has lied about the details of its plan in a couple of ways because it could predict the pushback the PresAux folks would have voiced, and it’s better to avoid all of that. This does create a moment, shortly after Murderbot arrives to meet GrayCris, where you might have wondered if Murderbot was actually scheming to betray its clients, but this passes pretty quickly. The plan is simply to pretend to betray its clients.
This works, insofar as GrayCris agrees to connect their systems to the PresAux systems, and that allows Gurathin to hack their emergency beacon, but this takes us to the other part of Murderbot’s plan, which it has kept hidden. It tells GrayCris that the Preservation Alliance has gone to release the beacon manually, and it quickly becomes clear that the idea is to lure GrayCris to the launchpad so that they’ll all die when the beacon is set off.
PresAux hates the idea of killing people, but they play along because they can’t see another way out of the mess they’re in. Unfortunately, GrayCris insists that Murderbot accompany them to the launchpad, which means that Murderbot is going to die, too.
Some kind of bird creature takes out Gurathin’s drone, but he’s able to sneak into the GrayCris habitat to reestablish his hack of their systems. This does, however, delay the timing of the emergency beacon launch in a way that requires Murderbot to stall to keep GrayCris from leaving the site when they don’t find PresAux there.
Meanwhile, Mensah has decided to fly the hopper to the launchpad, with an idea in her head that they can avoid killing GrayCris. They can talk about it.
When she arrives, Mensah offers GrayCris information about alien remnants in exchange for Murderbot, but their leader (Amanda Brugel) scoffs at the idea, saying they’ll just torture that information out of Mensah instead. When Murderbot volunteers to do the torturing, someone finally figures out that it has been quoting from Sanctuary Moon, and a big fight breaks out.
Ultimately, Murderbot grabs Mensah and jumps off the launchpad just before the emergency beacon launches. All of the GrayCris folks and SecUnits who were still alive at that point presumably die in the explosion, while Murderbot uses its body to shield Mensah from the impact when they hit the ground below.
As the episode ends, Gurathin and Pin-Lee come to find Mensah and Murderbot, who is showing minimal signs of life. But, one has to guess that the title character of the TV show we’re watching has some plot armor. I think it’s more a question of who fixes it.
With one episode left in the season, our team has managed to launch an emergency beacon, which should mean the Corporation is about to come to their rescue. The fact that the Corporation is completely evil is a wrinkle, of course, but at least our friends should be able to get off of this planet they’ve been stuck on… unless something else happens in the season finale.
See you next week.
