Mensah is one of the main characters of the first season of the AppleTV+ sci-fi action-comedy, Murderbot.
Mensah is a terraforming expert and leader of a team of scientists from the Preservation Alliance, a utopian and egalitarian planet. She and her team have won a contract for a mission to research and explore a supposedly unexplored planet in the Corporation Rim. However, Mensah runs into two major problems during the expedition. One, it seems that there is more to what’s going on in the planet and with the mission than what the government is letting her in on. And two their security unit, a cyborg who has secretly named itself Murderbot (Alexander Skarsgård), seems to have overridden its government module and is gaining sentience by forming its own sense of self and free-will.
Mensah is warm, measured, brilliant, and a good leader in an extraordinary situation. But she is not without her flaws — instead of expressing her stress, she often internalizes her turmoil, which leads to constant panic attacks she tries to shield from Murderbot as well as the rest of the crew.
Mensah’s bisexuality is more casual than the triad in the B storyline but still present and essential. On an away mission, she lightly mentions that she has children and that at least two of her partners tried to dissuade her from going on the mission. (In the Preservation Alliance, both queerness and polyamory are destigmatized and accepted to the point of legality and contracts.) Not much is mentioned past this remark, but it shows Mensah’s life beyond the mission and gives her very real stakes to make sure she and her crew (and Murderbot) get off the planet alive.
Mensah’s bisexuality is far from being the center of her character or its development, but it still plays a vital part. It is an important and a not-to-be-overlooked factor that this is a leading character who is a bi person of color in a story that could have been easily both whitewashed and straightwashed. If you want to know more about the show, check out our Unicorn Scale review, here.