it's always halloween in our hearts

Prison Break, Season 3: Michael Scofield has 7 days to break an agent of the company out of a prison he's currently in.

Prison Break, The Final Break: Michael Scofield has 3 days to break his wife out of a prison he's never been in before.

It occurs to me that no one in the Preservation crew is a social worker, therapist, health aide, or in any other helping profession. They're scientists, with a side of public servant in Mensah's case. Pin-Lee could be described as a public-interest lawyer, broadly, but they seem more oriented to corporate litigation than, say, working as a public defender.

Which is to say: it's easy to forget, since they're so eager to help, but taking in traumatized people from Corporation Rim isn't actually what the Preservation crew is good at. It's actually them going outside their specialties and their knowledge bases. As far as we know, Gurathin forms the entirety of their experience with that kind of thing.

I think it's easier to soften on all their missteps when you think of them as a bunch of scientists and a litigator who only have 15% of an idea of what to do in this kind of situation.

Like, I get that maybe Arada rushed off to print nice soft clothes for SecUnit when it wasn't able to talk much, but she could have said that it's a temporary outfit and asked SecUnit to pick out the next one. She's from a world where everyone makes their own clothes. It niggles.

Same goes for the way MB was left to stand around while the negotiations with various corporations happened in the next room. Normally MB loves being left alone! More Sanctuary Moon time, yay! But this time it had just been through an unbelievable amount of horrible shit, and no one even asked it about that.

MB even said "we can talk about it," which is about as direct a request as it's going to make, but they were all so caught up in relief at its memories being restored they didn't get what it was actually saying.

Because that's what it did as Security, obviously. And how it gets out of uncomfortable situations.

I need to rewatch the strike scene and see what status messages were shown there, but as far as I recall MB wasn't being punished by the module when it glitched and stopped hitting people. Like it was malfunctioning so badly it couldn't even be interpreted by the software as disobedience.

In the book, things go pretty straight from MB getting knocked out by the blast to the PresAux team buying it's contract and it wakes up somewhere safe.

But the show, leaning so hard into "no, this is corporate property. Wipe it to factory default and replace the faulty parts. March it out to intimidate and brutalize striking workers, then melt it down when it glitches out again (due to trauma from the last time it was forced to murder civilians because that can't truly be wiped from memory)." Watching MB pull a gun on Ratthi. Watching it helplessly ping other secunits in the acid room. This is what it was built for, this is what anyone with the right equipment can force it to do.

Of COURSE it ran. Even if the PresAux team promised everything would be safe and they'd look after it from now on, MB is one legal loophole or combat override away from having that happen again.

It doesn't want anyone telling it what to do again, even people it likes. Because it's always one order or code bundle away from losing itself again. It needs to figure out what happened at the Ganaka pit. It needs to remove the backdoors that it was exploited by in the past. (It needs to meet an asshole research transport and have its data port detached in some friendly cosmetic surgery)

(bit of a clickbait title if you ask me. then again, it is collider)

But yeah, here's David talking about Gurathin's nail polish.

[Collider] You see where the little changes are made in adaptation. One of the biggest is the makeup of the Preservation Alliance team. In terms of specific traits, however, I was delighted to see that your black nail polish was part of Gurathin’s character. Was that a conscious choice to include, or were you getting ready, and then the team was like, “What if we just keep it?”

DASTMALCHIAN: The latter. I showed up in Toronto to do a fitting and some hair and makeup tests. By the way, can we give a major shout-out to how incredible the costume design is in this show? Our designer is brilliant. Our production design, brilliant. Our cinematography, brilliant. It's just so well done. So, for hair and makeup, they saw the pictures of me in the costumes, and this wonderful team of hair and makeup artists were having a conversation, and they said to Paul and Chris, “What do you think about for Gura, what would that represent at this time in this world, and somebody coming out of maybe Corporation Rim, what does it represent in 2025, but what does it mean in that world?” Gura is such a highly specific figure who is so cerebral.

It’s that sequence, for me, that helps sell the conclusion here. Mensah and the rest of PresAux mean well, of course. When they dismiss the resurrected Murderbot’s requests for its armor, it’s because they don’t want it to need it; when Mensah informs the construct that she’ll legally be its guardian when they bring it home to Preservation Alliance, it’s intended with love. But it is, still, a curtailing of free will, one that comes part and parcel with any reliance on others, or assimilation into a community. And Murderbot has just had the need to own its free will underlined in triplicate. Gurathin gives it the best sell—and it would have to be Gurathin; the episode is so clearly aching for one last Skarsgård/Dastmalchian collaboration that there’s a palpable sense of relief when it’s Gura who comes stepping out of the shadows as Murderbot prepares to disappear out into the galaxy at large. The warmth in this ensuing scene is beautiful, both actors moving mountains with half-smiles and quiet implications. These two characters have spent the entire season bristling at all the ways they fall in parallel; seeing Gurathin grasp that connection for what it is, to say “I did it, and so can you,” is genuinely heartwarming. And so, in its way, is his quiet, solemn yielding when Murderbot tells him it “needs to check the perimeter,” Skarsgård, stripped of all armor and artifice, nakedly emoting in a way this show has rarely let him. This has, with all due respect to Dumezweni and Mensah, been the show’s most riveting, fascinating relationship: It’s fitting that it’s Gurathin who receives the closest thing MB can deliver to a “goodbye,” as it seeks to find out who it is, before it can accept the burdens and beauties of “home.”

When you fold laundry, fold each piece according to its particular shape. Check it for holes or stains or signs of wear, so you can care for it. When you're trying to clear out clutter and decide that an object no longer has a place in your life, say thank you for what it did give you before you throw it away. Maybe having less stuff is okay if each piece of that stuff has more thought and care put into it.

It's the absolute opposite of the Corporation's philosophy of selling as much cheap shit as they can get away with as quickly as possible so it can be thrown out and they can sell more cheap shit. It's a lot closer to how the Preservation team moves through the world.

They make their own clothes and jewelry. They paint their habitat, which early MB snidely dismisses as defacing it for aesthetic purposes. They fill the standard-issue interior with textiles and plants.

This stuff came up in my mind because of Gurathin's visit to his old dealer, and the way this man who lives in a sad apartment block is convinced Gurathin must be having a hard time of it outside Corporation Rim, on some "podunk planet." The way he obviously sold out his colleague so he could get that Level 3 clearance and afford that apartment in the first place.

And of course, there's our repeated peeks into how SecUnits are built, maintained, and used: with utter contempt and lack of care, from beginning to end, not just towards the SecUnits but towards other humans, as well. They're all objects to be used for profit. They're all trash.

The strikers in the finale looked poor and working-class - they weren't the Gurathins or the SecUnit techs of this world. The scientists and engineers are the ones scrambling for scraps, shitting on each other for the amazing prize of maybe finishing out their indentures or getting that precious Level 3 clearance.

The strikers are being paid in food. They don't even have the capitalist promise of material comfort to keep them going - just the threat of starvation if they stop.

The Gurathin we meet at the start of the season still has traces of that CR sneer, though he's trying to get better. And then MB comes along, a representation of everything Gurathin loathes about the Rim. The object to be treated with contempt.

But as we see over and over again, MB and Gurathin are the same person. The way Gurathin treats MB is the way he treats himself. So to see MB as a person, to hold all of it inside his mind in all its fullness - that was Gurathin seeing himself as a person too. He wasn't a contemptible object. No one is.

Again and again, we see humans spitting on constructs, harassing and assaulting them, forcing them into humiliating acts, all to feel like they're somehow in control and powerful. But it's not the constructs who are lessened by those actions - it's the humans. And the way they treat the objects in their lives is the way they treat themselves.

They could add bits of what PresAux is doing while Murderbot investigates what happened at Ganaka Pit (and since I read in an interview that they might do more than one book for season 2, the investigation on Milu as well). It wouldn't have to be every episode (unless they wanted to 😉).