Murderbot wrapped up its season today, bringing the Apple TV+ adaptation of Martha Wells’ first Murderbot Diaries story, All Systems Red, to a close. If you’ve read the 2017 novella, you know the show stayed true to Wells’ ending—perfectly setting up that just-announced season two, something creators Chris and Paul Weitz told io9 they’ve had in mind all along.
Episode 10, “The Perimeter,” is unlike earlier episodes in that it doesn’t immediately pick up right where we left off. A little bit of time has passed. The team from Preservation Alliance has returned to the Corporation Rim, having barely survived their adventure, and it’s all thanks to SecUnit, aka Murderbot (Alexander Skarsgård). As a result, they’ve grown quite attached to it.
Considering when we last saw Murderbot, it was having a “catastrophic failure” after all those heroics, it’s a relief when we see it being resurrected by a couple of sarcastic maintenance techs. While PresAux, led by a determined Dr. Mensah (Noma Dumezwani), presses the Company for their SecUnit’s whereabouts, it’s revealed to us that at that very moment it’s having its memory wiped and system updated.
A factory reset means it’s duty-bound to take orders from humans again, but even worse, it doesn’t remember any of the people who are so desperate to reconnect with it. The Company might not think of it as a person, but PresAux has long since realized Murderbot’s value beyond simply being a piece of equipment.
After some finagling, including the threat of a lawsuit over that whole “you sent another team to the same planet as us, and they tried to massacre everyone” situation that unfolded across the season, the Company agrees to sell SecUnit to PresAux. The good guys snag their metal-and-organic buddy from being acid-vatted at the very last moment, and a happy reunion ensues.
There’s just one big problem: Murderbot has no idea who they are.
A solution comes from the most unlikely of places, or it would have been unlikely at the start of the season. PresAux team member Dr. Gurathin (David Dastmalchian) was initially very suspicious of Murderbot, but we learned along the way that he has good reason to distrust anything originating from the Company. Before he met Dr. Mensah, he was a corporate spy kept loyal by a drug addiction his former employers created and maintained.
It took almost all 10 episodes, but seeing Murderbot in action, especially the part where it sacrificed itself to protect Mensah, convinced Gurathin that SecUnit is indeed “a person.”
And he’s uniquely qualified to return the favor: as an augmented human, he can self-download the memories the Company removed from Murderbot’s artificial brain. He’s able to access them by calling in a favor from a Company doctor who feels guilt over his role in facilitating Gurathin’s drug abuse. (Guarathin is also clever enough to root out the encrypted data by searching The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, since he knows thousands of episodes of Murderbot’s favorite sci-fi soap opera would be part of the data purge).
But even with its memories restored, Murderbot has changed. This could be due to some pieces of code going missing as part of the process, as Gurathin warned might happen. But there’s a greater sense that the robot has somehow evolved as a result of its experiences.
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