One other really WILD take I've been seeing here lately is an idea that Mensah is going to go off on Gurathin or has 'finally had it' with what he's doing. I don't want to blame it on Mensah being a female character and therefore obligated to babysit everyone, but I think that might play a part. Either way, I don't think so, fam.
For one thing, Ayda Mensah has WAY too much common sense to get in the middle of whatever the fuck is happening with those two. If she goes off, it'll be at both of them, because they're both being shitheads. But I think it's way more likely that she'll stay out of it. They don't need lectures on morality. She's not their mother. They need to figure their own shit out.
(Also, Gurathin has rejection-sensitive dysphoria and is halfway to feeling replaced already. The last thing you want to do to someone in that situation and that state of mind is yell at them.)
But the biggest point, and one I think we need to face here, is that Gurathin is doing exactly what Mensah wants him to do.
Look at them. They've been friends for six years. Mensah agreed to him coming on the mission, and says she's glad he's here, and you know what, I believe her. David has described their relationship as codependent in interviews. Codependence means you're both using each other for something, even if it's not malicious, right? Gurathin uses Mensah for comfort, and as a moral compass. We already know this. What does Mensah use Gurathin for?
Well, what's the one thing Mensah isn't great at doing? Being an asshole. Being harsh and uncompromising. Being suspicious of other people's goodwill.
Gurathin, in all his paranoia and belligerence, is doing his job. Going too far in some cases, and she almost certainly wishes he'd chill out a bit, for his own sake as well as Murderbot's. But there is a reason she listens to him, and it's not because she feels sorry for him or has no backbone (she's told people off when she needed to, a few times now) or he's some kind of Wormtongue influencing her thoughts. Honey, no. She listens to him because he might be right and because she knows her own weaknesses. She's too trusting, sometimes straying into naive. And he is there to balance that out. There's the bunch of hippies, and Gurathin. The designated bastard. The ruthless sonofabitch who will make damn sure they don't get killed by their own kindness.
And despite stress and jealousy and spite sometimes compromising his judgment, he's still right more often than he's wrong, and some of the things he's wrong about haven't been proven yet. So his usefulness continues. Of course it does. He's from the Company, usefulness is all he thinks he has to offer. She knows he'll continue to be useful until his last breath if needed. She can count on that, in a way that she can't count on Murderbot (yet).
Mensah, god help her, wants Gurathin exactly the way he is. Otherwise she'd have done something about it by now. It'd be easy to write him off as a blind spot in her judgment, but no. She knows he's Like That, and that's the whole point.
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