Murderbot Is Almost the Real Thing

Murderbot, Apple TV+’s new adaptation of Martha Wells’s science-fiction book series, teeters on the margins of greatness. A story about a security cyborg with violent capabilities that’s learned how to be human by hacking its control chip and binging bad TV, Murderbot the TV series gets more right than it gets wrong. It pokes at all the most interesting questions about its world and its protagonist. How human can Alexander Skarsgård’s Murderbot be, and should it even want to be human? Is humanity required for compassion? Where is the line between mimicking behavior and feeling it, and how much does that distinction actually matter?

The show, thankfully, avoids the easiest reductions that would sell out the things that make Wells’s series so fascinating: A computer longing to be human is familiar, but Murderbot is not Pinocchio, and it has no desire to become a real boy, nor does the series ever suggest that it should. (But also, put a pin in “boy.”) Still, the series grapples with but cannot overcome the classic stumbling blocks of adapting a written work told through a first-person narrator. On screen we see Murderbot from the outside. There’s no avoiding it, and for better and for worse, that move into a world seen from beyond Murderbot’s perspective flattens everything into a story that’s simpler, sillier, and lighter.

The show’s biggest boon is Skarsgård, who plays Murderbot with an unblinking straightness that still manages to read as a whole palette of emotional experience. It’s a war of micro-expressions, and Skarsgård has brought a bazooka (his face, my God) to a knife fight. Murderbot is somehow sulky and exasperated and frightened and amused in turn, but Skarsgård manages to communicate these emotions through a series of tiny choices that could each, if seen as a single still frame, be legitimately described as “an expressionless man.” It is delicate, lovely work that would singlehandedly be enough to make the series worth checking out, most especially toward the end of the season, where the whole show finally clicks into the best version of itself.

Beyond Skarsgård, things are more uneven. The human crew of this mission, whom Murderbot is bound to protect, are well-meaning and sometimes fun but often come off as a little clunky. Noma Dumezweni plays Mensah, the closest thing Murderbot has to a foil, and she plays the role of the team leader with enough nuance and range to make Mensah’s moments of vital insight feel well-earned. The other highlight among the crew is David Dastmalchian as Gurathin, the team’s augmented human data guy, and Dastmalchian’s performance effectively portrays Gurathin as deeply suspicious because he is, ultimately, painfully anxious and sensitive. Outside of them, though, the other performances struggle to lock into what the tone of this series really wants to be. They are sometimes having intense, traumatized responses to a horrible event, but at the same time, for instance, that horrible event was an attack by a huge goofy-looking alien worm that shoots way past “scary” and falls somewhere in the zone of “cartoonish.” Everybody loves a threesome plotline driven by humorous miscommunication! Except also everyone keeps almost dying, and because it’s difficult to tell how much time is passing between one event and another, it’s also hard to imagine how they also have all this mental and emotional energy for fun new sexual partners.

In some cases, the tonal whiplash works. Murderbot’s love of bad TV is expressed via a show-within-a-show representation of its favorite soap, The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, which is rendered with daytime soap-style performances from John Cho, Jack McBrayer, and DeWanda Wise, and with more than one Flock of Seagulls–style hairdo. The show is so outlandish that it plays well against Skarsgård’s restrained performance, which is exactly what makes Murderbot such a fascinating central character. Its exterior reveals nothing, while inside it is obsessively watching stratospherically over-the-top melodrama. Anna Konkle also dominates her guest-star appearance as the lone survivor of a catastrophe on another mission; her deranged unpredictability helps so much to define the tone of where this show works best that her scenes are like donning and then removing glasses, so the whole show goes into focus and then fuzzes out again.

There’s enough of this Murderbot to love that it’s worth the brief, breezy watch. Adaptations should stand on their own, without necessary reference to whatever the original work was and without an obedience to unwinnable aims like faithfulness or fidelity to every story beat, every character makeup, or every plot point. There, this Murderbot mostly succeeds. But what it’s lost is something more fundamental about the core of what makes Wells’s books so compelling. From a reader’s perspective, there is no access to any of these human characters except through Murderbot’s point of view. To him, they are inherently alien, with bizarre qualities Murderbot cannot understand and does not really care to explore. On the show, they’re all just weird science-y normies, seen from an objective camera-eye.

What’s more interesting is how Murderbot slowly comes to understand itself, something that happens entirely through narrative interiority in the books and which the TV series can only skim the surface of through Skarsgård’s frequent voiceover. The humor of the books is darker and drier, partly because it comes filtered entirely through the perspective of a cyborg that views humanity as inherently untrustworthy and violence as a frustrating but useful chore. The Murderbot of the books sees itself as entirely outside of any human definition of gender, for instance — not because of some cynical desire for diversity of sexual orientations, but because for Murderbot, that entire concept is a completely mystifying and alienating way of defining oneself. Murderbot considers that idea directly and frequently through Wells’s work, and it becomes one of the bright defining reasons why Murderbot insists that it is not and can never be human.

But the TV Murderbot dodges this issue entirely, avoiding any discussion of gender while also tilting the character heavily toward masculinity through the choice to cast Skarsgård. (Yes, the TV Murderbot also has the waist-down anatomy of a Ken doll, but that never stopped anyone from guessing at Ken’s preferred pronouns.) It’s not that the series wholly misrepresents or flinches away from this element of Murderbot’s character. It’s a missed opportunity, a decision not to get into one of the key things that makes Murderbot ontologically distinct. Murderbot, seen from the inside, just has more to say about itself. Seen from the outside, though, Murderbot becomes a fun and funny space romp with a few interesting ideas about what makes a person.