We're hurtling toward an exciting conclusion on Apple TV+'s Murderbot. After last week's episode gave the SecUnit and PresAux team some time out in the wilderness, they're forced to head back to the habitat — and towards the climactic events of the book, All Systems Red.
Murderbot has been a delight to watch each week, but there's an undercurrent of tension to "Foreign Object" that makes it hard to fully relax, no matter how effective the punch lines are. Things have gotten dangerous for our team of hippie scientists, and Murderbot is thinking hard about whether it's even worth it to keep protecting them when they seem so determined to paint him as a bad guy. And can you blame it? Humans are so ungrateful.
Beware FULL SPOILERS ahead for "Foreign Object."
Murderbot Episode 8 review: "Foreign Object"
Like every episode of Murderbot so far, "Foreign Object" is a pacey episode of TV that leaves you wanting more by the end of its 23-minute runtime. I've really enjoyed the shorter installments of this show; it's made it a delight to come back week after week.
The focus of this week's episode is the PresAux team's return to their habitat, where they are forced to process the implications of Murderbot's bloody past. This is nicely mirrored by the opening Sanctuary Moon scene, where we find out that the Nav Bot played by DeWanda Wise was forced to kill the ship's previous captain (John Cho), with whom she was having a love affair. She was reprogrammed and should be subservient to the ship's new captain, the former Lieutenant played by Clark Gregg. But instead she gets just revenge on the scheming new captain and the whole crew, launching the ship into the event horizon of a wormhole where it will be forever stuck. And smushing Clark Gregg's head, Gregor Clegane-style.
The question is whether Murderbot (Alexander Skargård) will take a similarly homicidal route when push comes to shove, or find a better path. Thanks to the life-and-death stakes of the return to the PresAux habitat, Murderbot is forced to stop watching its show and go scout the area, to be sure that Leebeebee's mysterious employer didn't leave any traps behind.
This sequence pulls in an element I was wondering about from the book, which is that Murderbot left a bunch of drones at the habitat to spy on their pursuers. Since we inhabit Murderbot's point-of-view in the novella, we know this up front. The show made it a little more of a reveal, which worked fine even if it does raise questions about why Murderbot was so opposed to returning to the habitat if it had these spy drones in place to know whether it was safe.
It turns out that the habitat is indeed clear, and at last we learn about Leebeebee's employer: a company called GrayCris. Over the course of the episode, the PresAux team reasons that GrayCris has bribed the Corporation Rim powers to allow them to survey the planet in secret, because they're hoping to find alien relics which they can then sell on the black market. GrayCris wants to meet with PresAux in hopes they can find a diplomatic solution to their standoff, which Murderbot thinks is obviously a trap.
"It calls itself Murderbot."
The main drama of the episode comes when Murderbot plugs directly into Gurathin's (David Dastmalchian) body to dull his sense of pain while Bharadwaj (Tamara Podemski) extracts the dirty bits of clothing from his bullet wound which are causing the tissue around it to become necrotized. Murderbot thinks this is a fine opportunity to poke around in Gurathin's head, where we see that he's pining deeply over Mensah (Noma Dumezweni). But once the operation is over, Gurathin flips things and goes inside the SecUnit's head instead, discovering that it calls itself Murderbot and previously killed 57 people on a mining expedition.
There's great acting all around as everyone wrangles with the implications of this, Murderbot included. Unlike in the book, where Murderbot knows exactly what happened with that mining expedition, the show is making it more of a long-game reveal. Murderbot has no idea why it killed those people or even if it really did, since memories can be implanted. Hopefully it — and we — learn more soon. The music also deserves a special shoutout. It's been good all season, but the scoring as Murderbot storms out of the habitat stands out.
Ultimately, the PresAux team decides they have no choice but to meet with GrayCris, despite their reservations. And right when they're trying to figure out how to approach this thorny situation, Murderbot returns saying it has a plan. This, right after it realized it could betray its clients and write its own storyline. Ominous!
Overall, this was another solid episode of Murderbot, if not quite so good as the couple that preceded it. One of my biggest issues with the episode is that it feels like there are a few holes in the overall plot. Alien remnants cannot be taken off world; in the book, when a survey team finds them, they're supposed to immediately notify the Corporation Rim and cease all surveying. In the show, PresAux found alien remnants early on and never mentioned them again until it was relevant in this episode. There's also very little discussion of Mensah's role as a planetary administrator, and what that would mean for GrayCris and the Company if she was killed. The book makes a huge point of this, so it's a little weird the show has given it such short shrift.
These sorts of little inconsistencies nagged at me a little more than usual this episode, since so much of it centered around setting up GrayCris as the final antagonist of the season, which required a lot of explanations. So while I had as good a time as I always had with Murderbot this week, I'm even more excited for the two episodes ahead, now that some of this slightly awkward exposition is out of the way.
Murderbot Bullet Points
- Once again, I really like how Gurathin and Murderbot thoroughly dislike each other despite being the two most similar people on the mission. It seems like Murderbot may be starting to realize it too, such as in the scene where it notes that it and Gurathin had the same idea about linking via hardwire.
- Gurathin insisting on no painkillers is a nice touch, since that's how the Company fostered his addictions back when he was a spy. I also really liked how Murderbot said Gurathin's thoughts out loud; more of this sort of mind-bending sci-fi stuff, please!
- I cackled when Murderbot denied learning about hardwiring to an augmented human from Sanctuary Moon, only to think in its inner monologue that it was from a different show.
- The throuple arrangement between Pin-Lee (Sabrina Wu), Arada (Tattiawna Jones), and Ratthi (Akshay Khanna) takes a funny and unexpected turn when Pin-Lee and Arada try to break it off only for Ratthi to beat them to the punch by admitting he only had feelings for Pin-Lee and couldn't keep going in a throuple scenario. Both Wu and Khanna had some very funny moments.
Verdict
"Foreign Object" is another good episode of Murderbot, but it's not quite as great as some of the others. The main reason for that is some small plotholes with the overall setup for the GrayCris confrontation, all of which were explained very clearly in the book. Fortunately, they don't weigh things down too much. There are still plenty of great punchlines, even as the show sets up its climactic confrontation which will test the relationship between Murderbot and its human clients to its limits. Only two more episodes to go!
Episode grade: B+
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