The latest episode of Game Changer, Dropout’s comedy game show where the game changes every episode, begins with comedians Jacob Wysocki, Kimia Behoornia, Kurt Maloney, and Jeremy Culhaneplaying a seemingly straightforward version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. This is not unusual: Dropout has produced its own versions of popular game shows and reality competition franchises, such as The Bachelor, Survivor, and The Circle. But what is unusual is what happens after Wysocki wins the opening challenge — drawing a “cool cat” — and steps center stage to begin answering trivia questions tailor-made to his interests and personal history. As his winnings pile up, Wysocki tells host and Dropout CEO Sam Reich, “I feel absolutely insane!”
Contestants claiming to freak out during a Game Changer challenge is familiar enough — Wysocki previously expressed this sentiment while playing a demented version of Simon Says — considering the show’s producers and crew make a game out of psyching out players as they try to figure out the rules and parameters of the game they’re playing. It’s hard to fault the comedians for having an additional level of paranoia when the show has produced episodes that conspire to set up a single person. Previous examples include “Yes or No,” in which the only rule was that Brennan Lee Mulligan couldn’t win, or “Don’t Cry,” an episode designed to celebrate Jess Ross during a personally challenging year. Before long, it becomes clear that this is one of those Game Changers.
Wysocki has indeed been set up by his colleagues and friends: The game he’s playing is designed to recognize his popularity among the Dropout audience and acknowledge the personal losses he’s recently experienced. He gets every question correct, regardless of his answer; his longtime friends and collaborators are introduced into the game, and by the episode’s emotional conclusion, he’s won a prize total of $100,000. But even as he was winning “an astonishing amount of money,” Wysocki couldn’t lose sight of the fact that “you’re also making a television show as a comedian, so you have to balance those two things.” Speaking over Zoom before he performed at the Just for Laughs comedy festival in Montreal, Wysocki broke down how he processed it all in the moment: “You’re just letting the comedy training come and see what happens.”
Can you walk me through the process of getting cast in an episode of Game Changer? I know Sam and the team go to great pains to make sure the cast members don’t get tipped off about what’s going on. It’s hard to speak about it holistically because each episode is so specific, and I think depending on the level of secrecy or mischief, probably requires different levels of communication. The very, very beginning is, you get an email from Sam: “I would like you to be on this season of Game Changer. Here are some vague sentiments — how spicy are you willing to get?” And so you’re sort of giving soft consent on this email. Then a bunch of time goes by, you forget about it, and you show up to Dropout doing other jobs, wondering if it’s secretly going to be a Game Changer.
When did you realize this wasn’t a typical Game Changer episode but an episode designed around you? Sam said this thing to all of us before, where he was being vague, and he was like, “Remember, it’s got to be funny and everybody gets a turn.” So when I was picked first to start answering these trivia questions that were lightly about my life, I was like, “Cool, I’ll do two or three of these, I’ll make a hundred bucks, I’ll go sit down.” I thought that was the game. We’re going to take rotating turns, answering interpersonal questions about ourselves and maybe our friendship.
I had no information other than that it was going to be me, Kurt, Kimia, and Jeremy. Kurt and I have been friends for nearly two decades. Kimia and I have known each other since we were both 18. So I thought it was like they were playing with the fact that we were a historical group of friends, and it would be answering questions about our friendship. Then when we got to 15, 20,000 bucks, I was like, This is getting kind of crazy. When are we going to have somebody else go? Then it kept going, and it got to a point where I realized, Oh, nobody else is going, and it’s just going to be me.
It was like watching Jim Carrey realize what’s going on in The Truman Show. I think it took me longer because there were two levels of acceptance. There’s the level of acceptance that’s, Oh, this episode is just about me. I’m the driving force of the momentum and the comedy. I have to humbly accept one of the most righteous things that could ever happen to a person, which is a windfall. That’s a lot of money for how I came up and the world that I grew up in.
Besides the large amount of prize money, what element of the episode was the most meaningful to you? Being there with my buddies. I think my friend group is one of the best things about me. To have friends that you’ve known for so long and that you’ve grown up with, I think that’s so special. The strongest bonds I have are all in one room celebrating this moment.
I watched a lot of groups get big — Broken Lizard, the State, Good Neighbor, the Whitest Kids You Know — and that was sort of maybe a blueprint for how you could get into Hollywood. They were all just buddies doing comedy, and they made their stuff, and eventually people paid them to make stuff. We came up thinking, All right, if we just keep making videos like all these other big influences, maybe we can do that too. At a certain point, life gets in the way, you grow up, and you realize, Oh, it’s really hard being a group of dudes trying to make it in this town. For whatever reason, it didn’t work out for us as a group, but it worked out for a lot of us as individuals. So it was particularly special making something together, being funny, and doing bits. For some of us, we haven’t done that together in a long time and it felt really good.
The speech you gave about what the money would mean to you was disarmingly sincere. What was going through your mind at that moment? That was probably the hardest part of it. You have this crazy experience, and then the ringleader goes, “Land the backflip.” That’s the time when you want to be perfect because something perfect just happened to me. It was just a lot of pressure. How much do you want to share with an audience? There are things that happened in my life that are technically public, but I don’t really share as my onscreen persona. Do I talk about my active grief and that there are people missing? You have to create a separation of church and state. So, you’re threading so many different lines: Be funny, be gracious, be celebratory, be eloquent, be concise, and also self-edit so that I’m not being too personal and I’m not letting a bunch of great fans, but ultimately strangers, into the true intricacies of my life and my heart.
Sam does mention that it was a difficult year for you. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? I was actively grieving the loss of my mother and a member of our sketch group, Roger Garcia III. And yeah — they’re there, but they’re not.
You’ve become popular online through Dropout. That helps Dropout, but it also helps you. However, you mention the need to have these boundaries, as you say, with strangers whose affection for you is intense and well-meaning, but they don’t know you, and you don’t know them. How has that been for you? The infancy of the popularity is very novel. I don’t think the human brain and body are designed to have unearned affection, which, I think parasocial relationships can sometimes feel that way. I came up in a world where I do a live show, I hear the live audience laugh — that’s our contractual exchange. To get it after the fact is just something that you’re not used to. It’s sort of this compliment that exists in a vacuum. It’s a process that I’m still learning, and the people who are watching us are also learning.
How have you been since the filming of that episode? Awesome. My go-to joke is it’s all gone. I spent it, I burned it. No, but I feel great. I think the craziest thing about it all is that the same evening, the Dodgers won the World Series. I’m an L.A. boy. So we finished filming and then me and my friends go get a case of beer and we drove down to Echo Park and we’re just partying in the streets and we’re celebrating our city, but we’re also celebrating what just happened. We got to go out and be like, “Yeah!” and we didn’t look crazy because everybody else was doing it. That makes it even more special and even more memorable. And the night ended with us watching a Los Angeles Metro bus explode.
I still feel pretty insane about it when I really sit down and think about how I won a huge amount of money because of the work I’ve put in and the relationships I’ve built with the people who watch the place where I work. It’s a celebration of that. And it’s also a recognition that I had a pretty shit year and had to keep working. I got to keep working for the company. There were times when stuff with my mother got really intense, and I had to be like, “I can’t work today. I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to call Jeremy Culhane. You’re going to have to bring in Jeremy.” They were extremely kind and generous throughout that process.
I was recently in Japan with my high school graduate, a promised trip to a place I’d never been. My takeaway, besides humid summer heat poaching us in our own juices, is the wild green that took over anything humans left untouched. Hills are a chlorophyl riot, rugged canyons buried in canopies, creek after creek dancing through boulders and shadow. Even in the pulsing core of Tokyo, we’d find a temple and walk a trail through the woods getting there, washing our hands at a bamboo spigot as a form of purification.
I took an afternoon to walk alone because even with someone you dearly love, they need a break from you. I climbed stairs from a street in the small city of Takayama to a shrine, the route beyond the shrine skinnying into a leaf-and-dirt trail under a deciduous sky, insects clicking and buzzing around me. At the top of the hill was a clearing with a flat-faced boulder chiseled with kanjis. I used a translator app on my camera and I got back, “tree spirit.” It was a stone shrine to a tree spirit, which made sense, the traditional religion of Japan being Shinto, its tenets animistic. Spirits called kami are known to dwell inside of animals, plants, rocks, rivers, clouds, rain. If I were to follow a religion that aligned most with who I am, this would be it. When I took another translation pic, I got “block of wood” instead of “tree spirit.” At first I was puzzled, then I realized they were the same thing. A block of wood in itself would be a piece of a tree’s spirit.
Back at home in Colorado, I was 87 days into 100 of walking animal trails in wild places, part of a self-imposed wildlife project I’m working on. At ponderosa pines I’ve been mashing my face into their trunks intoxicated with the candy store smell of terpenes under the bark. Tracks of mountain lions and bears brought me to my knees. This was my own form of worship, extensive interviews with field biologists mixed with time on the ground sniffing urine spots and measuring prints, talking with ants and clouds as if they were people. There’s no reason the practice of science and the belief that things have spirits are in opposition. Science will find that, too, if we look hard enough.
In Japan, you can see why I’d feel at home. Sharing certain sensibilities, my kid and I gravitated towards shrines and walks in the humid woods around the central island of Honshu. At dusk with umbrellas out, we followed trails in heavy timber back toward a town where we were staying. We came on a small shrine, a statue of a large frog with a smaller frog riding it. Out of the larger frog’s mouth came a stream of water, a spring tapped from the ground. We paused as the air around us darkened, and we cupped the water in our hands under rain tapping on our umbrellas.
When I came home last week, I got back into my rhythm of tracking, leaving around four in the morning and driving out dirt roads til I parked and set off under a waning crescent moon and its thin light. I prefer the waning moon in the morning, it makes dusk last twice as long. In this gloaming, I came to a familiar rimrock edge above a wooded gulch where last winter I tracked a fresh mountain lion until I was afraid and I quietly retreated. Now I was here to have my eye on the woods as light came on, a favorite time of day, gray becoming blue becoming orange. This place was my shrine, my offering being the hour I spent sitting on the rimrock, only moving to shift my ears following the first birds of the day, towhees crooning at each other.
Is it fair to call this a religion? It seems more like an understanding. We were all animists once upon a time, pagans and dirt worshippers, prayers sent to clouds for rain. We believed there was a strength and sentience to objects. You might pat your car’s dashboard lovingly asking the vehicle to make it another ten thousand miles. Or you’ve sang “rain, rain, go away,” a rhyme I’m loathe to repeat, being a desert dweller.
In Japan we learned to bow and clap our hands, dropping coins in offering boxes watched over by stone foxes. We pulled on ropes and rang bells and I wondered if back at home the spirits could hear.
If you want to make me love your work, take a scene or a character who could have been flat or cliche or basic, and write them a wildly new direction. In Murderbot, to my surprise and delight, it was what the Weitzes did with the character of Dr. Gurathin. In the books, Gurathin is the one member of the PresAux team who’s a little more suspicious of their assigned SecUnit. He clocks that Murderbot is acting weird, and he questions it in front of the rest of the group to figure out whether they’re in danger. Once they figure out that it’s autonomous, he needles Murderbot occasionally just to make sure it’s not going to go rogue and kill them all. This is brave of him, from a certain point of view, but also stupid, and Dr. Mensah mostly seems to be annoyed when he does it.
When I learned that David Dastmalchian had been cast in the Murderbot adaptation, I figured he was playing Dr. Gurathin, and that Gurathin’s role was going to be expanded a bit. My first thought was that he would be the Dr. Smith of the group, which would have been fun, but nowhere near as meaningful as the path they took.
One of the highlights of reading Martha Wells’ Murderbot books is watching as she builds a comprehensive critique of unchecked capitalism. As we travel through her world, and meet Murderbot, ART, Three, and the Preservation Alliance team, we gradually see how corporate greed has ruined every aspect of sentient life. It works incredibly well because, since we’re in Murderbot’s head, the horrors of the Corporation Rim are presented as simple fact: many of Murderbot’s clients torture it for fun; SecUnits and ComfortUnits have to obey orders no matter the circumstances; many of Murderbot’s clients make equipment a higher priority than human life or safety; yes Murderbot is also equipment; of course the Company can be bribed.
We get a sense of how bad things are largely from watching Murderbot’s confusion and initial discomfort as it gets to know its new clients from Preservation Alliance, where life and freedom have intrinsic value, and where Murderbot itself would be a person with autonomy.
Since the first season of Murderbot primarily adapts Wells’ first book, All Systems Red, it can’t show us all the worldbuilding yet. Instead, the writers decided to frontload a critique of capitalism that feels much harsher and more immediate than the one in the book. Some of this is purely a matter of medium I think—we see the cops order SecUnits to attack starving indentured servants; we see the exhaustion and desperation of the people who work at the SecUnit factory; we see that the world Murderbot accepts as normal is deeply, terribly sick. And on top of that, best of all, we have Gurathin.
Gurathin starts out as the same character he was in the book: an augmented human, slightly shy and awkward, and openly more suspicious of Murderbot than the rest of the Preservation Alliance team. When we meet him, we see that he hold himself back from the rest of the team. When PresAux meets with the Company to fine tune their mission, he glares at the reps like he expects a fight. He’s reluctant to turn his back on them long enough to join the Consensus Circle; he also doesn’t want them to watch him join hands with his friends. And, as Alex Brown pointed out in their fabulous episode reviews, note how Gurathin dresses: the bright colors of PresAux covered by a bland suit jacket. He doesn’t want people to notice him. He doesn’t want to seem “weird”.
At the habitat, while the others dance freely to their upsetting music, Gurathin does… pretty much what I’d do in the scenario: he stands still, only moving his torso and arms, folded into himself like he wants to make himself small. His resistance to Murderbot is presented as a distrust of corporate spyware. But the expansion of his character begins when he asks everyone to meet in the hopper to avoid Murderbot overhearing his suspicions. Ratthi says Gurathin doesn’t trust anyone, which in a different kind of show would just be a comedy setup—“here’s Gurathin, our resident grump, he’ll be cynical about Murderbot until it saves him and he admits he likes it.” But on this show, one that takes human emotion seriously and treats its characters and audience with the care we all deserve, the scene becomes something else entirely. No one treats this like comedy. Gurathin turns to Ratthi, and with total sincerity replies, “I trust you. I trust this team. I don’t trust anything that comes from the Company.”
Oh.
Mensah responds by saying “You have good reason for that”—which immediately tells us that Gurathin has a history with Corporation Rim that the others do not. And, being Preservation, they all chime in with affirmations, tell him they love him, and Ratthi calls him “Gugu”.
The grumpy cynic is not being dismissed or discounted, and now we know he has a History.
Credit: Apple TV+
When he forces Murderbot to meet with him privately, he vacillates between seemingly sincere questions about Murderbot’s sense of self, and more pointed ones that show his distrust of Corporation Rim. His interrogation is cruel if you know anything about Murderbot and its hatred of interpersonal contact. The eye contact thing is actually torture—there’s no mission-based reason for it, Gurathin’s only doing it because he knows it makes Murderbot uncomfortable, and he knows it can’t say no. The rest of PresAux would be horrified if they saw him doing this.
He uses the interrogation to establish that Murderbot shouldn’t have emotional attachments, that there’s a line between it and a “ComfortUnit”—and he takes the time to tell it that in Preservation Alliance it would be considered a person. He goes on to say that he’s only been in the Alliance six years, and that he joined because he was friends with Dr. Mensah. (We later learn that this is a much more complicated situation.) Gurathin describes himself as being “extremely cautious” and tells Murderbot that he cares very deeply about his friends, but his intensity and attempted Bond Villain vibe are undercut when when Mensah and Bharadwaj end up in actual danger, and Murderbot isn’t there to protect them. After that, Gurathin seems to step back for a while, presumably muttering to himself that the rest of the team are being too trusting.
While Murderbot is away with Mensah we get the first real hint about Gura’s past, but it’s hidden in a charged moment so it could be overlooked. When Leebeebee is hovering, and trying to get Gura to talk with her about his projects, she offers him a “stimulant” from the Medpak, and he snaps “No!” in response. Which in the moment could be seen as the Grumpy One being annoyed, but it still seems like an overreaction to what could be a traumatized person trying to make a connection.
It’s revealed that this wasn’t an overreaction in the next episode, which was when I realized what the show was doing.
Credit: Apple TV+
Is the “Bitter/Sweet” scene my favorite in the show? I think there are a few others that top it, but only barely. The teammates are playing a “game” where people share their memories of each other, teasing out moments that were “sweet”, but balancing them with moments that were “bitter”. This is the kind of thing only Preservation Alliance would call a game—if I was invited to their table I’d definitely go with an acid bath instead.
When it’s Gurathin’s turn, he only gives in because they chant his name loud enough that people at other tables begin to stare. It seems like he’s never played before—he checks with the others to make sure he’s doing the hand gestures correctly, and, rather than telling them about a simple moment of interpersonal connection, or like a time Ratthi annoyed him or something, he dives straight into terrible trauma. And it’s here that the season’s true critique of capitalism snaps into focus. He was targeted by the Corporation, who saw an opportunity to exploit the augments that set him apart and could be used for so much good. He was intentionally hooked on hardcore drugs, and forced to spy for the Company on pain of being refused his medication. He didn’t just join Preservation Alliance because he and Mensah were “friends” like he told Murderbot—Mensah was meant to be his latest victim. Faced with her loving personality he came clean. Faced with this broken, desperate man, she offered him sanctuary and a shot at a new life.
He tells his story in present tense. He’s telling this story to them, now, on the eve of their mission, in the belly of his personal beast, surrounded by the life that almost killed him. He ends his “sweet” memory by saying, “I see what is possible between people of good will. I break down, tell her everything… she forgives me. And I move to Preservation Alliance and here we are.” Then he flees the table rather than giving a “bitter” memory—as though there isn’t enough bitter laced into what he’s just said?
Because think about what he’s editing out as he speaks to them: escape from his corporate overlords, flight to a strange part of the galaxy, learning how to live in a society that is utterly alien to him (six years later he’s still visibly uncomfortable with it), a leap into the unknown—all of that without getting into the hell of kicking drugs that were custom-made to control him. (I’ll mention that Dastmalchian’s acting here is among the best of the series–I’ve loved Dastmalchian since I saw The Dark Knight on opening night in 2008, and watching him carve out his own fabulous goth niche alongside his work in stuff like Late Night with The Devil and Animals has made my sparkly black heart sing. And this??? I practically crawled into my TV during this scene.)
Credit: Apple TV+
But the other thing that gets to me is just how raw it is. Not to dismiss Bharadwaj’s pain, but she’s confessing to having feelings for a coworker, and whomst among us? But when we get to Gura’s turn, he trusts them with part of the truth of who he is—a truth that could make them look at him differently, that could set him even more apart from them. He honors the conceit of the game with an offering that is as bitter and sweet as anything could be. And he does it in this glittering restaurant, in the place he hates most, surrounded by all the trappings that almost killed him. In this room filled with artifice and small talk, elites eating and drinking while indentured servants and enslaved bots provide all the labor, he cuts through all of it to get to a place of brutal honesty. Gurathin is what happens when capitalism can do whatever it wants. It latches onto a person and sucks them dry until they’d rather die than keep living under it.
Again, I love it when people take big swings. This games could have happened privately in the team’s quarters. He could have told his friends his story after he was shot, to explain why he wouldn’t use painkillers. The Weitzes could have undercut it with jokes, Dastmalchian could have added a layer of irony to distance present Gurathin from his past. Instead they use the scene to get the core of what capitalism does to people: make you want more and more and more, and then hold that “more” just out of reach to control you. He chooses to tell his friends about this now, on the eve of their mission, so they can see what the Corporation is truly capable of.
He chooses to tell his friends about this now, on the eve of their mission, so they can see what the Corporation is truly capable of. This is why he’s been holding himself back, this is why he’s been suspicious of Murderbot, why he was suspicious of Leebeebee, why he snarled at her when she casually offered him speed. Where Murderbot’s greatest fear is the Acid Bath, Gura’s is falling back into addiction, being dragged back to the Corporation Rim, back to the half life he had there. This is how much he loves Mensah and the team, that he’ll come on the mission with them, because he knows he’s the only one who understands what they’re dealing with.
Well, him and Murderbot. But he can’t trust Murderbot.
Which leads to the most heartbreaking scene of the show. He’s been shot, the wound is infected, Bharadwaj can operate on him but he can’t have any pain meds without risking addiction again. At first he tells Murderbot to restrain him, but then both of them seem to have the same idea at the same time—Murderbot can link to him and block the pain from hitting his nervous system. If he hadn’t had the idea, it seems like Murderbot would have suggested it anyway, which is what makes everything worse. Murderbot pokes around in Gura’s head (payback for their earlier confrontation) but then inadvertently reveals the man’s deepest secret, and most likely the thing he would have claimed as “bitter” during that dinner a month ago: he’s in love with Mensah, and she doesn’t love him back. Not like that, anyway.
But even here, Murderbot doesn’t announce that—it just, again, seemingly accidentally, says “Why don’t you love me back” out loud. Mensah knows what the words means; who knows if the others do? Gura even asks if he’s said something, implying that when the two of them are linked together, the lines between Murderbot and Gura are blurry at best. So when Gura chooses to stay in Murderbot’s mind for an extra second, dredge up the memory of the massacre, blurt it out to the group, and reveal Murderbot’s name for itself—despite Murderbot saying “Don’t!” with more emotion than it’s ever had in its voice before—it feels like a far greater betrayal than Murderbot’s slip. Is this Gura’s spy training coming to the fore? Or was this pure anger, lashing out at a being he already doesn’t trust, after having to make himself vulnerable? Why else would he take that extra beat to lock eyes with Murderbot and say, “You’re defective”?
Credit: Apple TV+
Under a capitalist system “defective” is the worst thing you can be. If you can’t do your job, make your company money, and spend your money to fund other companies, you’re useless. Everything in a society like that will hammer home the idea that your life has no worth if it isn’t earning money or spending it. If you’re a SecUnit who can’t be trusted to do security, you’ll be melted down and stripped for parts. If you’re an augmented human, you’ll be hooked on drugs and used as a weapon.
How often were insults like that thrown at Gurathin, in his old life? Of course he puts Murderbot’s worst fear, and his own, into words and spits it out for the whole team to hear.
But as he says later, he’s been in Murderbot’s mind. He’s the one who figures out its secret plan, who has an abrupt and total change of heart when he realizes that Murderbot is about to sacrifice itself for them. He’s the one who risks capture to finish the beacon launch, and it’s him, not Mensah, who realizes Murderbot is dying and runs to its side.
He’s also the only one who knows what it’s going to take to get Murderbot back.
While the rest of the team try to use political power (“‘Madame President’. You will address me as ‘Madame President’.”) legal wrestling in the form of Pin-Lee’s massive lawsuit, and sheer emotion and appeals to common decency, it’s Gurathin who understands the Corporation Rim. He’s the one who finally steps into the center, sits down across from the company reps, and tells them that they’ll buy SecUnit. Naturally the others react in horror, because SecUnit isn’t an object to be bought or sold, but Gurathin understands that here, it is. But more than that: they all are. The Preservation Alliance doesn’t realize it, but he knows: you can believe in autonomy and self-determination and free will and even the soul—you can believe anything you want; functionally speaking, if you’re in a room with people who are more powerful than you and the majority of them don’t agree that you’re a person, your internal personhood ceases to matter.
So, use your wallet.
The problem is that they’ve already downloaded SecUnit’s personality and cycled it back into the system. And it’s here that for once capitalism inadvertently saves the day.
While the rest of them are basically helpless, Mensah says, “I refuse to believe that the experience of everything we went through together is just a stream of zeros and ones” and Gurathin snaps “It is.” As she looks up at him, startled, he repeats himself, but more quietly. Mensah still pushes back. “Removed? Yes. Erased? No.” But Gurathin points out that that’s the true evil here. Sure, they’ll keep Murderbot’s memories to strip them for any data they can use, but “personality doesn’t possess any monetary value to them. This is Corporation Rim—they don’t play fair.”
And he thinks like one of them.
Credit: Apple TV+
He goes back to his old dealer, but this isn’t the kind of soapy, over-the-top show Murderbot would like, so there’s nothing seedy here. This isn’t a drug den or the backroom of a nightclub or anything, just an apartment. Gura’s dealer was a co-worker, a regular man with a day job, who ended up exploiting someone who would have been his friend in a better society. I would be willing to bet my own capitalist earnings that the dealer didn’t have much more choice than Gurathin did. Now he’s free of that life. He has a kid, and (thanks to Leebeebee) we know that’s prohibitively expensive, so he must have done well for himself. But here’s where Gurathin twists the knife. There is only a thin door between the ex-dealer’s husband and child—and the truth of how he used to make his money. The man caves to Gurathin’s blackmail almost immediately.
Who knows if there will be consequences for this man? If Gurathin’s hacking and theft comes to light will it be traced back to him? Will he lose his career and family after all this, anyway? Gurathin can’t let himself care. He can’t think like a member of Preservation Alliance if he wants to win against the Corporation.
He goes into the system, searches for the remnants of Murderbot’s personality. He tries a couple basic searches before he realizes that the key to finding Murderbot is through accepting Murderbot for who it is. He searches for the soap opera that he’s never watched and regards with distaste, and there’s their Murderbot, its personality shaped by the media it loves.
Gurathin then does something that no one else could do: he uploads Murderbot into his own mind. Even as he’s told not to.
Pin-Lee’s legal actions have worked in that they’ve been able to retrieve Murderbot’s body; Mensah’s political clout allowed her to offer up the GrayCris scandal to a ravenous media industrial complex. They’re able to fight the Corporation Rim in ways that don’t touch their selfhood—if anything, this will enhance Pin-Lee’s status as a lawyer, and other leaders will learn not to test Mensah. But Gurathin is the one who knows that you have to get dirty if you want to beat the Corporation. He drags himself back into the shame of his old life, he comes face-to-face with the worst moments of his past by confronting his old dealer. He checks his own moral code at the door to threaten the man into giving him what he wants. He presumably risks arrest if he’s caught hacking into a Company database. He risks his own mind by uploading Murderbot. And what happens? He runs back into PresAux’s suite and pukes into the sink from the physical strain, and Mensah, of course, thinks he’s relapsed. His friends are so shocked by what’s happening, and by seeing Murderbot come back to itself, that no one even thinks to thank him at first.
He wants so badly to be Murderbot’s mentor, to help it learn how to live in Preservation Alliance, as Mensah helped him six years before. And of everyone on the team, he might be the one human who could. But he’s also the only one who can really understand why Murderbot needs to go. It has to be in its own head for a while, and figure out what it wants on its own terms, not by talking about it with humans who, try as they might, literally can’t imagine what it’s been through. He hasn’t just seen inside Murderbot’s mind, he’s held it inside of his own, and learned its language enough to let it go by agreeing that, “You need to check the perimeter.”
Credit: Apple TV+
In the end we watch the person who was the most twisted by Corporation Rim’s capitalist machine define himself by the gifts he gives freely to his friends. He chooses to tell his friends his story. To trust them. To let them in. He chooses to dive back into his past, and face his worst fears, to rescue Murderbot’s consciousness. He takes Murderbot into himself, gives it the gift of space in his own mind, to give it a shot at a new life. And he gives it the gift of letting it go without an argument, something I don’t think Mensah herself would have been able to do, if she’d been the one to wake up.
Lately I’ve been thinking even more than usual about What Art Can Accomplish Right Now. I doubt I’m alone in that. I think it’s this. The Weitzes looked at Dr. Gurathin, and saw an opportunity to layer in a backstory that didn’t just add depth to the character, but also became a prism for the themes of the books and the show. Murderbot is about free will, but through Gurathin the show is able to ask: how much free will can even a human person really have under a system that sees them as only as a resource to be exploited? Rather than giving us info dumps or exposition, they found a way to talk about this giant capital-T THEME through an irritating, hilarious, deeply lovable character.[end-mark]
There’s a long and powerful queer lineage of artists whose bodies were politicized, pathologized, and misunderstood and who still chose to create from that place.
FireAid, the massive benefit concert for those affected by the LA wildfires, reportedly raised an estimated $100 million. The concert — which featured a surprise Nirvana reunion with St. Vincent and Joan Jett, massive pop stars like Lady Gaga and Billie Eilish, and icons like Joni Mitchell — took place this past January at the neighboring Inglewood venues Intuit Dome and Kia Forum, but now wildfire victims have been asking where all this fundraised support has gone. One person trying to come up with some answers about how victims can receive direct financial help is LA-based investigative journalist Sue Pascoe, who runs the site Circling The News.
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