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.
