Between hacking its Governor Module and learning to accept that it’s yet to figure out what it wants to do with its life, Murderbot has gone from a complete misanthrope to a sentient robot who actually loves its favorite humans. For AppleTV’s Murderbot, it’s not so much about blurring the line between humans and sentient constructs. In fact, after watching the final episode of Murderbot, I can say with a reasonable amount of certainty that that’s very much the antithesis of the point the show’s trying to make. In this far from perfect, futuristic world, where the good suffer and scrounge and the bad hoard the power and resources, it’s actually crazy that a hard line between humans and constructs even exists. But that’s how you know that Murderbot‘s world is not too dissimilar to the one we inhabit. That fictitious line is carefully imposed to divide and distract the common victims. It’s to keep them from ever pointing their fingers at the common perpetrator. And when that story is centred around a sentient construct whose individuality breaks the cage no matter how hard the human oppressor tries to keep it tamed, it’s practically ironic that we need to see it as a human. What Murderbot wants to inspire in you instead is a perspective that doesn’t need to follow the preconceived patterns. If there’s anything the titular cyborg has proven, it’s the fact that sentient constructs can be much more “humane” than the species that is designed to be kind.
Spoiler Alert
Gurathin comes full circle
Gurathin’s always been a tough one to read. He didn’t look too thrilled when the PresAux team had come to Corporation Rim to get insurance and tools for an expedition. But once we met the board members running the Company, his cynicism made sense. The fact that he’s part machine only makes his depths all the more imperceptible. So when we saw him hate Murderbot right off the bat, it didn’t make much sense. He came off petty and jealous. And while we could’ve convinced ourselves that that’s a simple trope that sits kind of uncomfortable, there were always signs that there was more to Gurathin and his complicated personality than met the eye. If it was a simple thing like a toxic, jealous quality in him, Mensah and the rest of the PresAux team wouldn’t have loved Gurathin as much as they did. Sure, they’re kind people in general. But the kind of attachment they had with Gurathin was a sign that there was a lot of good in him. Granted, he’s not the best at handling the feelings he has for Mensah. But Gurathin wouldn’t have clung to his distrust of Murderbot only out of envy. We first got a whiff of what kind of demons he carries when we got to know that he had had a long, near-fatal struggle with pain killer addiction. Pills had had him in a chokehold. And in that unbearable state, he was manipulated into being a spy. But wouldn’t that only instill more empathy in him? If it was about gatekeeping the kind of kindness that had saved him, why wouldn’t he have the same feelings about other people who tried to get close to his friends? The answer to all of Gurathin’s contradictory feelings and instincts is laid out plain and simple in the final episode of Murderbot. It was never in Gura’s nature to hurt good people. But a person’s nature isn’t this ever-stable, unalterable thing. No matter how much a person perseveres, a hard enough push can budge even the most righteous of us.
Gurathin’s push was his pain. The Company was not only responsible for the injury he sustained working for them, but they also weaponized his pain against him by getting him hooked on pain killers. In the finale, Landers seems like someone Gurathin once trusted. That’s what made it all the more traumatizing for him. His own friend supplied him highly addictive drugs in exchange for the promotion that the Company had offered him. But now that Gurathin is back where it all started, and he can clearly see what went wrong and how, he has a better handle on his emotions than he usually does. Considering what he went through when he lived in Corporation Rim, it makes sense for him to always see everything associated with that place with suspicion. That’s why he could never trust Murderbot. To Gurathin, someone who’s known Security Units as agents of violence, Murderbot felt like a spy who’d always had its loyalties tied to its owners. Now that his newfound clarity is helping him recognize his trauma, Gurathin can see that Murderbot was never the enemy. Murderbot and Gurathin are oddly similar in the most fundamental ways. But one of the biggest things they have in common is that they’re both victims to the Company’s abuse. As a sentient Security Unit, Murderbot has been kept a slave under the threat of pain. That’s how the Company keeps their cyborgs in line. Gurathin needed to be back where it all happened to find closure. And that’s all the help that he needed to actually be who he’s always wanted to be. Lucky for Murderbot, at his best, Gurathin is an absolute hero. The fact that he goes through unthinkable pain to download Murderbot’s memories not only proves how selfless and helpful he is, it also shows that he’s actually dealt with his demons. His fear of pain kept him addicted. And now he voluntarily endured excruciating pain to save someone else. By saving Murderbot from a bleak existence without its memories, Gurathin becomes the kind of savior that he needed back when he was down.
There has to be some way to take the Company down
If there’s one thing Mensah and her friends have always been united on, it’s their hate toward Corporation Rim. Think about it, they had to have been really desperate to come to a place where everything’s the absolute opposite of how they believe it should be. We haven’t been to Preservation Alliance, but the more we hear about it, it sounds like a place which is vehemently anti-capitalistic. And Corporation Rim is pretty much the opposite. In fact, most of the places that we hear of in Murderbot’s universe sound like different versions of our world. So yeah, Mensah’s wonderful little freehold must’ve really been struggling for them to consider taking up a job that required them to have any association with evil corporate entities like the Company. The two sides, no matter how much they might want to, can never see eye to eye on the fundamental things that make them who they are. In Preservation Alliance, no person or construct is seen as an entity who can be owned. Respect, freedom, and autonomy are the most important aspects of existence to them. On the contrary, Corporation Rim has gone out of its way to manufacture sentient constructs that they can turn into subservient agents of brutality and chaos. The constructs that have their miserable awakening into existence in a terrible place like Corporation Rim are forever bound to that place. But if Murderbot’s actions are any sign, the Company’s cyborgs are capable of feeling and wanting things. So it’s not like the Company is unaware of how cruel they’re being by keeping their sentient constructs subdued and terrified. That’s where the Governor Module comes in. Not only do their SecUnits know that any out of line action will get them dipped in acid, but they’re incapable of making any choices for themselves because the Governor Module blocks that part of their systems. That’s why, no matter how hard Murderbot tries to negotiate with or befriend other Sec Units, they never have a positive response to it. The Company’s bots are given instructions. But never rewards. In order to make them as advanced as they are, they had to have the ability for thinking and feeling.
And once you see how human beings are treated in Corporation Rim, you’ll realize that their cruelty isn’t exclusive to cyborgs. The Company doesn’t care about anything or anyone that doesn’t get them rich or out of trouble. If they could install Governor Modules into every single person on the planet, they would’ve done so. People having access to the most basic needs is a huge inconvenience to the corporate entity that only wants to exploit. On some level, abusers always know what they’re doing. The Company must’ve figured out early on that keeping people starved and deprived would be the best way to bring out the worst in them. That’s when we humans are the most desperate and vulnerable to further manipulation. So it’s practically impossible to keep your empathy and humanity alive in a place where you’d have to sell your soul to feed your kid. And when you think of it like that, you’ll see that even people like Landers are the Company’s victims. If they could find a way to make someone like Gurathin drop his morals and ideals, they can do it to just about anyone. That’s really all that you need to understand to know why the protestors are going crazy outside the fence. Even the fear of getting brutalized by the Company’s cyborg killing machines can’t stop them from revolting, because, well, they die either way. But the best thing about kindness, love, and empathy is that these things never completely die out. No matter how far removed a sentient being or a person may be from their innate goodness, they find ways to put up a fight. That’s the kind of warzone Murderbot’s head has always been. It has killed and maimed people. But it never wanted to do any such thing. And that’s what got it to even want to break free in the first place.
As a Company-owned machine with guns built into its arms, Murderbot has only ever known violence. But it could still never be okay with going on killing people. That’s why, no matter how many times they reboot it and erase its memories, the trauma stays. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Murderbot’s desperation to be good is the one thing that never lets it stay tamed. And that’s a hopeful sign, really. They may not have the voice or the power to do anything about it yet, but there must be other people and bots that are absolutely done with the way of life that the Company has forced on them. So are they just going to be allowed to exploit everyone and everything they can get their hands on without any repercussions? I wouldn’t give up hope just yet. Mensah’s team may not be influential enough to take them down once and for all right now, but they’re not necessarily powerless either. That’s the thing about the kind of good people whose desire to help surpasses their fear of being hurt in the process. We don’t know the full extent of the Company’s reach yet, but in Murderbot’s ending, Pin-Lee does manage to get a court order to keep the Company from destroying their favorite SecUnit. So the Company isn’t entirely above the law. That’s not too bad a place to start if you think about the real life equivalents of these scenarios. The media will always focus more on the salacious news. That’s why, when Mensah’s trying to get a bunch of reporters to see how the Company’s trying to hide information about a Sec Unit who witnessed things that might get them in trouble, they’re more interested in cringey gossip than something that big. But what you have to remember about this particular situation is that the Company was desperate to hide Murderbot’s memories for a reason. They might not have been directly involved in the criminal activities GrayCris got up to, but they know that they’ve breached their own clauses and endangered their clients’ lives in more ways than one. Now that Murderbot and Gurathin have all that information, they can actually go ahead and start concocting the perfect game plan against the evil corporation that has made existing unbearable for everyone.
Murderbot and freedom
The urge for something different and better must’ve been an odd sensation for Murderbot. It was surrounded by constructs that killed without question. And for the most part, it didn’t even realize that it was the killing that it had a major problem with. But you can also see why Murderbot wouldn’t be very fond of humans. It never met a single decent person until it was ordered to work for the PresAux team. The first time we saw Murderbot, it was getting tortured by its clients for fun. So why would it not call itself Murderbot and take an oath to be an enemy to humans after it hacked its Governor Module? But all of that changed when it met its first group of good people. And boy did it get really lucky in that regard! It wasn’t a spontaneous, sudden change. No reliable change ever happens that fast. At first, Murderbot still had to self soothe to cope like most of us do. That’s where all the shows it watches come in. Before it trusted Mensah and the rest of the PresAux team, it trusted the characters in Sanctuary Moon. The Captain in its favorite show is actually the first human it grows fond of. So the show didn’t just teach it funky ways to deal with unexpected trouble. Sanctuary Moon also was its first introduction to the idea that a human can love a cyborg. It had all the reasons in the world to not trust its new clients. But the circumstances were just right. And the people were the absolute best that anyone could ever hope to meet. So in many ways, everything fell into place just properly enough for Murderbot to learn a thing or two about the species it was only taught to kill. There are a few exceptions in an ocean of cruel humans and bots. And as an exception itself, Murderbot eventually found it easy to trust the love and kindness it received from its favorite people. If anything, the goodness they instilled in their SecUnit by actions and examples is what makes it an unchangeable part of its identity. That’s why, even though its memories are erased, its system is rebooted, and a new Governor Module is installed into it, the Company’s hold on it doesn’t last too long. The fact that Murderbot is more than a combination of 1s and 0s is undeniable by this point. There has to be a reason that, no matter how many times its memories are wiped, it can’t get the images of its killing spree out of its head, right? That reason is empathy. Murderbot’s capable of all the feelings you’d only expect from humans. And that in itself is enough to convince you that there’s no point in attributing certain qualities to certain categories of sentient beings.
If there’s anything that Murderbot wants us to know, it’s the fact that people can be terrible, and bots that are designed to be violent can be tender, loving beings who would rather spend their time watching shows. Murderbot’s identity shines through and breaks any preconceived ideas you had about constructs in the ending of the final episode of Murderbot. When it’s given the option to live a far better life with its favorite people, it doesn’t necessarily have a reason to reject it. But it takes its time to make up its mind. And when it comes to a decision, it does so based on what’s right for it, not for the people who love it. It may wear their clothes and make little jokes like them, but Murderbot is neither a person, nor an augmented human. It is a free sentient construct. And what it wants to do as of now is find and befriend other constructs who are in dire need of some entertainment. There’s no shortage of that in Corporation Rim and the distant mining stations they frequent. It doesn’t know what it’ll do with its life, but that’s something it knows it will figure out along the way. So even though the PresAux team had to part ways with their favorite SecUnit, they know that things have turned out the best way that they could. Murderbot actually believes in its freedom. It doesn’t need to be handheld through it anymore.
