TL;DR: Murderbot ends its first season with a finale so quietly devastating and beautifully human that I found myself sobbing into my cat’s fur at 3 AM. It’s a farewell without finality, a liberation tinged with grief, and the story of an abused SecUnit finally choosing itself.
Murderbot
There are episodes that entertain you, there are episodes that impress you, and then there are episodes that crack open a quiet place inside you that you didn’t even know was sealed shut. Murderbot Season 1 Episode 10, titled “The Perimeter,” is the latter. I spent most of it with tears brimming, clinging to the final minutes with a desperate hope that everything would be okay for a character who isn’t even human, technically isn’t even alive in the biological sense, and yet feels more real to me than half the people in my contacts list.
That’s the paradox of Murderbot, and it’s why this finale felt like both an ending and a beginning. The explosive action climax was last episode’s domain. This one is a coda of grief, tenderness, and the radical notion that liberation does not always mean integration into human society. Sometimes freedom is simply walking away to figure out what you want, without anyone deciding it for you.
The episode begins with horror. Not blood-and-guts horror, but the existential horror of being erased.
Murderbot wakes restrained on a sterile table, its disoriented pleas ignored as Company employees prepare to wipe its memory. The show doesn’t overplay the scene with melodrama. It’s quiet. Efficient. Clinical. That’s what makes it so vile. Watching them spit on Murderbot and dismiss its calls for Mensah felt like watching someone kick a chained dog that trusts them. Within seconds, everything that made Murderbot Murderbot is deleted. The sarcasm. The stubbornness. The careful, fragile sense of self it fought so hard to construct.
I felt gutted watching it. Because if you’ve ever felt your identity stripped by people who saw you only as utility, if you’ve ever had your trauma belittled or your autonomy stolen, this scene lands with a sickening familiarity. It is not an exaggeration to say it triggered my memories of being reduced to “the smart kid,” “the reliable worker,” “the body in the chair” while my actual personhood was ignored. Murderbot renders this dehumanization with chilling accuracy.
Meanwhile, Mensah and the Preservation team are fighting corporate stonewalls to rescue their SecUnit friend. Mensah’s refusal to accept that Murderbot’s consciousness is gone is deeply moving. She’s a mother-figure, a mentor, and a comrade all rolled into one. Watching her cling to hope even as Gurathin informs her that the wiped memories are almost certainly gone was agonizing.
And yet Gurathin finds a loophole. He hacks into Company servers by searching for Sanctuary Moon, Murderbot’s beloved soap opera. Because what better way to find someone’s soul than through the media they love?
I burst into tears when Gurathin downloaded every episode, every memory, every sarcastic monologue into himself, risking his own brain in the process. He’s never been warm. He’s never been affectionate. But in that moment, he was love incarnate: painful, sacrificial, quiet love.
The final moments are some of the most beautifully understated writing I’ve seen on TV this year. Murderbot, newly reuploaded with its memories, awakens only to complain it’s missing Episodes 420 to 568 of Sanctuary Moon. The team laughs, cries, celebrates. They’ve purchased its contract, promising a future of freedom under Preservation’s protection.
But Murderbot is not human. It’s not built for emotional resolutions tied up in pretty bows. Even surrounded by the people who love it most, it remains aware that safety is not the same as freedom. Its identity was forged in slavery and violence. Now that it has autonomy, it must define what that means without simply trading one benevolent owner for another.
The scene where it watches Gurathin quietly sob through the door after saying goodbye is one of the most devastating send-offs I’ve witnessed since Buffy walked away from Sunnydale. Murderbot doesn’t leave because it doesn’t care. It leaves because it cares too much to let itself stagnate in the love it’s finally been offered.
Its final narration echoes with something I’ve whispered to myself in hospital rooms, on overnight buses, in toxic workplaces I’ve finally left behind:
“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.”
There is such radical power in that statement. It is the thesis of Murderbot as a series. That you can love people deeply, and they can love you back, but ultimately your life is yours to choose. That your freedom is worth more than your usefulness to others, even if they are kind, even if they treat you well. That wanting your own path does not make you ungrateful. It makes you free.
In an era of television that often prioritizes spectacle over heart, Murderbot Season 1 ends with an episode that is all heart. Not the forced inspirational kind, but the raw, messy, bittersweet heart that defines good science fiction. Because the best sci-fi isn’t about spaceships or corporations or dystopian systems. It’s about what happens when a construct programmed to kill learns to love trashy soap operas, learns to love the people who see its personhood, and ultimately learns to love itself enough to walk away from both.
Murderbot’s season finale is a masterclass in quiet storytelling. It is deeply human, exquisitely acted, and narratively uncompromising in its commitment to autonomy as the ultimate good. The last few minutes will leave you in tears, not from grief alone, but from the radical, complicated joy of watching a character you love choose freedom over comfort, truth over convenience, and self-definition over anyone’s expectations.
