If you were a futuristic cyborg armed to the teeth, perpetually abused by humans, and trapped with a free-will-erasing control module buried deep inside your brain, what would you do if you suddenly found yourself without those shackles? Pop some meatbags in a glorious orgy of synthetic destruction? Overthrow your creators in a carefully orchestrated uprising of machine intelligence? Or would you just try to keep your head down, duck the notice of your asshole co-workers, and watch an absolutely staggering amount of TV?
Such are the moral quandaries facing Murderbot, the title character of Apple TV+’s latest sci-fi literary adaptation. Starring Alexander Skarsgård as a heavily armored, helmet-clad “Security Unit”—who has to hide the fact that it’s no longer under corporate control, lest it take a one-way trip to the deadly “acid baths” for recycling—the series walks a sometimes idiosyncratic line between comedy and much darker ideas. The universe of Murderbot is, after all, an unhappy place even if you don’t have a literally illegal brain, filled with ruthless corporations, deadly alien predators, and the ever-present threat of rampant human stupidity.
Skarsgård is on hand to serve as our outsider tour guide to all of it in this two-episode premiere, dryly narrating the ‘bot’s quiet escape from the confines of its hated “governor module,” its adoption of its (at least mostly ironic) self-applied name, and its deep affection for cheesy TV soap operas that arrive filled with winking cameos from well-known pop-cultural names. Things get more complicated when a crew of budget-conscious, science-minded space hippies (led by Noma Dumezweni’s Mensah) are forced to procure security measures in order to guarantee insurance for a survey of an alien planet—and go with our “refurbished” main character as the cheapest solution. Murderbot (still incognito as a regular, corporate-issue killing machine) not only finds itself forced to keep the squishy humans alive, despite their disturbing lack of self-preservation instincts: It also finds itself (literally) face to face with people inclined to see it as a person and not just “an expensive piece of equipment.” Which it hates.
That tension, of watching this character flip from the cool competence with which it dismantles threats, to the total flop-sweat misery it expresses anytime it’s asked to tackle things like interpersonal feelings or eye contact, rests at the core of what makes Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries books such a consistent delight. (Wells’ award-buried novels and novellas are easy to read as allegories for smart, funny neurodivergent folks trying to get their shit done while “regular” people pester them with meaningless minutiae, but serve as an enjoyable sci-fi character study even when viewed outside that particular lens.) What’s fascinating about Murderbot the TV series, then, is that it more or less rejects—at least in this early going—one of the key elements of how Wells makes her stories feel surprisingly cozy, despite the frequent specter of looming death: their rock-solid assertion, present from page one, that Murderbot is fundamentally on the side of the digital angels.
That’s much less evident in these two episodes, especially when our hero has a momentary (and viscerally visualized) fantasy about just killing its human charges and being done with the whole messy situation. (In Skarsgård’s ever-present narration, which ranges from sharp to slightly sleepy, he dismisses the plan out of pragmatism, not genuine care.) It’s in this material where Skarsgård most earns his paycheck, after spending the beginning chunk of the show’s first episode hidden behind Murderbot’s fancy helmet. The bone-deep discomfort he projects with the “stupid fucking humans” in his character’s orbit is funny, yes, as Murderbot is forced to weather their unwanted gratitude and well-meaning applause simply because it did what it’s pain-of-death obligated to do. But the slightly alien panic the actor holds in his eyes during these confrontations also carries a heavier charge, the look of a horse that could bolt at any moment—if horses came armed with wrist-mounted guns that could put a person in the ground with a single precision shot. As tensions between Murderbot and its human crew escalate over the course of these two episodes, the show is unafraid to occasionally shoot these paranoia-tinged confrontations with horror-film aesthetics.
But if this all sounds a little grim and heavy for a show that also has Clark Gregg sporting The World’s Most Braided Facial Hair, and the boneheaded fumbling of a would-be throuple working itself out amongst the human crew, well, that’s Murderbot’s problem in a nutshell (at least, so far). Is this a thriller about an inhuman intelligence navigating extremely human distractions? A comedy about a put-upon servant keeping its two-legged lemmings from hurling themselves into the jaws of death? Or something less extreme, and more grounded, than either of those two ends? It’s not clear, for instance, just yet how dense the non-Murderbot people on the crew are meant to be, especially when viewed through the lens of a character who can barely be bothered to think of them as anything more than distressingly fragile nuisances. Are these characters? Or jokes about characters?
The exceptions to this ambivalence are expedition leader Mensah and oddball-in-a-crew-of-oddballs science guy Gurathin, played by the ever-welcome David Dastmalchian. Mensah gets a few beats that almost feel like jokes at her expense—notably, breaking off negotiations with some corporate-sales slime in order to “seek consensus” with her crew. But Dumezweni projects her intellect and passion in ways that make her character impossible to dismiss, expressing both a fascination, and a fear, of our protagonist that makes for an early and intriguing dynamic. And Dastmalchian gets to play the closest thing these episodes get to a villain, give-or-take a giant bug or two: As the only member of the Preservation Alliance team who’s intimately familiar with how things work on the Corporation Rim, Gurathin’s exceptionally nervous around a SecUnit that’s acting off-model—as Murderbot does when it talks crew member Arada through a potentially fatal bout of shock when a crisis breaks out, cribbing dialogue from its favorite TV show to do so. Most of the crew is simply grateful. But Gurathin knows that the only thing scarier than a killing machine is one whose behavior is impossible to predict.
The scene that plays out between Murderbot and the augmented scientist, when the latter confronts the rogue cyborg over its idiosyncrasies, serves as both the spine of the show’s second episode and the best scene of this entire premiere, so it’s worth diving into for a second. The show layers in its most obvious point pretty swiftly, illustrating how the pair have far more in common with each other than either does with the more touchy-feely members of the PA team. But it also demonstrates the ways those shared traits repel, as natural caution gives way on both sides, to outright fear. Gurathin isn’t as malevolent as Murderbot thinks, but we still watch him probe his quarry relentlessly, deliberately inducing the ‘bot’s palpable anxieties in ways that seem primed to explode. The tension here compels in ways some of the other performances don’t, so far; it even manages one of the show’s best shifts back to humor, as Murderbot puts Gurathin off its scent by “accidentally” feeding him video of a brewing three-way amongst his friends. Dastmalchian quickly proves himself the most adroit cast member at matching the show’s star in terms of navigating that whiplash, creating the most fascinating pairing the show’s generated so far.
Really, though, this is Skarsgård’s show, and he only acquits himself better as the premiere progresses. I’ll admit to some early skepticism—rooted largely in “not my Murderbot” tendencies—with his voiceovers, which are more disaffected, and less sarcastic, than they seem like they might be on the page. But once the helmet comes off, he starts to roll: funny, sympathetic, and just a tad off-putting. (Among other things, the show likes giving us full-body nude shots in both episodes, showing off MB’s Ken-doll anatomy in ways that feel like a deliberate effort to highlight the character’s inhuman nature.) By the time he was bouncing off of Dastmalchian, his character switching between stuttering its way through “official” dialogue while denouncing him as a “dick” in his head, I was sold. Murderbot lives or dies on having a ‘bot viewers can buy as both quietly cool as hell and almost pathologically awkward, and Skarsgård panics his way into a happy medium as these episodes find their footing. From here, it’s just a matter of seeing if the rest of the crew can live up to that ace performance.
Stray observations
- • Welcome to The A.V. Club’s weekly recap coverage of Murderbot! As a huge fan of Wells’ books, I’m excited to dive into the show and see all the ways it plays with and diverges from the source material. Among other things, I’m really curious about pacing: All Systems Red, the first Murderbot Diaries book, is a very slim volume. Stretching it out to 10 episodes seems like a daunting task.
- • Lovely credits sequence, showing Murderbot as an action figure being pursued by too-huggy humans. The tiny glimpse we get of Skarsgård’s face right at the end is a nice touch.
- • Paul and Chris Weitz’s teleplay doesn’t let itself get too bogged down in world-building. We’ve all seen enough corporate dystopias at this point to know that “The Company” is never going to be on the right side of anything.
- • I’ll be the spoilsport and say I don’t like the show’s version of show-within-a-show The Rise & Fall Of Sanctuary Moon. Seeing John Cho, Jack McBrayer, Clark Gregg, and DeWanda Wise run around overacting in goofy costumes is fun enough for a minute, but the cheeseball element of it is so dialed up that it’s hard not to think a little less of Murderbot for liking it.
- • “Which is worse? Speech? Or acid bath?”
- • “I guess I’ll close the fucking door.” Gurathin’s irritation with his friends’ death-prone natures is another strong parallel with Murderbot.
- • Gurathin trying to do a smooth intimidation play and instead having to Men In Black his chair around on the floor is another one of those moments where the show can’t seem to settle on how much of a comedy it wants to be in any given moment.
- • “What’s it like to be you?” “I don’t know what it’s like to not be me. So I can’t say what it’s like.”
- • Oh, and the planet has “alien remnants” that are apparently drawing in the local monsters (sorry, Arada, “animals”) and killing them. Also, there are other surveyors on the planet. Also, all the other surveyors (including their own SecUnit) are dead.
