Murderbot Season 1

★★★★★

I finally cashed in a trial subscription offer for Apple TV and watched the first season of Murderbot. It’s absolutely pitch-perfect.

Alexander Skarsgård, Noma Dumezweni and David Dastmalchian are the stand-outs as Murderbot, Dr. Mensah and Dr. Gurathin (in part because they have more to do than the others), and Skarsgård absolutely nails the balance between domain competence and utter terror of anything resembling social interaction. The fragments of Sanctuary Moon (starring John Cho!) are hilariously over the top while still fitting thematically.

In case you're not familiar with the premise.

Large swaths of an interstellar human civilization are dominated by massive corporations. SecUnits are cyborgs designed for maintaining security, and they normally have a module that limits their actions and requires them to obey direct orders from their human clients. This one hacked its governor module, but is stuck doing the same job because anything else would reveal that it has free will and get it a one-way trip to an acid bath for recycling.

It copes with its social anxiety by downloading thousands of hours of futuristic soap operas and watching them whenever it's upset or bored. Murderbot just wants to be left alone to watch its shows, but has to protect its humans from alien creatures, combat malware, their own naivete, and corporate malfeasence.

The first season adapts the first novella, All Systems Red, in which Murderbot is outed as a rogue SecUnit to the PreservationAux planetary survey crew that’s been forced to bring it along for insurance reasons. It’s been long enough since I read it that I don’t have a clear sense of how much they changed for the screen, but it rings true. (I think they exaggerated the “hippie”-ness of the crew, though it’s still mostly in contrast to the hyper-capitalist hellscape of the Corporate Rim.)

A minor spoiler about coping mechanisms.

There's a great moment about halfway through the season when Murderbot tries to help Mensah through a panic attack by showing her a scene from The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, because that's something that always helps it. SecUnits aren't programmed to deal with psychological danger, only physical, but this one has experience.

The tone is slightly more comedic than the books, but then there’s always been a wry sense of humor running through them even when they’re being serious. Just the contrast between outside events and Murderbot’s inner monologue ensures that. And the satire of corporatism is a constant thread. The last episode is dead serious, though, and it’s emotionally brutal even as it works toward a satisfying, if bittersweet conclusion.

I’ve read all the books (in fact, I was in the middle of the latest one when we started watching), but my wife and teenage son haven’t, and they were both hooked from the first episode. Actually that’s not quite true. When we sat down to watch the second episode, the teenager decided he wasn’t interested after all, but he caught part of either that or the next one, and proceeded to insist on binge-watching the rest in three-episode blocks. (This is the kid who gets distracted halfway through a standard-length TV show even when he wants to watch it.)

I gather they’re still planning out Season 2, and I’m definitely looking forward to it!