Believe it or not, we're officially halfway through the first season of Murderbot on Apple TV+. The fourth episode ended with a bang, as the SecUnit played by Alexander Skarsgård was forced to shoot itself in the chest before a malicious override module could force it to kill all its friends. Is this the end for our reluctant hero?
Of course not! "Rogue War Tracker Infinite" picks up with Murderbot in the medbay of the PresAux habitat, where the rest of the team is hard at work repairing it. Which it thinks is a pretty stupid idea, since it doesn't particularly trust them to do the job well and the tendrils from the override module are still embedded in its system. But hey, who can blame Murderbot for having some trust issues?
Beware full spoilers ahead for Murderbot Episode 5, "Rogue War Tracker Infinite."
Murderbot Episode 5 review: "Rogue War Tracker Infinite"
This halfway point episode is an important one for Murderbot, shifting the status quo in a major way that will ripple through the rest of the season. After trying to keep its autonomy secret from the Preservation Alliance team, Murderbot is finally outed when Gurathin (David Dastmalchian) and Bharadwaj (Tamara Podemski) discover it has hacked its governor module during repairs. Time for some radical honesty!
But let's rewind a bit, just like the episode does. "Rogue War Tracker Infinite" mostly takes place from the medbay scene onward, but it does show us a few earlier scenes to tie all the pieces together and show us how Mensah (Noma Dumezweni), Pin-Lee (Sabrina Wu), Ratthi (Akshay Khanna), and Arada (Tattiawna Jones) brought the SecUnit home. The show does this in a clever way that keeps the recap entertaining, having Murderbot reconstruct its memory of those events via video logs while it narrates in predictably funny fashion. The narration is exceptionally good and necessary in this episode, since Murderbot spends a solid portion of it immobile on a hospital bed.
As it turns out, Murderbot and its friends didn't return to the Preservation Alliance habitat alone. As the team struggled to lift the downed SecUnit, a survivor appears from the DeltFall team. After a hilarious scene where Arada nearly shoots her, we learn that this person played by guest star Anna Konkle is named Leebeebee. No, that is not a typo, and the name quickly becomes a running joke.
This is an interesting departure from Martha Wells' novella All Systems Red, where no survivors are found at DeltFall. Leebeebee acts more than a little suspicious, so I'm very much waiting to see how that all plays out, because I definitely don't buy that she is who she says she is.
Beyond the absurdity of Leebeebee's name and general presence in the episode, she actually brings with her one of the few things I don't love about the Murderbot TV show. She is sexually fascinated by the SecUnit. This ranges from imagining how its robotic penis would work (it doesn't have one) to complimenting its face and trying to kiss it later in the episode. I haven't read far enough into The Murderbot Diaries to know whether humans pining after Murderbot ever comes up in the books, but my gut feeling is this was all inserted because the show has a very attractive actor playing the SecUnit and wanted to capitalize on that for some extra jokes. They mostly fell flat for me.
Fortunately, the awkward moments with Leebeebee don't take up too much of the episode, and as I said, it seems pretty clear viewers aren't necessarily supposed to like her anyway. The bulk of "Rogue War Tracker Infinite" revolves around Murderbot's revival at the hands of the Preservation Alliance group, and the subsequent discovery that it's rogue. What happens now? Can they trust it? And how do they know it's really rogue?
In the case of the latter question, they try to trick it with television trivia. Gurathin is adamant that the SecUnit is dangerous, but after the rest of the group finds out that it's been mostly spending its time watching TV shows since they've been on the planet, they start to think maybe it's not that bad. After all, why would it be doing that if it wanted to kill them? It just keeps saving their lives and watching shows, which hardly sounds like the pattern of a killing machine.
This leads to a pretty fun moment where Gurathin claims Murderbot's television obsession must be a front for sending out secret messages, and Ratthi tries to trick it with a deep cut question about The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon that it has a very passionate answer for. I still love how much Murderbot is playing with the TV-obsession angle of the story in a way that feels even more fitting for this new medium than it did in the books.
Ultimately, Murderbot takes the question of whether to trust it out of the humans' hands when it shows it had already freed itself from Gurathin's attempt to immobilize it and could kill him at any point. It chooses to spare him, even though it doesn't like him very much. Would a bloodthirsty killing machine do that?
The final stretch of the episode does a great job playing with some interesting character dynamics, with Mensah convincing the SecUnit to stay a part of their group and promising not to reveal its secret to the powers of the Corporation Rim. Gurathin and the SecUnit really dislike each other; ironically, they also have more in common than anyone else in the group, often coming to similar conclusions and getting fed up with the petty bickering of the other humans. It's an interesting parallel that I definitely want to see more of.
The episode ends with Mensah and Murderbot heading out to fire off the emergency beacon, which they have to do manually because it's seemingly malfunctioning...except when their shuttle gets close, the beacon explodes because someone laid a trap. Once more we cut off with a cliffhanger, as the hopper plummets to the ground in a fiery blaze. The pacing remains excellent in this show; the episodes are so engrossing that they seem to fly by. Would I watch more in a row? Absolutely. But it's refreshing to have a show that remembers how to deliver small, supremely satisfying installments that leave me eager to come back for more.
Murderbot Bullet Points
- I'm still really enjoying the visual effects and aesthetic on this show. The hopper soaring across the alien landscape looked wonderful.
- As much as I hated Leebeebee kissing Murderbot, I do love that the show leans on the SecUnit's digital display for small comedic bits, like when its performance reliability dropped a few percentage points right after.
- Murderbot believes that whoever killed the DeltFall team did it by impersonating Preservation Alliance. DeltFall let these imposters in and they killed everyone. It's a sobering realization, and Noma Dumezweni gave a great performance as Mensah grappling with it.
- This was also a very good episode for David Dastmalchian as Gurathin. He's quietly delivering one of my favorite performances I've seen from him as an actor in this show.
- It's very fun how the show plays off people having different opinions about TV shows. The show Leebeebee, a resident of the Corporation Rim, thinks is good is something that the PresAux team all thinks is garbage. But a bunch of them do like Sanctuary Moon just like Murderbot. Except for Gurathin, who is clueless about good television. Good times.
Verdict
"Rogue War Tracker Infinite" is another solid episode of Murderbot that shuffles the pieces on the board. After the action-packed but hilarious fourth episode, this breath of air was needed to reset and shift the status quo. Now everyone knows Murderbot has autonomy, a new resident has arrived at the habitat who is almost certainly concealing secrets, and the team's first attempt to call for help has failed. The stakes are rising!
Episode grade: B
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