‘Murderbot’ Episode 8 Review
‘Murderbot’ is back with another episode, where we find out who killed the other survey team, and a dark secret is uncovered from Murderbot’s past.
The question arises as to whether Murderbot can be trusted now that Gurathin has discovered his “memory” of apparently killing fifty workers on a previous assignment, though the truth of that memory is still suspect. The problem is that this is something the audience has been aware of since the first episode, so it’s no big deal for us, but more importantly, it’s no big deal for the characters either. The team have been suspicious of their SecUnit all along, whether that’s because they believe it might be spying for the company, or when it’s taken over by a command module, or later, when they all learn it’s broken programming and no longer needs to follow their orders. So really there’s nothing changed here, and we’re in the same place as always, with the same uneasy alliance and tension between human and robot that there always was.
Where this episode does incrementally move forward is that we now know a little bit about who’s been menacing them and where the other SecUnits came from. It’s a company called GrayCris that apparently wants to get the alien artifacts they discovered (which, to be honest, I forgot even existed it was so long ago), which still seems a bit suspect anyway, as there’s been no reason to believe these alien artifacts have any use. As for the “personal drama”, I couldn’t care less. Eight episodes in and I still can’t care about any of these characters, so if Murderbot did have another killing spree, well…
As I suspected last week though, episode seven has been made redundant here and was a complete waste of time, a plot loop to bring everyone back right where they started. They are all at the base, they are in the same state, nothing’s changed. I don’t know if this is adapting the books closely or padding for its own sake, but it could have been cut completely, or at the very least merged with this to hide it a little.
Anyway, there are only a couple of episodes left now, so I guess they will be a bit more action-packed as we wrap things up and reveal what’s really been going on here.
