‘Murderbot’ Episode 2 Recap: Eye Contact

Whether or not you trust your Murderbot, it’s probably a good idea to take him along when you’re exploring the Planet of the Giant Two-Headed Centipedes. At least that’s the conclusion I’m drawing from the second installment of Murderbot, the back half of the show’s two-episode debut. If nothing else, it’ll keep him from making fun of you behind your backs for being dumbasses. 

With wounded scientist Bharadwaj back on her feet, expedition leader Mensah wants to head out again, this time aiming directly for one of the gaps they’ve discovered on their company-issued maps in hopes of figuring out what’s going on. But despite the danger, they leave their SecUnit, our boy Murderbot, at home at Dr. Gurathin’s suggestion. The augmented human, who apparently has an unpleasant history with SecUnits, believes the bot to be the clearest and most present danger they face. 

In a real meeting of actors with odd energies, Gurathin and Murderbot face off, courtesy of David Dastmalchian and Alexander Skarsgård. Murderbot has a hard time maintaining eye contact with humans when his mask is off, a problem Gurathin exploits by directly ordering the robot to look him in the eye. Since he has to pretend that his governor module is still working and he must obey all direct commands from humans, Murderbot forces himself to stare the doctor down. He’d prefer being melted down for parts, he thinks to himself.

Gurathin closes their tense conversation by ordering Murderbot to retrieve his buried memories of his last incarnation, which we know are images of horrible violence. In fact, Gurathin tries accessing this info directly by tapping into Murderbot’s brain; Murderbot quietly retaliates by showing him Pin Lee, Arada, and Ratthi signing a contract that makes them an official throuple, then making out awkwardly. “This is the part I skip over when I’m watching media,” Murderbot says, sounding like way too many grown-ass adults if you ask me.

While all this is going down, Mensah runs into trouble, but it’s trouble of a different kind. For one thing, she’s prone to panic attacks brought on by her failure to keep her team safe in the previous episode, and she has one in the middle of climbing a slippery ridge to set up equipment. Determined to prove she’s still got it, she ignores Murderbot’s desperate pleas to turn back to the ship due to dangerous fauna in the area, which he detects remotely.

Sure enough, one of those monstrous centipedes arrives, rising up behind Mensah. But instead of gobbling her up, it rushes headlong for some weird white vortex, surrounded by dozens of dead centipedes. When the crew’s surveillance drown flies overhead to investigate, the power of the vortex smashes it to pieces. The team surmises that technology left behind by ancient aliens, a common enough hazard for space explorers apparently, could be responsible for the phenomena. Such relics are just as dangerous, if not more so, than gigantic arthropods or malfunctioning security droids.

Before they do anything else, Mensah radios their counterpart team on the other side of the planet for advice. When she can’t get ahold of anyone, she decides to head out there to see what’s going on.  A cut to the other base shows exactly that: Everyone there, including their own SecUnit, has been slaughtered, seemingly quickly and easily. As Murderbot muses to himself when he hears Mensah’s plan to investigate, “What could possibly go wrong?” 

Apple TV+ has done more experimentation with 30-minute dramas, particularly genre pieces, than any other streamer I can think of. To cite two examples, last year’s Sugar, starring Colin Farrell as an unusual private detective, worked, because the mystery format lends itself to being broken up into discreet chunks whenver there’s a twist or breakthrough in the case. Before, a supernatural thriller starring Billy Crystal and Judith Light, did not work, because effective horror depends on building tension and dread, which you can’t do if you’ve got to end on a big cliffhanger every 26 minutes or so. 

Murderbot can go in the “works” category. It’s not asking a ton of you as a viewer, at least not yet; its main question seems to be “Do you like watching Alexander Skarsgård play a neurodivergent Terminator?”, and that’s a question you can easily answer, in the affirmative, in 30-minute chunks. I want to see what trouble this big goofy killing machine gets up to. I want to find out what trouble he’s gotten up to in the past. And I want to see how he gets his reluctant human friends out of their own trouble — or, who knows, maybe abandons them to it in a shocking way and becomes a real antihero, instead of a wisecracking sidekick who suddenly got a story of his own. Either way, I’ll be watching. 

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.