Murderbot (Apple TV, Depth of Field, Paramount Television Productions, Phantom Four Films, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Over the last week during which my husband Charles and I were out of town visiting his mother Edi in Martinez, California, we watched a number of movies and TV shows on the Apple TV+ “streaming” network. (This despicable “streaming” technology is displacing physical media for films and TV shows as well as records.) One was a series we screened July 29 and 30 and which we were particularly interested in: Murderbot, based on Martha Wells’s novel All Systems Down, first in a series of seven books (five novellas, two full-length novels) about Murderbot, a 25th century “SecUnit” (short for “Security Unit”) robot who has figured out how to hack its “governor module.” As a result, it’s free to obey or refuse human orders at will and go wherever it likes in the known universe. Interplanetary travel has become practical due to the discovery of wormholes in space that can move spacecraft along great distances, though navigation based on these is tricky and requires the use of onboard computers which, like Murderbot and the other mobile robots, can communicate with humans and so-called “augmented humans” (people who have had implants to increase their brain or brawn) by simply talking to them. I must say I was more than a bit disappointed when I heard that Alexander Skarsgård had been picked to play Murderbot because from Wells’s books (I’d read all seven and so had Charles; in fact, it was he who first turned me on to them) I had envisioned Murderbot as a short, wiry, compactly built female. (Indeed, I even had one of our neighbors, a short, wiry Lesbian, in mind as my model for what Murderbot looked like.) I also found myself hearing a woman’s voice as Murderbot – the books are narrated from Murderbot’s point of view and the author is a woman – even though Wells made it clear that Murderbot’s preferred gender pronouns are “it” and “its.” Though Murderbot is a mechanical construct overall, it incorporates human tissue and therefore can feel pain, though its electromechanical parts can dial down its pain sensitivity.

Aside from my qualms about casting Skarsgård as Murderbot (presumably on the grounds that a tall, hunky biological male would be far more credible to the movie or TV audience as an action hero than a short, wiry, butch-looking female) and my missing certain aspects of the novel, like the transport computer guidance system Murderbot nicknames “ART” (for “Asshole Rapid Transit”), the show pretty much does justice to the original. Murderbot joins an interplanetary expedition by a bunch of do-gooders called the Preservation Alliance that operates within the overall framework of the Corporation Rim, the governing authority for that sector of the universe. (In this 25th century future, corporate and government authority have fused into one giant bureaucracy out to exploit the universe for whatever profit it can gain. In other words, it’s pretty much like what the U.S. is evolving into under Führer Trump.) The Preservation Alliance people don’t really want a SecUnit as part of their crew, but the Corporation Rim requires that they have one for “security” or they won’t insure the voyage. The expedition is commanded by Ayda Mensah (Noma Dumezweni), a middle-aged Black woman who’s an expert on terraforming as well as president of the Preservation Alliance. Other members of the team include Bharadwaj (Tamara Podemski), a geochemist; Pin-Lee (Sabrina Wu), scientist and legal counsel; Arada (Tattiawana Jones), a biologist; Ratthi (Akshay Khanna), a wormhole expert; and the group’s one augmented human, Gurathin (David Dastmalchian), a technology expert who takes an instant dislike to Murderbot and is convinced it’s a Corporation Rim spy who means them no good. The principal creators of the show are brothers Chris and Paul Weitz, who adapted Wells’s book for TV and Chris directed the first three episodes.

The Preservation Alliance team finds themselves on a remote planet where the only maps they’ve been given, prepared by the Corporation Rim, are horrendously inaccurate and don’t indicate the existence of predatory monsters who look like the sandworms in Dune except they have heads at both ends of their worm-like bodies and can therefore attack and consume humans at either end. Ultimately, after they (except for Gurathin) reach a grudging respect for Murderbot since it keeps saving their lives, they realize that the planet has been invaded by a mining team from a company called GrayCris that is not part of the corporate establishment. One of the gimmicks the Weitzes preserved from Wells’s novels is that Murderbot distracts itself from the long, boring parts of its existence by endlessly rewatching commercial media, particularly a show called The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon (which might be a good one for the Weitzes or someone else to create as an actual show). Also Pin-Lee and Arada are in a Lesbian relationship which they plan to expand by bringing in the male Ratthi to form a “thruple,” only Ratthi is uneasy because he’s attracted to Pin-Lee but not to Arada. Murderbot gives us asides in which it tells us how appalled it is by human conduct in general and sex in particular. In her book Wells references “SexBots” that come equipped with sexual organs and are created to copulate with humans, but Murderbot virtuously insists it’s a SecBot, not a SexBot. This doesn’t stop the humans from speculating what sort of genitalia Murderbot would have if it had any at all.

We get some intriguing shots of Murderbot naked without a dick, breasts, or nipples, and according to an imdb.com “Trivia” post, to get the hairless look demanded for the character Alexander Skarsgård went through regular waxing treatments and then complained how much they hurt. Ultimately the Preservation Alliance threatens to go public with the damage done to them by the Corporation Rim and their negligence in providing them with maps that didn’t indicate the presence of the person-eating worms, as well as not briefing them about the GreyCris crews on the planet. There’s also a character called Leebeedee (Anna Konkle) whom the Weitzes introduced from later in Wells’s cycle, who’s rescued from a Corporation colony that’s otherwise been wiped out by the GreyCris people, only she goes rogue and threatens to kill the entire Preservation crew until Murderbot takes her out with its built-in weapons. And there’s a subplot indicating how the GreyCris people turned the SecBots assigned to the Corporation crew into monstrous machines that killed them: they hacked them with a small medallion they stuck on their backs. They do that to Murderbot, too, and in one of the weirder scenes of the show it begs the Preservation crew to shoot it before it goes rogue and kills them. Though I liked the books even better, this Murderbot series caught much of the appeal of Wells’s texts and in particular Murderbot’s slow but steady acquisition of human emotions as it’s around people who for once treat it as an equal and not just an object, and its discomfort as it starts to react more like a human instead of a machine.