It's been quite a journey, but at last we've arrived at the season finale of Murderbot, Apple's sci-fi series based on The Muderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. After nine episodes of drama on a remote planet, the Preservation Alliance team and the SecUnit played by Alexander Skarsgård have returned to civilization. But it comes with plenty of its own perils, especially for Murderbot.
The thrilling penultimate episode of the season saw the SecUnit make a heroic sacrifice, shielding Doctor Mensah (Noma Dumezweni) with its own body as they fell from a cliff in order to save her life. When last we saw it, the SecUnit was powering down from catastrophic damage, its mission to stop the nefarious GrayCris team from killing PresAux accomplished.
In "The Perimeter," we find out what happens next. It's an emotional, dramatic finish to the season that had me on the edge of my seat even though I've read All Systems Red, the novella on which this season was based. Murderbot has done a great job of keeping things unpredictable, and that's especially true in the season's final episode. Beware FULL SPOILERS ahead.
Murderbot Episode 10 review: "The Perimeter"
"The Perimeter" is set entirely on a space station in the Corporation Rim where the PresAux team initially purchased their survey contract at the start of the season. But what they find there is no happy homecoming. While the humans may be out of immediate danger, Murderbot has never been in more. It wakes up on an operating table, asking in a daze about its clients. Before it's even had time to register where it is or what's happening, its memory is wiped and a new, working governor module is installed.
This turns our sarcastic, lovable Murderbot back into a mindless drone. It's heartbreaking to watch the derisive techs spit on its face and order it to act like a baby, a command it can't help but obey now that its governor module once more forces it into mindless obedience. Most of the episode revolves around the Preservation Alliance team's efforts to find and rescue Murderbot from its horrible fate.
The show does a very good job of playing up the drama of that quest. We've spent all season rooting for Murderbot, and here at the end we see it nearly succumb to the fate it has feared the whole time. The Corporation forces it to beat starving protesters as part of a security detail, but the traumatic memories of killing a bunch of miners which have haunted Murderbot all season are too deeply ingrained. It begins malfunctioning, leading the Corporate security team to order it to be melted down in an acid bath. Only a last minute save from Pin-Lee (Sabrina Wu) and Ratthi (Akshay Khanna) save its life.
While Murderbot is being forced back into the Corporate machine, the Preservation Alliance group wages a legal and public relations campaign against the Company in the name of getting their SecUnit friend back. The back-and-forth between the characters we've come to know and love and the corporate powers that would rather they just go away is interesting and unpredictable. I thoroughly enjoyed all the layers of it, from the board room verbal sparring to Mensah holding a press conference that throws GrayCris under the bus to Pin-Lee getting an injunction to stop the Corporation from destroying the SecUnit, since it's valuable evidence for their case.
One of the highlights of the episode is Gurathin (David Dastmalchian), who goes on a solo mission to recover Murderbot's memories. Believing the Corporation wouldn't have fully erased Murderbot's memories if it thought it could gain any profit from them, he leans on a former drug dealer contact to give him access to the Corporation's computer system. This serves not only as a good way to learn more about Gurathin's past as a former spy whom the Corporation got addicted to drugs as a means of keeping him compliant, but also as a way to show just how much he has changed over the course of the season. The Gurathin of the season premiere would never have stuck his neck out for Murderbot like he does in the finale. But here, he takes the biggest risk of any of the humans, downloading all of Murderbot's memories into his own mind so that he can later transfer them back into the SecUnit. Dastmalchian has been consistently turning in a fantastic performance all season, but this might be his most compelling episode.
All of this hard work pays off as the main group of Perservation Alliance scientists recovering Murderbot while Gurathin secures the memories that could help restore its personality, which he was able to find in the Company database thanks to Murderbot's obsession with The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, of course.
At last, Murderbot returns to full coherence and is able to speak with its former clients, remembering who they are. It's a breath of relief after the tension of the episode, but it's undercut by an interesting tension point: Murderbot is now free to go live in the Preservation Alliance system with its friends, but only so long as Mensah is its "guardian." In other words, it's free from the Corporation, but still not truly free to make its own choices. This is a key point at the end of the novella, and while the show kind of glosses over it, I'm glad it was included in some capacity.
Despite the joy of the reunion, Murderbot ultimately can't accept that compromise. All it's wanted this whole time is just to make its own decisions. So after the Preservation Alliance team falls asleep, it wanders over to the apartment door, where it has a final conversation with Gurathin. It's a powerful moment with great acting from both Skarsgård and Dastmalchian, as Murderbot informs its friend that it has to go "check the Perimeter" — which is what it says whenever it needs space. Gurathin understands, and they bid a heartwrenching farewell. The show did such a good job with the journey of these two characters, who spent most of the season hating each other. Murderbot even makes direct eye contact when it thanks Gurathin, which is how you know this is a big moment for it.
This leads into Murderbot's final monologue of the season as it walks through the space station unnoticed by the human populace. After all, without its armor it looks just like an augmented human. This sequence shows off some cool set design for the space station, has some standout scoring, and has a bit of very good silent acting from Dumezweni when Mensah wakes up and realizes Murderbot is going its own way.
Just like All Systems Red, the season finale ends with Murderbot hitching a ride with a bot-driven cargo ship to a distant mining colony. It shares its vast entertainment library, since cargo ships apparently enjoy good TV just as much as Murderbot does. It's a perfect note to end the season on, and I'm so happy that the television show stuck the landing. Murderbot has gained its freedom, and I can't wait to see what it does with it; there are plenty more book in The Murderbot Diaries, so there's a promising future ahead as the SecUnit.
"The Perimeter" is a perfect example of how well Murderbot has threaded the needle between honoring its source material and inventing its own drama to make for fulfilling episodes of television. In the book, this section at the Corporation Rim station is essentially a short epilogue. All of the peril Murderbot is in here is invented for the show, but it's all part of the emotional throughline from the entire season. The book is strictly told from Murderbot's perspective, so all we see is SecUnit waking up with its PresAux friends, who fill it in on their legal struggle to rescue it before it ultimately decides to leave. Since the television show isn't bound to that perspective, it has much more freedom to dig into other characters and expand on potential plot points that wouldn't have made sense for the novella, like Murderbot getting its memories wiped and its governor module re-installed.
But despite all the liberties the show takes, it still includes basically every beat of this final section from the book, as well as its emotional core. It's not just changing things because the writers thought they could do it better than Martha Wells; it's changing them because it needs to optimize the material to best suit an episode of television, and it works spectacularly well. I'm hard pressed to think of many recent science fiction adaptations that walked that line quite so well as Murderbot.
Verdict
"The Perimeter" takes a fairly straightforward section of All Systems Red and turns it into a powerful finale that's filled with peril and poignant performances from the show's ensemble cast. The TV show has been solid all season, but it ends on a high note. This is an adaptation that deserves to go the distance with as many more seasons as Apple TV+ is willing to give it.
Episode grade: A+
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