Imagine a bored Robocop. There you have the vibe of new comedy drama Murderbot, adapted by Chris and Paul Weitz (the co-creators of American Pie, Antz, About a Boy and more) from the sci-fi book seriesThe Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells.
The premise is a good one. What if one of the cyborg security units used by the all-powerful, not overly benevolent Company that operates throughout the galaxy’s Corporation Rim managed to hack his own governor module and restored free will to himself? So instead of attending to the safety of humans working for or leasing mining rights from the Company he could go rogue and kill them all? And what if he’d rather not? What if he couldn’t really be bothered. What if he would rather spend his time watching shows on the Company’s streaming services and … well, not much else?
The security unit in question – No 238776431, since you ask – is played by Alexander Skarsgård, with all his cool quirk deployed. After coming to consciousness and deciding to hide his new abilities, he finds himself assigned to a group of researchers from the Preservation Alliance, an “unaligned” planet that tries to run along more egalitarian lines than the signed-up members of the Rim. They are eager to inform 238776431 that they are “not comfortable with the idea of a sentient construct being required to work for us”, but the Company will not issue insurance for them until they do. So they chose him, as the cheapest option. 238776431 hasn’t yet mastered the art of the eyeroll, but faced with these “hippie scientists” you can feel the desire building.
The team is led – though they of course try not to put it that way – by Dr Ayda Mensah (the wonderful Noma Dumezweni, too often relegated to smaller parts). The other members are geologist Bharadwaj (Tamara Podemski), Arada (Tattiawna Jones), her wife, Pin-Lee (Sabrina Wu), and Ratthi (Akshay Khanna), a nascent throuple despite Pin-Lee’s reservations, and augmented human Gurathin (David Dastmalchian), who is the first to realise that something may be afoot with their security unit, while the rest are keen to embrace our antihero as part of the team. They treat him with kindness and consideration. He rides alongside the rest of them instead of in the cargo hold and is given one of their spare uniforms to wear. They drive him up the wall. “Stupid fucking humans,” is his constant inner refrain.
As Gurathin’s suspicions grow, the group argues about whether damage to his governor module would automatically make him less trustworthy. On the one hand, his compromised robot-focus leads to Bharadwaj being terribly injured. But on the other, he chooses to save her, suffering massive – albeit reparable – damage in the process. Does that put him ahead of or behind an automaton? 238776431 calls on lines from his favourite of the Company’s shows, The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon (a kind of soap opera Star Trek, with John Cho as the dashing captain and DeWanda Wise as his Navigation Bot love interest) to help him fake his way through various interactions, although he still cannot get to grips with eye contact and when called upon to give a speech would rather, like most of us, die instead.
For at least the first five of its 10 half-hour episodes, Murderbot does little but tread water, and the comedic conceit of a stony-faced cyborg secretly hating its human overlords and wishing to be left in peace is soon played out. There is only so much non-eyerolling at a throuple situation you can watch before the joke is no longer even as minimally funny as it was.
The pace picks up a little when the hippies feel duty bound to investigate the massacre of another group of research scientists nearby. Then, the wall between the security unit and his humans begins to break down and we can all start to ponder the usual questions about what makes us human, how we should treat the soulless and the ensouled and what our choices say about us. And so on.
This first series is based on a slim book that doesn’t have much plot, and the Weitz brothers appear to have cleaved too faithfully to it, instead of using it as a springboard to profounder things. Though the pacing improves and the characters’ interactions become more meaningful as the series goes on, when “stupid fucking humans” remains the bulk of the commentary and “I don’t have a stomach so I can’t throw up but if I did, I would” are a representative sample of humour, it feels like a wasted opportunity.
Murderbot is on Apple TV+ now.