האַק מיר נישט קיין טשײַניק

I can’t stop thinking about how Murderbot, which is a show on a much smaller scale in terms of plot, cast, and production budget worked so well in digging its fingers right into many of the social and fandom bruises around concepts like the stormtroopers and k2 droid to make something both so much more empathetic and hopeful and so much more brutal than many of the places sw has been able to go, particularly by being able to really focus on two premises: secunits can easily kill people AND secunits can develop free will.

Because the thing the show establishes so early on is that the sec units can and will kill people. It fundamentally alters a key aspect of the stormtrooper mythos by making them not just nameless soldiers who can pick up a gun and always miss but creatures with guns in their arms who can and will kill civilians based on programming. When they DONT immediately shoot to kill it is explicitly a problem and a sign of something much worse happening. The PresAux team knows they’re living around a corporate entity that could kill all of them and that they cannot easily overpower, and in another critical departure from a lot of SW canon, the PresAux team are civilians who are explicitly… really bad at combat fighting. Unlike sw, civilians here are not all secretly future cool soldiers in waiting and when the violence escalates there’s a real cost in the narrative. Also unlike SW, the PresAux team is already all some kind of rebel simply by choosing to live beyond the corporation rim. But it really heightens the danger posed by SecUnits like Murderbot and the corporation in general: what is it like to live on a world with saleable units that can murder you at any time? Murderbot is not a stormtrooper or even k2 unit that can be easily controlled and reprogrammed, and the civilian status of the rest of the team makes his presence among them even heavier in this corporate-militarized world, because in this kind of sin-eater way they are increasingly dependent on it as their bodyguard to protect them. It could kill them or save them and it’s dependent on trust and it deepens the ethical messiness of the whole premise, and the whole issue of bringing it in the first place: they didn’t want to bring Murderbot, and yet without it they’d all be dead, because as the corporation knew, these jobs were super dangerous.

(I also think it’s really interesting that it’s established early on that Murderbot is kind of an older model that can be easily overpowered by newer ones and this holds true for the entire show, where Murderbot is in fact overpowered in pretty much every confrontation with a newer model and only learns how to fight these things - and be better at killing these things - through trickieness and creativity it develops from its shows and from humans like Captain Mensah.)

and yet Murderbot also establishes that amidst this violence is the capacity not to be violent and this is where episode 8 really fucks me up and has dug in my mind forever, because it kind of feels like acknowledging this question of: why don’t soldiers in evil empires in any fictional or real world fight back? Why don’t they lay down their guns? And episode 8 establishes that even with its memory wiped and its governor module replaced so that Murderbot is again a stripped single member of the corporation, Murderbot still stops. Murderbot is pulled out to quell a human uprising of indentured forced into servitude much like Murderbot itself and Murderbot still makes this choice again. (It also hints that Murderbot had made this choice before). Identity and memory can be taken, it makes this choice, and the cost of making this choice is the death it was so afraid of. ONLY the deus ex machina of literally being purchased by new owners can save murderbot from the certain death of an acid take. As powerful as Murderbot is, there’s no immediate choice to rise up in this system as it is. And like, maybe this is defeatist, a little bit. Soldiers have laid down their arms and risen up in so many real life situations. But it’s also feels like a very cathartic, very empathetic response to this question of why soldiers having risen up or lay down their guns against so many other regimes when the literal answer is that they have, and they’ve been killed for it, and this is probably the answer over and over again with people like stormtroopers in Star Wars. So idk. I’m thinking about it, it’s lodged forever in my brain, it was stunningly good tv and Alexander Skarsgard’s face acting in the final episode alone was truly a performance of a lifetime as he established Murderbot as again a corporate drone who both will and won’t kill someone.