Murderbot 1x08

[sholio]

I'm still absorbing this one!

(Also, I lasted this long without blocking people on Tumblr just so I don't have to see their hot takes in the tags, but this finally broke me. Some people have no comprehension of nuance whatsoever.)

The mirroring with Gurathin and Murderbot is still just fascinating - I cannot get over that everything Gurathin does (in this case, invading MB's privacy and blurting out its biggest secret) is something that MB does first (ditto, in both cases). I also hadn't really absorbed, until sovay pointed it out, but now I can't unsee it, how blatantly Gurathin is talking about himself with the "defective construct who kills everyone around you" line. That venom is not directed at you, Murderbot! I mean, it is, but the intensity of it isn't. And they're both acting from a very legitimate place of fear - MB glosses its invasion of Gurathin's mind as regular curiosity, and his as being a "sneaky bastard", but in both cases, they're scared (and validly!) and need to know what the other has planned for them. And neither of them like the answer they came up with ...

(Also, MB about why it acted to help Gurathin - I can't remember the exact words, but something like "I'm not being nice, I just don't want to listen to you screaming." That's exactly the sort of thing that a lying liar who lies would say, MB! It's not that it likes him, even before their shared mental invasion, but if it wanted him to hurt, or just didn't care if he suffers and didn't want to listen to it, all it has to do is ... nothing. It can simply go outside for ten or fifteen minutes.)

And I really like the way that the show has taken the tack of having MB come back to defend them when its relationship with them is at its lowest. (I mean, *it* may not even have realized that's what it's doing, but that's clearly what it's going to do.) Because that means it has to make the right choice, the moral choice, when it believes that all it's going to get for it is to be reviled and hated and possibly melted down for defective scrap. Clearly none of that is the case either, but it means the decision becomes, not saving these people because they're uniquely special to it, but saving these people because it is right - because MB has to decide what kind of person it's going to be.

And all of this taking place against a media landscape that portrays people like MB as inhuman monsters! That's also a really great move on the show's part, I think - MB has been taking its cues from media in how to behave as a free person, but it's dealing with a sanitized media landscape in which people like it are portrayed as stereotypes and villains. What is it supposed to think about that, how is it supposed to deal? It not only doesn't know who it is, but it has to actively work against a set of media models that basically only gives it "slave" or "villain" to draw upon.

And the humans also have to deal with this! Especially Gurathin, whose experience with real-life SecUnits has probably been entirely in their corporate enforcer role. The rest of them likely have little to no real-life experience to draw on, and they mean well, but they also have those media portrayals of servile or evil bots floating around in the backs of their heads. It's really a good move.

Gotta say I appreciated Mensah's smackdown of Ratthi. "It's not your pet!" Like ... does MB deserve people who accept it no matter what? Yes! Did he deserve that? Also yes! But at the same time, Mensah's snapping because she's on the edge here, too! The feral strays are fighting! There's legitimate reason to believe that MB might pose an actual danger to the people she's responsible for. If she chooses wrong, they'll all die. And she's also seen a more human side of MB than any of them have; she has more evidence that it's a person than any of them do.

(Except for Gurathin, ironically. While both of them react to their look inside the other's head in ways that are perfectly in character, I am actually curious if both of them are going to end up parsing those glimpses with a lot more nuance and awareness later on.)

Cannot wait for the last two episodes!