‘Murderbot’ Episode 9 Review
‘Murderbot’ is almost over as we reach the penultimate episode, where the team finally come face-to-face with the villains who’ve been menacing them ever since they arrived on the planet. Murderbot confronts them, pretending to sell out the others in exchange for a passage off planet, while the others hack into their system so they can launch a beacon and call for help.
This is really the climax of the main plot here, and I don’t know, it’s all a bit underwhelming and confusing. The bad guys from GrayCris are looking for alien relics, but there’s no real explanation of what these relics are, or why they are so valuable. Is it just for their rarity, their significance, or do they hold valuable technologies and secrets that can be exploited? We don’t even see the artifacts up close, so they feel more like a plot device than an integral part of the story.
There’s also a problem with the villains who are introduced late in the story. There’s no real explanation of who they are, or how they can get away with what they do. Considering this is a ten-episode series, there would have been room in earlier episodes to introduce them so we get to know a bit more about them. Instead they’re just some generic evil types who don’t care what they do, but don’t have any clear motives beyond “uh, money”.
It feels like this episode should have been where the show ended. The bad guys are gone, so anything else is going to feel like an epilogue. Tacking an extra ten minutes to the runtime would probably have been enough to clear things up, or else, as I’ve said before, the whole season should have been structured around six forty-five minute episodes to give it a proper narrative flow.
As it is, this was a faster-paced episode than usual, with the various parties working on their own part of the plan, and a race against the clock until the beacon launches, though half the team felt sidelined and had little to do.
It seems like the obvious question for episode ten will be what happens to Murderbot after his fall? Surely he can just be patched up back at the base, as he’s suffered serious injuries before, and the “3D printer” seemed to fix him up okay.
There are a few things left hanging that it might wrap up too, like Murderbot’s past where he apparently killed dozens of people. Whether that will be answered or they’re spinning it out for a second season, I guess we’ll find out.
