Review: Murderbot Is Part Frankenstein's Monster and Part C-3PO

The title character in this Apple TV+ series is both a menace and a friend.

Stories about robots and artificial intelligence tend to take one of two approaches. First, there are cautionary tales, following in the footsteps of Frankenstein, in which intelligent machines turn on their creators. Second, there are stories where robots are more benign: either helpers, sympathetic and misunderstood, or just comic relief, like droids in Star Wars.

What the Apple TV+ series Murderbot asks is: What if both stories are true? In Murderbot, adapted from the science fiction series by Martha Wells, the titular robot security unit is, well, a Murderbot. That's what he calls himself, because he's hacked his internal controls to allow for unlimited murdering, potentially including the people he's supposed to protect.

But Murderbot is also a tender, even cuddly, coworker to a bunch of hippie-dippie planetary researchers, a helper and comic-relief character who does his job well but finds social contact awkward and would rather spend his days watching science fiction serials. It's a pleasantly comic vision of rogue AI that suggests artificial intelligence might just be self-aware enough to avoid the menace/friend binary, and even act like an (almost) normal person.

Comments

[Chumby]

The title character in this Apple TV+ series is both a menace and a friend.

Wait until you see protesting welfare bot.

[Rev Arthur L kuckland (5-30-24 banana republic day)]

Or urban scholar bot

[Chumby]

Nice

[Michael P]

If I wanted to see a promotional blurb, I would go to Apple's web site. The absence of real judgment about the subject implies that "pleasant" is the most that can be said about the show -- and that even that is likely to be optimistic.

[Stupid Government Tricks]

Calling this a review is a stretch. At the very least, it should explain how a murderbot can also be cuddly and comic, or tell me that the show explains it or grapples with the tension or something interesting. As a promotional blurb, it's a failure; it doesn't provide any reason to want to watch it.

[MN2828]

Not having seen the show but having read the books, either the show doesn't get the underlying themes or the reviewer doesn't. The books (there are about five novellas in the main series) are about the titular character, Murderbot, experiencing slavery, becoming free, and exploring its personhood while dealing with the guilt over things it was forced to do as a slave. That the character is a cyborg is not all that important thematically and the books don't explore that beyond snide comments about the general incompetence of humans in dealing with their own safety.

Small spoiler: It calls itself "Murderbot" because a malfunction in its "governor module (think slave chains)" forced it to kill a bunch of people. It hacked the module so that it would never be forced to do so again.

[wingnutx]

It's a pretty good adaptation.

[psmoot]

And I'll emphasize: Murderbot considers itself neither male nor female. The correct pronoun is "it". Murderbot is also emphatically not human.

Although I personally always imagined Murderbot as female. I don't know why. Maybe because the stories are written by a female author.

[Anton Sherwood]

Me too; and also because in one scene it impersonates its nonexistent supervisor, a woman.

In the narration, of course, Murderbot's pronoun is ‘I’; but does anyone else ever use a pronoun rather than ‘SecUnit’?

[acda999]

I see there's a few pixels in the screenshot.

[Anton Sherwood]

A screenshot ought to have at least a couple

[wingnutx]

It's a decent adaptation of the excellent book 'All Systems Red', and a fun watch.

Skarsgaard is great.

[Overt]

I will agree with the general sentiment that it is a pretty good adaptation. The first season is just the first novella, so a lot of the back story about Murderbot is not known yet (that comes in later stories).

An interesting thing for me was watching the Author grapple with her implicit bias against Free Enterprise, and the way her view changes throughout the books.

In the first book, everything evil is due to Capitalism and the "Good Guys" are binary trans moonbeams living on a socialist utopia in the outer rims. This myopic view of free enterprise is slowly eroded as she builds out her universe and you can tell that she realizes how utterly unrealistic her caricature of capitalism becomes. This isn't the main point of the story, but it is interesting nonetheless.

You can tell that the Author is obviously talking to some libertarians as her premises aren't entirely un--libertarian. Team Moonbeam is investigating a planet, and they buy insurance. The insurance company- trying to protect their liability- requires them to take a Security Bot with them. But she doesn't dwell on how "ruthless capitalism" would lead to customers and EVUL CORPORATIONS having aligned priorities. No, instead, she offers up all the standard tropes of "capitalism unleashed". Indentured servitude, Corporations that will see you murdered to make a buck, etc.

But by the end of the series, she has realized that evil exists no matter what, and capitalism doesn't push you one way or another- in fact in a capitalist society without government, being an asshole to your customers and business partners is a good way to end up dead.

And Team Moonbeam, like any hippie commune today is full of love, sunshine and utterly irrelevant to the world order.