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<p class="syndicationauthor">Posted by Emmet Asher-Perrin</p><p class="ljsyndicationlink"><a href="https://reactormag.com/tv-review-murderbot-episode-10-the-perimeter/">https://reactormag.com/tv-review-murderbot-episode-10-the-perimeter/</a></p><p class="ljsyndicationlink"><a href="https://reactormag.com/?p=817845">https://reactormag.com/?p=817845</a></p><post-hero class="wp-block-post-hero js-post-hero post-hero post-hero-horizontal">
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<h2 class="post-hero-title text-h1"><i>Murderbot</i> Is Faced With a Choice in Season Finale “The Perimeter”</h2>
<div class="prose post-hero-description prose--post-hero">First comes the illusion of choice; then a real one.</div>
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<p class="post-hero-author text-xs font-aktiv uppercase font-medium [&_a]:link-hover">By <a href="https://reactormag.com/author/alex-brown/" title="Posts by Alex Brown" class="author url fn" rel="author">Alex Brown</a></p>
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Published on July 11, 2025
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<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="740" height="379" src="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/murderbot-perimeter-5-740x379.jpeg" class="w-full object-cover" alt="Murderbot stripped of its armor in Murderbot S1 finale "The Perimeter"" srcset="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/murderbot-perimeter-5-740x379.jpeg 740w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/murderbot-perimeter-5-1100x564.jpeg 1100w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/murderbot-perimeter-5-768x394.jpeg 768w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/murderbot-perimeter-5-1536x787.jpeg 1536w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/murderbot-perimeter-5-2048x1049.jpeg 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 740px) 100vw, 740px" /> </figure>
<div class="post-hero-caption post-hero-caption-horizontal [&_a]:link"><p>Image: Apple TV+</p>
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<p>We’ve reached the final episode of what is hopefully the first of many seasons of <em>Murderbot</em>. In it, we get corporate shenanigans, a PR nightmare, and the illusion of choice.</p>
<p><strong>Spoilers ahoy!</strong></p>
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<p>“Something has happened.” We open with “system reboot” flashing on the screen. Murderbot’s voice sounds hollow. It repeats that phrase as its eyes open, sounding more like itself now. Murderbot doesn’t know where it is, but we the audience do. It’s back in the Threshold Pass Fabrication Center from the fourth episode. The workers wipe its memory, and the last thing it sees is Mensah gazing up at it. Next comes a new governor module (and a globule of spit). The Company claims SecUnits are nothing more than equipment, but they treat them worse than that. You don’t humiliate, degrade, and insult a tent, to use Arada’s example. The workers treat the equipment they use to maintain SecUnits better than they treat the actual SecUnits.</p>
<p>PresAux is also in the Corporate Rim, back in the meeting room where they made their initial deal with the Company. The suits are confused as to why they’re so concerned with “the physical location of a particular piece of equipment.” Pin-Lee gets to play lawyer for a hot minute as they take on the “fucker” in charge. Later, as the group discusses next steps, they’re torn about SecUnit. As Gurathin points out, “that Unit is full of proprietary data.” He’s certain the Company is going through Murderbot’s memory looking for anything they can sell. </p>
<p>Things aren’t great in the Corporate Rim. We’ve seen hints of this in the indenture contracts and Gugu getting press ganged into the Company’s espionage squad, but now we see that unrest billowing out into the working class. SecUnit’s contract has been passed onto law enforcement, something Ratthi discovers the hard way. I live in Southern California, where the military is marching around doing disruptive demonstrations, ICE is terrorizing my neighbors, and local cops are aiding and abetting the state. So to see Murderbot go from a goofy little droid who just wants to watch space soaps to a weapon of state violence was a hard dose of truth in fiction. </p>
<p>Strikers are protesting and the cops are eager to “do some damage” by antagonizing the workers into bloodshed. It’s a helluva thing to hear human strikers chant “We’re not slaves!” while a bunch of cops sic a group of enslaved constructs on them. Because these people are in violation of their indenture contract, they’re effectively without rights. However, remember that most of these humans are/were on indenture. Indenture is terrible for everyone involved except those turning a profit, but it’s not slavery. They have the choice to strike and fight back (so did real enslaved Africans, to be fair; there were a couple hundred slave rebellions in the so-called New World, not to mention the Haitian Revolution). SecUnits do not have that choice. </p>
<p>Those strikers don’t see SecUnits as potential allies. Why would they? SecUnits are things, equipment, tools. They aren’t people to Corporate Rim indentured workers. That division is sown by the Corporate Rim and reinforced by Corporate Rim humans (and those streaming shows Murderbot likes so much). That fraction of a memory of a massacre is still in Murderbot’s brain, and it pops back right as the melee kicks off with the protestors, causing it to glitch out. It doesn’t want to hurt humans, no matter what its governor module commands. Instead of using Murderbot’s glitch as an opportunity to go after the human cops or to try and turn that SecUnit to their side, the strikers pummel Murderbot with their own weapons. On one hand, I understand why. They feel powerless, and as we’ve seen before, wielding what tiny bit of power they have over SecUnits is a way to feel in control of their lives. On the other hand, SecUnits are tools in this situation; go after the hand holding the weapon, not the weapon itself. Most of the humans in the fray aren’t doing anything but cheering on those attacking Murderbot with hammers. They aren’t attacking other SecUnits or the cops, just celebrating destroying a toaster. It’s a complicated, nuanced scene in which humans on both sides come out looking not great.</p>
<figure class="wp-block-image aligncenter size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1100" height="552" src="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/murderbot-perimeter-3-1100x552.jpeg" alt="Gurathin considering in Murderbot S1 finale "The Perimeter"" class="wp-image-817877" srcset="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/murderbot-perimeter-3-1100x552.jpeg 1100w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/murderbot-perimeter-3-740x371.jpeg 740w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/murderbot-perimeter-3-768x385.jpeg 768w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/murderbot-perimeter-3-1536x770.jpeg 1536w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/murderbot-perimeter-3-2048x1027.jpeg 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1100px) 100vw, 1100px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Image: Apple TV+</figcaption></figure>
<p>This moral haziness is explored again through Gurathin’s interactions with his former drug dealer. The guy acts like he had no choice and elides all responsibility, as if the fact that he doesn’t deal drugs <em>now</em> makes up for what he did <em>then</em>. He did his time in the trenches. He used Gurathin to earn his way into a good job, nice apartment, and a happy, well-cared-for kid. He nearly ruined Gurathin’s life, but at least he came out on top, right? Then Gurathin turned around and did the same thing to Mensah, or tried to before he realized he wasn’t a slave to the Company, not really. He had a choice. His memory wasn’t wiped. He didn’t have a governor module installed (his version of that was the drugs, and he was able to kick that, just like Murderbot). He has a choice now, too. The Gurathin we met in the first episode wouldn’t have confronted his former dealer and taken all this risk to help a SecUnit. Gurathin uses the guy to get access to the data file and tracks down Murderbot’s memory. Then he does something surprising. He downloads all of Murderbot’s memories into his own brain. He’s been digging around Murderbot’s mind all season, and now he finally gets full access… and he does it all to help Murderbot. </p>
<p>After glitching, Seccy is decommissioned and set to be destroyed in acid, the thing it fears the most. It’s been stripped of its armor and is fully exposed, but it has no reaction. It’s a blank slate. Fortunately, it’s saved at the last minute by Pin-Lee’s injunction. Back in their quarters, Mensah is devastated that its organic parts haven’t retained any memory of them. It’s curious that it still has the massacre memory and not anything of PresAux. I feel like Mensah has a pretty big impact on it. Either way, Gura passes on the memories and Murderbot is back! A bit subdued, but back nonetheless. According to Mensah, it’s going with them to Preservation Alliance where it will be a “free agent.” Except no, not quite. It won’t have a job, a purpose, or even its armor. It will be under Mensah’s guardianship. </p>
<p>Preservation Alliance can sneer at indenture and slavery all they way, but they’re doing something not all that dissimilar to constructs. Murderbot would be free to make simple choices such as picking a hobby or deciding what clothes to wear, but bigger things would seemingly require Mensah’s permission or are outright denied (it couldn’t marry a human, for example). Even if she was likely to say yes, it is in effect putting another governor module on it. What Preservation Alliance offers isn’t freedom, it’s ownership by another name. All this reminds me of how 19th century white abolitionists often talked about freeing enslaved Africans but didn’t think they could be educated or have equal rights. I think of Phillis Wheatley Peters, whose poetry authorship was consistently challenged as either a trick or a pleasant surprise that couldn’t be replicated by other enslaved Africans. I think of Sojourner Truth’s speech from the 1851 Ohio Woman’s Rights Convention and how the version most people know is not her true voice but a heavily altered transcript produced more than a decade later by a white woman abolitionist that changed Truth’s words to sound like the stereotype of an ignorant, largely illiterate Black Southerner. I think of that line in <em>Sinners</em> about Jim Crow in the North: “Chicago ain’t shit but tall buildings instead of plantations.” And I think about how Preservation Alliance still refers to it as SecUnit even though they know it calls itself Murderbot, even after it is no longer a Company-owned SecUnit. No one ever asks what it wants to be called. </p>
<p>In a moment that is both bitter and sweet, Gugu and Murderbot have a moment of total honesty and mutual respect. Gurathin wants to help Murderbot get used to Preservation Alliance, but Murderbot can’t go with them. The moment he realizes what Murderbot is asking for, you can see his heart break in real time. It’s tremendous acting from David Dastmalchian and Alexander Skarsgård. Not even Gurathin, a guy who experienced indenture at the hand of the Corporate Rim—indenture but not bondage—really understands why. Given her reaction, Mensah accepts its choice, even if she doesn’t like it. Gurathin gives it one last command and off Murderbot goes. As it sails away with a cargo transport bot excited to watch new shows, We get one last voiceover and a small smile: “I don’t know what I want. But I know I don’t want anyone to tell me what I want…or to make decisions for me. Even if they are my favorite human.”</p>
<p>Thank you for joining me on this journey! I hope you loved this show as much as I did. I think the showrunners did a great job expanding the world Martha Wells created while staying true to the tone and themes. I maintain that the show should’ve cast a nonbinary spectrum actor in the lead, but Skarsgård did win me over. I’ve been watching him in other movies and TV and he is a much better actor than I gave him credit for. Lots of good, subtle work from him. The ending wasn’t some big cliffhanger, but it was perfect. <a href="https://reactormag.com/murderbot-has-been-renewed-for-a-second-season-on-apple-tv/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Season 2</a> can’t come soon enough!</p>
<p>If you want more Murderbot, I’ll be covering the entire series starting this summer with <em>All Systems Red</em> over at Reactor’s <a href="https://reactormag.com/tag/martha-wells-book-club/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Martha Wells Book Club</a>. </p>
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<figure class="wp-block-image aligncenter size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1100" height="460" src="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/murderbot-perimeter-2-1100x460.jpeg" alt="Murderbot in civilian clothes, traveling in Murderbot S1 finale "The Perimeter"" class="wp-image-817876" srcset="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/murderbot-perimeter-2-1100x460.jpeg 1100w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/murderbot-perimeter-2-740x310.jpeg 740w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/murderbot-perimeter-2-768x321.jpeg 768w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/murderbot-perimeter-2-1536x643.jpeg 1536w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/murderbot-perimeter-2-2048x857.jpeg 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1100px) 100vw, 1100px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Image: Apple TV+</figcaption></figure>
<p><strong>Final Thoughts</strong></p>
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<li>Episode 10 covers the rest of chapter 7 and chapter 8 (the rest of the book) in <em>All Systems Red</em>, but much of the episode is invented for the show.</li>
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<li>Not hearing Murderbot’s voiceover hit harder than I expected. The silence was deafening. </li>
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<li>I’m going to be thinking about that little half smile Gura does when Mensah asserts her authority and that lone tear when he realizes Murderbot is leaving forever.</li>
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<li>It’s not lost on me that most of the cops are white or white presenting.</li>
</ul>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>That hostile alien world is officially known as planetary body 898/8712. How creative.</li>
</ul>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Nice little nod as to why Murderbot doesn’t like eye contact. It spent its entire life having to look at humans directly as part of its normal functioning, albeit from the privacy of its helmet. Once it hacks its governor module, it gets to choose how it wants to look at them based on how it feels about that interaction. That and watching TV are pretty much the only choices it gets to make before meeting PresAux.</li>
</ul>
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<li>I love the shot of Murderbot as it stands just off center in the PresAux suite. Hands in loose fists, wearing fabricated clothing and surrounded by things it cannot use and doesn’t own.</li>
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<li>I think that was the first time we’ve seen Gurathin and Murderbot really smile, and they did it to each other.</li>
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<li>I think the show needed to dig into the guardianship aspect a little more. It gets glossed over so that the impact of why Murderbot chooses to leave doesn’t carry as much weight as it should. Most of my reaction in this review was based on what I know from the books, rather than the show itself. I also wish we got a depiction of the cargo bot interaction, even if just as data on Murderbot’s screen. It would help set up for ART, assuming season 2 follows at least part of the plot of <em>Artificial Condition</em>. </li>
</ul>
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<li>The first thing Murderbot does when it’s finally free? It sits down. </li>
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<figure class="wp-block-image aligncenter size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1100" height="460" src="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/murderbot-perimeter-1-1100x460.jpeg" alt="Murderbot surrounded by PresAux out of it's armor in Murderbot S1 finale "The Perimeter"" class="wp-image-817875" srcset="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/murderbot-perimeter-1-1100x460.jpeg 1100w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/murderbot-perimeter-1-740x310.jpeg 740w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/murderbot-perimeter-1-768x321.jpeg 768w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/murderbot-perimeter-1-1536x643.jpeg 1536w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/murderbot-perimeter-1-2048x857.jpeg 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1100px) 100vw, 1100px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Image: Apple TV+</figcaption></figure>
<p><strong>Quotes</strong></p>
<figure class="wp-block-pullquote has-text-align-left"><blockquote><p>“Madam President. You will address me as Madam President.” Damn Mensah! </p></blockquote></figure>
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<figure class="wp-block-pullquote has-text-align-left"><blockquote><p>“On the Corporate Rim, eventually there is nothing but misery.” </p></blockquote></figure>
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<figure class="wp-block-pullquote has-text-align-left"><blockquote><p>Murderbot saying “I’m going to…check the perimeter,” then cutting Gurathin off with “I <em>need</em> to check the perimeter.” My heart!</p></blockquote></figure>
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<figure class="wp-block-pullquote has-text-align-left"><blockquote><p>“Murderbot, end message.”</p></blockquote></figure>
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<p>[end-mark]</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://reactormag.com/tv-review-murderbot-episode-10-the-perimeter/"><i>Murderbot</i> Is Faced With a Choice in Season Finale “The Perimeter”</a> appeared first on <a href="https://reactormag.com">Reactor</a>.</p><p class="ljsyndicationlink"><a href="https://reactormag.com/tv-review-murderbot-episode-10-the-perimeter/">https://reactormag.com/tv-review-murderbot-episode-10-the-perimeter/</a></p><p class="ljsyndicationlink"><a href="https://reactormag.com/?p=817845">https://reactormag.com/?p=817845</a></p>