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.
“I don’t understand what’s happening,” it tells Mensah and the rest of the team, with a vacant, almost frightened look on its face. PresAux has bought out its contract, but they don’t want it to resume its old role. As we’ve seen quite clearly when the Company tried to deploy it as riot control, it’s no longer comfortable in its old role, which was more or less blasting organic targets on command.
At home on Preservation Alliance, Mensah says with a hopeful smile, she’ll be its guardian, but it won’t have to serve anyone. It won’t need its armor or guns. It’ll be a free agent, literally free to “do anything you want to do.”
It’s no longer SecUnit. It’s just… Unit.
Murderbot takes this in. Freedom is the ideal outcome, of course, but this isn’t the kind of freedom it seeks. Gurathin catches it as it’s slipping away, and though he’d be happy for Murderbot to come back to Preservation Alliance with him—the people there are weird, he admits, but they’re also the best people he’s ever known—he understands when Murderbot rattles off an oft-repeated phrase: “I need to check the perimeter.”
Though he’d griped at all the perimeter checks when they were on that far-flung planet together, Gurathin gets it now. “The perimeter” is what lies beyond the PresAux embrace, which is kind but also a bit suffocating. Murderbot’s future choices need to be the first ones it has ever made truly for itself.
While snagging a ride on a transport to a distant mining facility—a bargain helped along by promising to share its library of “premium quality entertainment” with the bot running the ship—Murderbot steals an unattended bag and disguises itself as just another augmented human.
“I don’t know what I want. But I know I don’t want anyone to tell me what I want or to make decisions for me… even if they are my favorite human,” it informs us in voice-over. We see a quick glimpse of Mensah realizing what has happened and reacting in a very Mensah way, by nodding understandingly through her tears.
As Murderbot heads to adventures unknown, we see a tiny smile emerge: “Murderbot—end message.”
As book fans know, the second entry in Wells’ series, Artificial Condition, digs into a disturbing flashback Murderbot can’t shake, even with the multiple memory wipes it’s had by now: the fact that it murdered its entire human team on its mission prior to joining PresAux. (Hence that self-given nickname.)
It’s the single biggest story thread left dangling from Murderbot season one (why did Murderbot snap, exactly? And why did the Company keep it in service after?) and it makes for a very juicy launching pad into season two. Plus, there are thousands and thousands more Sanctuary Moon plots left to explore! Stars, Captain!
You can watch all of Murderbot season one on Apple TV+.