Movies & TV Murderbot Murderbot Makes Some Awkward Choices in “Rogue War Tracker Infinite” Weren’t there other ways to comment on Murderbot’s assumed gender? By Alex Brown | Published on June 6, 2025 Image: Apple TV+ Comment 0 Share New Share Image: Apple TV+ We’re at the halfway point for Murderbot season one. In this episode, the plot kicks into high gear with a new conspiracy, a new addition to PresAux, and a new threat to Murderbot’s autonomy. Spoilers ahoy. So, turns out, Murderbot isn’t dead after all. It’s unconscious for part of the episode, but that doesn’t mean we don’t hear from it. The events that take place while it’s out are depicted via Murderbot reconstructing everything through recordings and voice-overs. Interestingly, many of the scenes that start from Murderbot’s video perspective quickly shift to a sort of third person omniscient but from the perspective of the humans. Ratthi, Arada, Pin-Lee, and Mensah take SecUnit back to their habitat to repair it. They also bring along Leebeebee, the only DeltFall survivor. She’s… an odd duck. In the previous episode it seemed like her strange behavior could be due to shock, but nope. If anything, at PresAux she’s even more unsettling. She says she was working off her indenture doing laundry and maintenance, a claim that seems suspicious to me but plausible to PresAux (everything is plausible to PresAux, those gullible, nerdy hippies). Leebeebee’s attitude toward Murderbot is so unpleasant and gross, made worse by no one from PresAux stepping in to stop it. Maybe I’m overreacting. I’ve written before that I see a lot of myself in Murderbot’s approach towards sex and romance (I’m asexual, aromantic, neurodivergent, and genderqueer). Like Murderbot, I don’t have any vested interest in other people engaging in those activities, and get bored when I have to watch people be all lovey dovey with each other or listen to people talk about their relationships. I also absolutely do not want in any way, shape, or form, any of that stuff being done to or on me. I get really uncomfortable when someone hits on me. The second I realize it’s happening I do exactly what Murderbot does and flee the scene. So to see Leebeebee sexually harass Murderbot over the course of two episodes, including forcing a kiss on it, I was bothered, to put it lightly. I thought about someone talking about me and to me in that way and actually had to pause the show and take a break. “Melt me down. Now,” is right. All the gender stuff I was worried about at the start of the season? Yeah, it’s happening. Leebeebee uses it/its pronouns but also seems to slot Murderbot into the gender box “man” by assuming it would have a penis and testicles based solely on making gendered assumptions about its physical appearance (much like many fans and critics keep doing). She then twice fantasizes about forcing it to have sex with her. Which. Ew. On myriad levels, ew.  Leebeebee could have been an opportunity for the show to use PresAux to further decouple Skarsgård’s body from Murderbot’s character, but instead it plays it as a sort of weird joke. To have no one from PresAux stand up for Murderbot or shut Leebeebee down reflects poorly on them, in my opinion. No one, not even Leebeebee, sexualizes Pin-Lee in a gendered way. No one comments on what body parts they might have and what they might want to do to them. Obviously, that’s because they all see Pin-Lee as human. But to not even bother to intervene on Murderbot’s behalf contradicts what we know about how PresAux sees it as more than just a toaster—Mensah even corrects herself when she accidentally misgenders one of her children as “he” instead of “they,” so it’s not like correcting pronouns is an unknown experience. It’s just so discordant to me to have them care so little about how Leebeebee treats SecUnit while also caring so much about SecUnit that Ratthi wants to name his future child after it.  Everything about this feels contrary to the way the books treat Murderbot. The books never imply a gender; they’re very clear that Murderbot is genderless, so much so that even the human characters don’t gender it. Despite readers who insist Murderbot is supposed to look more like one gender or another, Murderbot is explicitly and intentionally unencumbered by gender. Its gender, like mine, is: “no.” This whole Leebeebee thing taps into what a lot of fans were worried about in terms of casting a (presumably) cis man as Murderbot. It’s easy for many fans to objectify Alexander Skarsgård, and a lot of people are unable to separate the actor’s gender expression from the character’s lack of gender expression. I want to be generous and say the show is using Leebeebee to comment on audience assumptions of gender, but I’m not that nice. Hire nonbinary writers, television shows.  Given what happens in All Systems Red, I can guess what’s coming with Leebeebee’s character and why the show constructed her the way she is. I get that they want to show a stark contrast between Preservation Alliance and the Corporate Rim, particularly with regards to Security Units and Comfort Units. We’re seeing the ways the Corporate Rim turns non-sexual constructs into sexual objects with the Captain and the NavBot’s relationship in Sanctuary Moon, too. It makes sense, but it also undercuts the show’s message about personhood in ways I don’t think the writers reckon with. I don’t think it was necessary to put Murderbot through all that in order to make their point. Once in med bay, Bharadwaj and Arada remove the tendrils from the combat override module stuck in SecUnit. Gurathin finally gets to root around in Murderbot’s brain matter and freaks the hell out. SecUnit reboots and discovers everyone knows it hacked its governor module. Gurathin accuses it of being behind the sabotage and of colluding with the rogue DeltFall SecUnits somehow, but everyone knows that’s a stretch. The confrontation scene where PresAux learns about Murderbot’s thoughts is one of my favorite moments from the novella. We don’t get that full scene in the show but the part where Murderbot threatens to kill Gurathin and has to be talked down by the rest of the team is just as entertaining to watch as it was to read. Where Gura sees the worst in Murderbot, Bharadwaj sees the best. She points out that Murderbot has been rogue this whole time and still went out of its way to protect them. It didn’t have to do that, it chose to. The audience knows that several times now Murderbot has considered abandoning or killing everyone, but it hasn’t. Instead, it tried to kill itself to save them. That’s not the action of a rogue murder machine; even Leebeebee is surprised by it. Mensah and Murderbot make a pact: if they get off the planet alive they won’t tell anyone about its hacked governor module and they’ll let it decide what it wants for its own future as long as Murderbot continues to protect them… yes, even Gurathin. It’s a deal both parties have to agree to, because the only other option is everyone dies. Which they still might do anyway.  With HubSystem potentially compromised by an outside threat, it’s time to set off the emergency beacon. Murderbot and Mensah take the hopper to do it manually when they can get a single out from their habitat, leaving the rest of the group to pack essentials. The plan is to spend the next few days waiting for the Company starship to rescue them in hiding in case whatever attacked DeltFall tracks down PresAux.  Mensah, my moon and stars, my queen, my goddess. What I wouldn’t give for an outtake of Mensah monologuing about her “five million children” while Murderbot stands around looking increasingly uncomfortable. She’s done this before, talking to SecUnit like it’s a person, but was more tentative then. Now she’s got her legs crossed and is chilling all casual-like in the captain’s chair bombarding Murderbot with more information about her “offspring” than it ever wanted to know. Noma Dumezweni plays this scene so well. She and Skarsgård bounce off each other in such a compelling way.  It’s so obvious not only why Mensah is the leader but also why everyone loves her so much. She radiates compassion and interest. She doesn’t push but she does ask everyone to stretch a little. When Murderbot responds to her as itself, instead of being offended by its tone or shocked by its candor, she responds just like she would to one of her human teammates. She even seems to remember it doesn’t like eye contact (it told her that while glitching last ep) and doesn’t force Murderbot to look at her. She converses with Murderbot, asks its professional opinions, and digests its responses. Mensah genuinely wants to know what it thinks, and Murderbot in turn gives her its real thoughts. They’re able to break down some of the looming questions like how involved might the Company be and how DeltFall was able to be infiltrated. I think structurally this scene works better in the book—here, without Murderbot’s voiceover explaining things, it feels more like Mensah is stating facts rather than her figuring things out in real time—but emotionally it plays well on television.  Just before Mensah and Murderbot’s hopper reaches their emergency beacon, the thing blows up. The last shot we see is their ship caught in the fiery explosion. This show is so good at cliffhangers! Image: Apple TV+ Final Thoughts Episode 5 covers parts of chapter 5 in All Systems Red; the hopper trip to the emergency beacon was invented for the show but uses dialogue from the book. Speaking of, Leebeebee also isn’t in the books.  My issues with Leebeebee have nothing to do with the actress who plays her. Anna Konkle puts her all into the role. I’m more annoyed at the larger context around her role than the character and definitely not the actress. We have a new in-show show, this one only mentioned: Rogue War: Tracker Infinite: Tribulation.  Credit where credit is due: Skarsgård is great at playing a corpse. I think part of Gurathin’s annoyance at Murderbot is jealousy. It gets to spend all this time with Mensah and is the tech expert, and he’s just some guy with an augment who yearns for senpai to notice him. It’s kinda sweet, in a pathetic way.  I wish we could see Murderbot communicating with HubSystem. Like the drones, it’s a big thing to cut from the story, even though I’m sure it’s tricky (and probably very expensive) to do on television. Wanna bet the person at the Company who took the bribe was the guy in the middle who was a little too eager to get Preservation Alliance to agree to the contract? Image: Apple TV+ Quotes “Guess I’m not dead, despite my best efforts.” “Looking at their hopeful faces, I was glad I didn’t murder them. Mostly.” “It was weird, talking back and forth in a way that wasn’t just giving facts or receiving and confirming orders. They did it on the serials all the time. I just hadn’t done it myself before.” Until next week.[end-mark] The post <i>Murderbot</i> Makes Some Awkward Choices in “Rogue War Tracker Infinite” appeared first on Reactor.