Stray Murderbot thoughts

[sholio]

I love the music on this show. This is the first (new) thing I've seen in a long time with an original soundtrack that I want to own. That piece of music in the last scene in the finale, as MB walks away and the world opens up around it, is almost transcendentally gorgeous.

Vaguely related to that, one really interesting thing I noticed in the finale when I was clipping for the vid is how much more comfortable and settled in itself Murderbot looks after it leaves. Throughout the falling action after the memory transfer, wearing human clothes and socializing, it looks uncomfortable and stiff. It seems to be enjoying itself, or at least enjoying them. (And its face is so much more mobile and less stiff than in the first episode - honestly rewatching the first episode just makes me incredibly impressed all over again with how much the show does with body language.) But it still looks out of place and awkward.

But then, as it walks away, wearing its new clothes - technically stolen, but also, the first clothes it has ever picked out for itself - it looks so much more comfortable than we've ever seen it. And yeah, this is partly because it's simply trying to blend in, but I also think there's a strong sense that it really is more comfortable than we've seen it in the entire show to date. In that final scene on the ship, it looks ... relaxed. I kinda hate to say it in this context, but it really does look human, more so than we've ever seen it. And that makes sense! This is the first time it's making choices for itself, not being surveilled or watched or expected to do anything. And it settles into itself in a way that it simply hasn't been able to do earlier, even around people it's come to care for.

(I love how evident it is that Mensah and Gurathin both understand this. We see the moment that Gurathin understands, and Mensah in a more subtle way.)

Speaking of minor details that change a character's entire affect, I don't think it's accidental that Gurathin's look, early in the show when he's basically an antagonist vs our viewpoint character, is designed to be, if not exactly repellent, then at least not inviting. The unflattering haircut, the uniform, the pinched facial expression and closed-off body language - it is fascinating to rewatch the first episode knowing so much more about why he's like that, but you can still see the show almost going out of its way to give us a negative view of him early on, particularly his shut-down body language and lack of warmth compared to the Preservation natives.

And this is in very stark contrast to the last episode or two! As propaganda I give you this lovely gifset from the second half of 1x10, in which he is at his warmest with Murderbot, and also looking absolutely gorgeous. I think we're meant to find him cold and sterile and offputting in the first couple of episodes, and warm and approachable in the last episode or two.

The show is just so attentive to detail! I rewatched the first episode a bit earlier, and Murderbot's entire way of moving and interacting with people is radically different from how it develops later. And its general failure to connect emotionally with anything it's watching of the humans in the habitat. Why would someone bother to sit with someone else in the medbay, it wonders. And Mensah's panic attack is not a physical problem, and therefore not its problem - in contrast to several episodes later, when she has another one in front of it, and it shows her its favorite show to try to fix her! <3 And the fantasy about killing everyone on the hopper, in wild contrast to how disturbed it actually is when we see it react to its organic-storage memories of killing people. It can fantasize about it, but the idea of that it might actually have done it is horrifying to it; it has to self-soothe by quoting Sanctuary Moon. ;__;

(And later on, it can't even fantasize about it. Feeling profoundly hurt and rejected, its way of coping with the emotions it can't handle is to fantasize in an oblique kind of way about killing itself - just letting the jungle grow over it, stay here until its batteries run down. Not hurting them.)

URGH and also rewatching the finale, knowing where it's going - that moment when Mensah asks Gurathin what can they do here to help it, as helpless as we've ever seen her, and he turns away from her and just says that it's the Corporation Rim, they don't play fair; and in the moment, it looks like giving up. But you can see that's actually the moment when it crystalizes for him what can be done, and who is the only person on their team who can do it. (All of this a minute or two after he calls it a person for the first time, stuttering a little over the word and then saying it aloud. It is a person, and it's being used and abused by the Company, just like he was. And he's going to do something about it.)