Last week it was announced that Murderbot had been renewed for a second season, ahead of Friday’s season one finale — which sort of spoiled the penultimate cliffhanger of “Seccy” being on death’s door after saving Mensah. So, yes, Murderbot survived its tangle with GrayCris! From there, the supersized 36-minute finale found a newly free Murderbot leaving the Corporation Rim, its PresAux clients, and even its armor behind for adventures unknown. That’s right, folks: Murderbot season two is gonna have a whole lot more of Alexander Skarsgård’s beautiful face! Huzzah!
How the episode gets there, though, features some telling departures from the original novel. In the book, the denouement was fairly straightforward and only eight pages long. Mensah buys out Murderbot’s contract with the Company, with the intention of bringing the SecUnit back home to PresAux where she would act as its guardian and it could live however it wanted. That’s the thing, though — Murderbot doesn’t know what it wants. And going to PresAux, being “free,” having a guardian instead of an owner, all of it felt like what people assumed it should want. So they made decisions for it, and that turned out to be the one thing Murderbot did not want. So it sneaks out in the middle of the night and boards a cargo ship off the Corporation Rim, leaving its “favorite human” behind.
That’s still exactly what happens in the Murderbot finale, only with some more complicated flourishes. Before Mensah can buy Murderbot’s contract, the Company wipes its memory and reinstates it — along with a functioning governor module — to work security at a protest. When it is ordered to violently clash against humans, it glitches, flashing back to the same memories of participating in a massacre that has plagued it. The company then decides to scrap Murderbot, but are halted in the nick of time by PresAux’s intervention. Gurathin, meanwhile, realizes that Murderbot does not recognize them anymore and uses his connections to download the wiped memory data to his own brain before reinstalling it in Murderbot. Thus, Murderbot is saved from an acid bath and returned to its previous dysfunctional functionality by its clients, who then purchase its contract and make plans to take it home with them.
These additions do more than simply goose the runtime, of course, and I’m of two minds about it. On the one hand, giving the PresAux crew more agency in saving Murderbot is exactly what the show has been doing all along, to flesh out the human characters and take the story out of Murderbot’s sole perspective. However, doing so removes Murderbot’s own agency and makes its ultimate decision to leave seem sudden and ungrateful (though I think this is alleviated somewhat by Gurathin’s and Mensah’s emotional reactions to its decision, which show their understanding). The memory wipe and reinstatement also shine a spotlight on the question of what makes Murderbot an individual, something the books and the show will continue to explore. It’s interesting that the memory glitch remained despite the wipe, though its personality didn’t. Perhaps we are the collection of our experiences, though some experiences ingrain themselves in us more deeply than others. I’m not clear on how reinstating its memory could have re-hacked its governor module, though.
What matters is that the show retained perhaps the most powerful moment of the book’s conclusion: Murderbot referring to Mensah as its “favorite human” as it leaves. Whatever the show might be saying about Murderbot’s consciousness, the big step is seeing it acknowledge something as fundamental as a preference, an emotion, about another creature. And the show even added a hint of a smile to Murderbot’s face in the final moments.
As for season two? It’ll certainly pick up the events of the second novel, “Artificial Condition,” which I won’t spoil here. The only thing I want to say is that if my favorite character, ART – or “Asshole Research Transport” – is introduced. I hope Matt Berry does the voice. Let’s get a Matt Berry-bot threepeat going! The Book of Boba Fett and Fallout aren’t enough!
