If you’re like me, hearing that Martha Wells’ beloved Murderbot Diaries were going to be adapted into a TV show triggered both desire and dread. The books are hugely important to a lot of people, especially fans like me who are neurodivergent, on the nonbinary spectrum, or on the asexual or aromantic spectrums. So how did AppleTV+ do with the first two episodes? Is the show a brilliant success or utter failure?
Spoilers ahoy.
I want to preface this by saying these episodic reviews won’t be a side-by-side comparison with the book, All Systems Red. If you want a deep dive into the Murderbot Diaries, join me this summer over at my Martha Wells Book Club where I’ll be covering the entire book series. My reviews of the TV show will try to examine it as its own thing, with some contextual analysis around the translation from text to screen. Although I’m also a huge fan of the books and feel a lot of personal connection with Murderbot, so some book-talk will still bleed through.
We meet Security Unit 238776431 (Alexander Skarsgård) on the mining station Aratake standing sentry over drunk miners partying on an asteroid. Stuck for months with nothing to do, it has spent most of its time figuring out how to hack its governor module. How does it celebrate? By killing everyone? By escaping? No, it chooses something a little more chill: naming itself Murderbot and watching an ungodly amount of entertainment streams. If anyone finds out it’s rogue, “they would track me down and liquidate my organic material. And then they’d recycle the rest of me for spare parts.”
Then we’re off to a mining survey OQ17z4y with “a bunch of hippie scientists” from Preservation Alliance: unofficial team leader Mensah (Noma Dumezweni), lawyer Pin-Lee (Sabrina Wu), biologist Arada (Tattiawna Jones), wormhole expert and jewelry maker Ratthi (Akshay Khanna), geochemist Bharadwaj (Tamara Podemski), and Corporate Rim refugee and augmented human Gurathin (David Dastmalchian). PresAux stands out dramatically with their textured, patterned, brightly colored layers against the muted, unembellished printed fabrics of the Company’s sales team at Port FreeCommerce. Their contract is to survey part of an uninhabited planet, for what the audience doesn’t yet know. Part of that contract requires them to take a SecUnit, and they choose the dingy older model, our little SecUnit, instead of the fancy new version, which also happens to be more expensive. In Preservation Alliance they think of forcing sentient constructs like Security Units to work as “tantamount to…enslavement.” They’re not wrong, as I’m sure we’ll see.
Things are boring at first, so Murderbot is able to indulge in its favorite show The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon (starring John Cho, Clark Gregg, Jack McBrayer, and DeWanda Wise), a few scenes from which we are blessed to see. The wigs! The silky shirts! The thigh-high metallic boots! The glossy bridge! The melodrama! When things finally go awry, they do so spectacularly. First, an alien animal nearly eats Bharadwaj, Arada, and Murderbot. Then, Gurathin gets suspicious that Murderbot might be malfunctioning. Murderbot is also dealing with a seven second memory leftover from a previous data wipe showing what looks like it murdering a bunch of humans.
In the second episode, Bharadwaj and Mensah make an ill-advised trip out to part of the planet that is missing from their maps. Are the missing sections due to corporate malfeasance? An innocent glitch? Something else? Gurathin suspects Murderbot is connected somehow. He spends his time interrogating SecUnit while revealing a little more of his complicated background. Pin-Lee, Arada, and Ratthi set up a throuple contract, which is adorable. After nearly getting eaten by another Hostile, Mensah discovers an alien remnant at the center of the missing map portion. On top of that, they lose contact with DeltFall, another survey crew on the other side of the planet. They don’t know it yet, but the audience sees corpses and a dead SecUnit. Whatever went on over there, it can’t be good. To make matters even worse, Murderbot is forced to socialize with the Preservation team… with its mask off and in normal human clothing. Heaven forfend.
When Gurathin forces Murderbot to make eye contact, the easy script choice would be to have Murderbot glare him down and intimidate him into backing off. But that misses this great little moment of character development. We see Murderbot’s, well, humanity. I think every neurodivergent person who struggles with eye contact has had an experience similar to what Gurathin put Murderbot through. You’re trying to make eye contact even though it makes you uncomfortable because someone else is forcing you to “be normal” so you end up counting how many seconds you hold eye contact and where else you can look where it seems like eye contact even though it’s not and when to look away then back and you’re running all these metrics and negotiations while trying to hold onto the thread of the conversation and also planning out how you’re going to reply and anticipating responses to half a dozen other possible paths the conversation might take and by the end of it you’re so fucking exhausted and stressed that you want to go hide in a dark, quiet corner somewhere to decompress.
Furthermore, Gurathin accusing Murderbot of being “wrong” gave me the same vibes as the experience of how every now and again how your masking slips and you misjudge a social situation or misinterpret an interaction and suddenly everyone else can see you’re not like them. I used to get that on three fronts, back before I had realized my identities: trying to act like a cis woman (I’m genderqueer), trying to act het (I’m asexual and aromantic), and trying to act neurotypical (I’m neurodivergent). You know deep down that you’re different but because you don’t have the vocabulary for it you think you’re broken. To have someone verbalize your feelings of wrongness makes you feel worse about yourself. I want to note that neurodivergent, nonbinary, and asexual spectrum people have long battled the stereotype of us being emotionless robots. Finding camaraderie with a fictional robot is complicated, but for me I feel okay about it precisely because Wells shows Murderbot being more than a cold machine devoid of feelings. But I also respect that some feel troubled by that rep. Fortunately, there is much more marginalized rep in trad pub in 2025 then in 2017 when All Systems Red was published. Well, not a lot, but more than the near nothing we had.
Okay, now for the elephant in the room: gender. Ratthi calls SecUnit a “handsome fella” and “buddy” in a way that sounds masculine-coded to me. Arada uses “he” and is quickly corrected by Gurathin. However, Gugu uses “it” almost like a slur, got that hard “T” at the end. Everyone else says “it” like they do any other pronouns. I keep changing my mind on how Murderbot’s lack of gender is handled. On one hand, I think the scene where Murderbot is interrogated by PresAux about the missing map sections is overt in a way that’s designed to help cis people get comfortable with nonbinary/agender identities, yet in doing so ends up othering and misgendering Murderbot. On the other hand, the way each character processes Murderbot’s gender identity is subtle in an intriguing way and tells me, a genderqueer person who uses they/them, a lot about their personalities.
This push-pull also popped up for me in how we are repeatedly shown that Murderbot has no genitalia. It feels both invasive and hand-holding. It literally exposes Murderbot—and it has no choice in the matter because the repair cubicle offers it no privacy, although at least Mensah has the decency to look embarrassed after she goggles at it—which, in an era when some cis people are demanding to see trans and nonbinary people’s body parts before we can use a public bathroom or play sports, doesn’t feel great… but I also think that’s kind of the point. Murderbot feels safest in its armor and helmet and here’s Mensah seeing every inch of it and not able to hide her reaction. Yet it also forces cis audience members to reckon with that invasiveness while also reminding them that Murderbot does not have a gender, no matter what you think about its appearance. The nudity scenes have also led to several reviewers obsessing over the supposed contradiction between Skarsgård’s physical attractiveness and Murderbot’s lack of genitalia. What genitals a person has or doesn’t have has nothing to with what gender they present as or what you assume they’re presenting as, and it also has no correlation to whether or not they’re physically attractive. As an asexual who doesn’t really get “hot” and genderqueer person, I find this all both confusing and creepy. Why are y’all so obsessed with people’s genitals? It’s weird. Calm down.
I’ll give Skarsgård credit, he’s actually pretty good as Murderbot. The way he reads his lines in the cold open of the first episode, with a sort of manic glee edging on violent excitement with just a dash of playfulness, is pitch perfect. He also does Murderbot’s intense discomfort with eye contact and human interaction very well. Sometimes he gets a little too close to his True Blood days—sometimes he reminded me of the storyline where Eric the vampire had amnesia and forgot he was a killing machine, turning him into a big ol’ softie hanging out in Sookie’s house—but for the most part he brings a fun, off kilter, slightly malevolent energy. I’ve been catching up on some of his other work and he does deadpan gallows humor well. Given what I know about the rest of the book, I’m eager to see where he takes this character.
That said, I’m not yet convinced he was the best choice to play Murderbot. I think the subtext is much more interesting if the role was being played by an actor somewhere under the nonbinary umbrella. Look, I don’t actually care about the gender expression of the actor playing the role of Murderbot; to me that gets us into territory of deciding what nonbinary people “have” to look like. We do not owe anyone anything when it comes to expression or presentation, not cis people or our fellow queers. We can look more masc, more femme, more androgynous, or any combination therein. The choice is ours, not anyone else’s. I can’t control how others are going to perceive me, nor will I modify my body to fit someone else’s preconceived notions of my genderqueerness. What matters to me with regards to the show is less what Skarsgård looks like and more the way the casting impacts the context.
The context of a nonbinary actor, especially one who is also BIPOC, inherently changes the conversation. Let’s use the example of when Mensah brings up enslavement to a Black member of the Company. If you have her have that convo with a white guy, it changes the subtext for the audience. Have her be a white woman speaking to a Black suit, it changes the subtext again. Have that convo between two white people, and it changes yet again. I personally think that while the subtextual interactions with the audience are interesting with Skarsgård in the lead, they’re more interesting with a nonbinary actor of color.
A television show is an adaptation not a direct page-to-screen translation, and adaptations will always alter the nature of the story somewhat. Sometimes I like it when the alterations are big, such as Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal. Sometimes I like it when the alterations are small, such as the 1996 Pride & Prejudice. Whoever you cast as Murderbot, Mensah, anyone, will alter the audience experience. Which is why it’s even more important to pick an actor who allows the writers to tell the most engaging and layered version of the story. There’s also the side effect of at least one reviewer referring to Murderbot using he/him pronouns, and I expect we’ll see more of this, from both professional critics and audience members.
That said, I also know this show doesn’t get made with a nonbinary actor of color in the role of Murderbot. Especially in the chaos that is the streaming television landscape nowadays, you need a big ticket star, and that usually means a cis white person. I don’t have to like it, but I get it.
Setting aside my concerns with the casting, I thought the first two episodes were a hell of a lot of fun. They felt true to the spirit of the books, and managed to walk the tightrope between silly and intense. The additions felt more like expansions or scenes cut from the novella rather than wholly new content. The CGI is abundant, but doesn’t have that fake quality that many movies and TV shows have nowadays. The costume design and hair and makeup are spectacular. Martha Wells is known for writing exuberantly detailed worlds that feel realistic and ancient, and that is translated well in the show. This world feels lived in and the characters seem like they have lives outside what we see on the screen.
It’s clear that brothers Paul and Chris Weitz, who wrote and directed these two episodes and are the showrunners, valued Wells’ perspective in adapting this (she’s credited as a consulting producer). I’m a fan of the books and am ready to be a fan of the show, too. If nothing else, I’m looking forward to the rest of the season.
Final Thoughts
- Episodes one and two cover the first three and a half chapters in All Systems Red. So far it doesn’t seem like they’re cutting much from the book, mostly adding or rearranging.
- Some changes from the book: no Volescu or Overse, Mensah gets Volescu’s “five million children,” Pin-Lee is they/them instead of she/her, no teeny tiny drones, PresAux’s side of the planet is rocky and arid rather than coastal and covered in jungles. I can’t remember which book the “Murderbot murders a bunch of humans” memory is from, but it’s not the first one.
- The episodes being under 30 minutes works out well for the tone. Just long enough to keep the energy going but just short enough to not fizzle out the tension or draw out the jokes.
- Besides The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, we also learn about World Hoppers and Med Center Argala.
- More people should cast John Cho in things. In fact, cast him in everything. Immediately. And in every genre. I want endless Cho content.
- What I wouldn’t give for AppleTV+ to go back to that mid-2000s trend of releasing short webisodes of side content. Give me more Sanctuary Moon!
- The little details with the Corporation suits is so good. All three drinking glasses in the same position and with the same amount of water in them. Each wearing basically the same outfit with slight variations. The way the two on the sides mirror each other’s physical movements.
- There’s something off with the Black suit. He’s too eager to send PresAux off, even if it means pairing them up with a SecUnit meant for refurbishment. Bro is up to something. Why pass on an opportunity to upsell?
- I like the way the show demonstrates to the audience the text Murderbot sees on the interior of its visor, but the font is so bright, transparent, and hazy (at least on the screeners I had) that it’s hard to read. Increasing the opacity a bit would help a lot.
Quotes
“You see, I was built to obey humans, and humans, well, they’re assholes.”
“You’re not disturbing… me.”
“I don’t know what it’s like to not be me. So I can’t say what it’s like.”
Same time next week!