How polite are you to Siri? Do you say your “pleases” and “thank yous” to Alexa? Do you treat ChatGPT like a friend or a servant? In the AI age, these aren’t just matters for etiquette experts, but debates that challenge the nature of humanity. The emergence of non-human intelligence confronts us with plenty of philosophical questions, but will Murderbot, a new AppleTV+ series about a rogue machine exploring our mortal realm, provide any answers?
Security Unit 238776431 (Alexander Skarsgård) is a high-tech droid, deployed to protect workers on a remote mining expedition, somewhere in the dark, unexplored recesses of the galaxy. “I was built to obey humans,” his internal monologue announces. “And humans? Well, they’re a**holes.” So, when he discovers that he can hack and override the protocol that forces him to obey orders, he re-christens himself Murderbot and uses his newfound freedom the only way he knows how: to watch reruns of the schlocky space opera, The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. But when the beat-up old robot finds himself deployed with a ship crewed by renegades from the pacifist Preservation Alliance, led by commander Mensah (Noma Dumezweni), he finds his uncanny lack of emotion tested. Maybe not all humans are a**holes after all.
Murderbot and the crew of the “hopper” embark on a voyage of discovery. Sure, some of that discovery is flesh-eating aliens (which Murderbot is employed to dispatch), but mainly it’s an existential reckoning with his human-machine hybrid life. Is he “half bot, half organic” or just “one whole, confused entity”? Based on the novels by American author Martha Wells (titled The Murderbot Diaries, from which the show takes a strong first-person tone), Chris and Paul Weitz, the show’s creators, have gone for both a zany comedic feel and also some ontological reckoning. If Murderbot is incapable of feeling pain, is he also incapable of being hurt? Is his programming any more inauthentic than humans, whose “operating system is just a random shuffling of DNA”? These are big questions, entertainingly entertained in this wacky milieu.
It might sound strange when said about an interplanetary sci-fi saga with laser guns and giant omnivorous millipedes, but Murderbot is a very small show. Apple has opted for short episodes (the longest is 34 minutes, but most are around 23 minutes) that make the series bingeable in an afternoon. The action takes place predominantly on the ship or at a handful of low-key planetary pit stops. The crew – including David Dastmalchian’s morose scientist and Akshay Khanna’s chipper squad member – form the condensed dramatis personae. They all feel a little interchangeable, which leaves a lot of pressure on Skargård’s Murderbot to deliver both the comedy and the pathos. It’s a fine performance, and one that works whether his visor is up or down, but not quite enough to save the show from a sense of overreliance. He is rarely off-screen (there are few B-plots), because the Weitz brothers know the surroundings are flimsy.
Apple has made some fine TV shows recently (Severance, Slow Horses, Silo) and The Murderbot Diaries is the sort of IP they love to adapt. Foul-mouthed and intermittently violent, it is, perhaps, another symbol of the Deadpoolification of mass media, where heroes dispense with reverence for the world around them and engage, instead, in a meta-analysis of their situation. “What is it with humans and sitting?” Murderbot theorises, when he’s asked to take a seat. “It’s like a fetish to them.” And this may prove popular with certain audiences, but it’s starting to feel hackneyed. Not helping either is the obvious comparison to Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17, an aesthetically and thematically similar work, which has much more heart and joie de vivre. For the story of a (possibly) murderous robot learning the value of love, it has surprisingly little soul.
But it is, still, a romp. Skarsgård’s ability to pair his chiselled, leading man good looks with a very goofy sense of humour (recently utilised to good effect in Succession) makes Murderbot an enjoyable, lightweight watch. It might not grapple with the big philosophical questions of the present day, but it might give you a – brief – respite from thinking about the coming AI apocalypse.
