still thinking about how selfish the choreography for the GrayCris fight was and how fucking awesome that was as a narrative device.
this whole time we've seen a team from a planet of communal living and loving, who try so hard to be in unison on decisions to the point where when Mensah gives an order to Pin-Lee, they are genuinely shocked and hurt. AND THEN WE MEET THESE MOTHERFUCKERS.
who present as a united front, who blame PresAux for killing a teammate, who we assume to be united in their goals, because why wouldn't they be? even if they're the bad guys, surely they're a unit, right?
And then they start SHOOTING each other on accident or out of spite or because they dont want the other to have the right of escape etc etc until SecUnit barely has to lay a hand on any humans at all because they're so busy trashing each other to high hell. It's essential for our heroes to survive, but it's also a sharp reminder of other human cultures, and really hammers home to us (and Murderbot) that its clients really and truly are the best clients💙
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I do also think that Leebeebee's reaction to the rogue reveal in episode 5 was actually genuine - hearing that Murderbot was a rogue unit genuinely freaked her out, to the point that she nearly bailed on her mission. Her little "fuck this, I'm out" when she fled did not sound like it was for show or for her cover - logically, she should have stayed in the room to see what was happening, or if they mentioned the alien remnants or why they went to DeltFall in general, or if Murderbot was going to kill PresAux and do her job for her. If she was really on the ball, she could have hung around to try and negotiate with Murderbot herself - but instead of any of that, she bailed!
Given that she showed up later much more chill, or trying to be, at Murderbot, my guess is that she went to call GrayCris and tell them, panicking, that there was a rogue SecUnit that was going to kill everyone (just like in Rogue Tracker War Infinite!!) and she wanted out, and they talked her down. Maybe they themselves didn't believe it, hence their surprise at the reveal in episode 9, or the comm person she was talking to was like "yeah right, get back there or we'll kill you too, come on think of the money!" and didn't bother passing that stupid rumor off. Or maybe she just needed to hyperventilate in a corner and calm herself down. Think of the money think of the money!
I could see her weird thing with Murderbot later as an attempt at control - if she's used herself as leverage before, which given the Corporate Rim and the fact that she's wearing mascara on a survey mission seems likely, then flirting may be her way of attempting to assert herself over Murderbot - a sort of "I'm just a girl but you're just a man" kind of thing. Which whiffs horribly because it's not a man or even a human, but that's part and parcel with most of her attempts to get "in" with PresAux.
I also think her reaction is meant to be the Corporation Rim stand-in for attitudes towards rogue SecUnits - we're stuck with PresAux, who views constructs as people and don't get the same media mostly (and definitely face less violence in their daily lives than the average CR citizen), so Leebeebee is the one to show us that, for someone from the Corporation Rim, a rogue SecUnit is a horror story. Right out of Rogue Tracker War Infinite! That's panic inducing; that's a rabid bear roaming the streets, or a serial killer with a machine gun who's also in a tank menacing the city. SecUnits are hard to kill, can't be disarmed (except literally), and are built and designed for violence, and the media has made super extra sure that everything thinks of them as killing machines kept on the thin leash of the governor module, ravening for the slaughter. To the CR, the only honest reaction is Leebeebee's and maybe Gurathin's - the rest of PresAux are weird, and naive quite possibly to the point of getting themselves killed.
Of course, that's not actually how it works. But how would anyone in the CR know? They've never met a rogue SecUnit - just seen the ones on TV, in all the shows Murderbot hates.
In All Systems Red, we first encounter the main villain indirectly, at the end of the first chapter. Putting quote and discussion after a cut for book spoilers.
Then I found something weird. There was an “abort” order in the HubSystem command feed, the one that controlled, or currently believed it controlled, my governor module. It had to be a glitch. It didn’t matter, because when MedSystem has priority —
And then Murderbot suddenly shuts down, as though for repairs.
How the hell does anyone pull this off in a TV show?!
How do you introduce HubSystem and MedSystem and how they work together? How do you clue in viewers to its importance really really fast? How do you show its orders to Murderbot? How do you explain why/how Murderbot isn't following those orders? How do you make viewers understand how serious this is when even Gurathin (were he to investigate, and if he does, how do you avoid him discovering the governor module hack?) might not totally get it?
And does it even make sense to introduce GrayCris this early, when we barely know Murderbot or PresAux and we've barely assimilated the millipede attack?
Yeah. This structure, this specific cliffhanger, just wasn't gonna work. They had to do something different, and given that, they likely want to let GrayCris sit a bit because there are some starter villains to clear out before getting to GrayCris as the series-final boss.
More subtly and thematically, there's a question of humanity-calling-the-shots here. In ASR, PresAux doesn't even see a human associated with GrayCris until the final climactic negotiation with them -- until then it's all trails of destruction and SecUnits and note-passing through the feed. In a horror/suspense-aligned version of the show, that could be made to work, I guess -- but that's not the show they were writing. So they needed GrayCris to have a human face, not least to drive home that (in Murderbot's trenchant words) humans are greedy bastards.
It's quite possible to argue with exactly how they wrote LeeBeeBee the character. I would have been happier with like 90% less coercive sexuality, myself. But I can't argue with the need to delay GrayCris's intro, to give GrayCris a human face early-ish on, and to rework Murderbot/PresAux's initial encounter with GrayCris. Those were just necessary.
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I’ve been rewatching Murderbot Season 1, and finished 1.09 last night. It’s probably been said before, but in the firefight with Murderbot and Mensah, the GrayCris team do NOT fight like a team.
They’re mercenaries, so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. But none of the human GrayCris fighters cooperate with each other. I wasn’t expecting them to care if their SecUnits died, but they don’t care about their fellow humans either. The red haired woman, seeing her side might be losing, tries to make a run for their hopper so she (and only she) can escape. It doesn’t seem to occur to her to try and protect their leader who is taking fire from Mensah and Murderbot. She just wants to get away. And she’s not the only one.
I realize this was probably a deliberate choice by the director. Make the GrayCris people fight selfishly in part to explain how Murderbot and Mensah can hold their own against a larger force. But it’s interesting. Especially seeing how the PresAux team fight as a team.
