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 Apple TV+ 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 Apple TV+ 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!
Gurathin and Murderbot’s conversation about ComfortUnits had a really peculiar tension to it. If they were both allo characters, I’d say sexual tension but Murderbot isn’t and I don’t know about Gurathin. It’s like “the Narrative wants this conversation to about potential sex but neither of us shop at that store so it’s just going to be really awkward.”
I wonder how much more idiot things Mensa’s going to do because she’s the “one in charge.” Going off without the SecUnit then climbing up a steep hill by yourself did not seem very bright. She’s supposed to be the smart one, damn it. Her panic attacks are a nice touch and could pay off quite nicely if we get past the first set of novellas.
The “everything will be okay, you have my word on it” plagiarism was really funny. Skarsgård might not be the best possible casting but I think he earns it despite being pretty, famous, and white.
I do hope we get an entire narrative unit of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. The clips are great but I want full context for the nonsense.
I agree that this conversation was awkward, but I think it was both intentional to show the awkwardness and character parallels of Murderbot and Gurathin, and informational for the audience about the various types of human-bot constructs.
Oh, and I don’t like her panic attacks. It feels like she’s panicking about being a leader hung out to dry on this mission; but it really feels wrong having a middle aged Black woman leader panicking over leadership. It makes her look incompetent. She should be panicking over trauma she has during the course of action we see, like in the books. Having her panicking AFTER ep. 2 over megafauna and strange synthetics would be fine.
I disagree about the panic attacks making her look weak. I think its a reasonable response to her teammate and friend almost dying, and its consistent with her character development in later books. Also, I think it’s common for Black women to expect more of themselves and to have more put on them by others. I think it’s part of her stubbornness SecUnit observes and gives her an out of with its recommendation for her to get back to the hopper.
I found this conversation one of the fails of this adaptation. I know what they wanted to do with it, but there was TOO much awkwardness and not enough information (I’m talking about both verbal info and body-language-info.) And I think it was a mistake not having (and showing us) GuGu hacking into Murderbot’s system while it was recovering and discovering that its governor module was hacked. I get that they’re saving that revelation for a bigger reveal and plot point later, but it’s too much of a change.
OTOH, I love that they’re explaining things like strange synthetics through action rather than info dumps.
Gurathin’s expansion is one of my fave things about the show. David bring so much to the great script.
I also disagree about Mensah. I don’t think the choices she makes are bad or ill-informed. Most of them are exactly from the book, and I’d argue they’re exactly in line with her role as the caretaker. She’s trying to protect everyone by taking on their hardships, and the panic attacks are her realizing she can’t, that she’s out of her depth.
Except she clearly was never out of her depth in the books.
I don’t think the show could do things the same way as the books, since it couldn’t reside as fully in Murderbot’s POV as the books can and thus would need to give the human characters more screen time and character development. Like most adaptations, they’d pick and choose elements from across the series and distill or elaborate on them to build their own version of the plots and characters. It would hardly be the first time an adaptation borrowed a trait from later in a book character’s history and incorporated it from the beginning.
Fair. I think climbing the hill was more the writers than Mensah (audiobooks are the enemy of spelling). She has more danger moments coming but those are her being badass and in charge.
Thank you SO much for breaking down the issues in play as regards the display of Murderbot’s body. I always got the sense that one thing really important to the creators was to make it clear that Murderbot uses it pronouns and does not have a gender, and it’s, I suppose, unsurprising that some of the ways they found to make it clear feel rather clunky and weird. But I appreciate you breaking it down so clearly here.
And YAYYYY I am excited to watch this!
The gender thing is def complicated. I just really hope we don’t have 8 more weeks of miagendering from reviewers and fans.
On top of the casting issues, my first reaction to the costume design in the still at the top of the article is that it looks too much like a garment worn by a human instead of the surface armor of a cyborg.
Yeah, it’s a little flimsy. But I think it works for what they need Skarsgård to do in the show. All that movement and sitting would be challenging in something studier. It’s why the MCU guys rarely sit down.
There’s a video going around of the actor putting on the costume, and it’s mostly a tight, padded bodysuit with the armor printed on–you know, like a Halloween costume. There are a couple of pieces that go on over the suit–the chestplate, arm guards, and maybe one more?–but yeah, it’s pretty chintzy. I’m kind of sorry I watched the video, because it’s going to make it harder to ignore in the show.
Also, the Corporation is known for being cheap and using shoddy equipment whenever it can get away with it. It makes sense that Murderbot, being an older model on cheap contracts, has not been equipped with the good kind of armor that you’d find on, say, a CombatUnit.
My point is not that it looks like cheap equipment, my point is that it looks like something being worn by a human being rather than something integral to a cyborg body. He doesn’t look like a synthetic half-machine creation, he looks like an actor in a costume.
IIRC it’s not an integral part of its body in the books, it’s something SecUnit wears over its skinsuit.
My impression from the books is that SecUnit doesn’t just “wear” the armor, but that it’s attached to ports or plugs on its body in some way. I definitely remember that SecUnit has built-in weapons that can deploy from inside its forearms, so there should be openings on the armor to admit them. The wiki reminds me that its limbs are also semi-detachable, so the armor should probably have seams at the joints to accommodate that. Ideally the design should give a sense of integration with the cyborg body underneath, and I’m not getting that here.
The wiki also says that SecUnits have visible tech components on their heads and necks that look like human augments’ components. So Skarsgard’s entirely human-looking face is a change from the books.
Besides, conformity to the source is not a priority for an adaptation, because the vast majority of the audience for any TV or film adaptation of a printed work will never have read the source material. The very goal of an adaptation to a new medium is to introduce it to a new audience. So the priority of the designs should be to convey to the audience what the characters and settings are about, without any need for reference to the source material for clarification. There are surely ways to design a character’s body armor that convey “This is a cyborg” rather than just “This is a man in a suit.”
“ The wiki reminds me that its limbs are also semi-detachable, so the armor should probably have seams at the joints to accommodate that.”
No, that’s exactly the opposite of how the armor should be designed. The armor protect any vulnerable locations like limb joints points from incoming fire.
You can argue that in the abstract, but I’m talking about what’s actually depicted in the books. There’s at least one case where SecUnit is immobilized by some big machine gripping him, and he gets free by nearly detaching one of his limbs at the shoulder. If he’s capable of doing that while fully armored (if I’m remembering right), then obviously his armor is also capable of detaching at that point. This is not incompatible with protecting those joints, because the separation points could be underneath an outer protective layer. But the costume shown in the photo depicts a continuous underlayer with no way of detaching the sleeve from the body.
You’re remembering wrong. SecUnit isn’t in armor in that scene, or at any time past the end of All Systems Red. It’s also not designed to be able to do that, it’s just a feature of the things it is designed to do, much like a car isn’t designed to be a bedroom, but you can still sleep in one if need be.
I didn’t say he was designed to do that, I said only that he was capable of doing the thing he did, in fact, canonically do. The subject is not the intent, but the physical possibility of the action. My point was that he would not have been capable of doing that if he had been wearing a garment like the one depicted in the above photo. But if he wasn’t armored in the scene in question, that resolves that issue.
book 2 deals with that memory. and also give us ART! wondering how they are going to handle books 2 and 3 (if they are able to get to them), because changing the cast in a book is much, much easier than in a tv show.
I’m doing a reread right now, and my bet is that they’ll adapt the Book 3 story to use the PresAux team. They would slot in pretty well; the only really hard part would be the character of Miki. My guess is they might just skip it; it’s going to be pretty hard to adapt Miki to the screen without going full JarJar, so that might be for the best.
I really hope they keep the Book 2 element of Muderbot going off on its own and having at least one adventure with a group of humans it doesn’t hate and chose to help. I feel like that’s the bare minimum, to convincingly get across that Murderbot is genuinely choosing to work with the PresAux team, as opposed to simply defaulting to them because they were the last people to rent it/imprinting on them like a duckling because they’re the first to not be assholes to it.
Thats what I thought. But I haven’t reread 2 yet (saving that for my summer book club) so I couldn’t confirm.
“Murderbot murders a bunch of humans” is definitely in book one. It’s the reason it hacks its governor module, because it hard forced it to murder the miners. It’s also why it chose the name Murderbot for itself. The adaptation alters this, and I feel like it undermines a significant part of Murderbot’s character.
I read an article that said that the actor who plays Pin-Lee uses they/them pronouns and asked the writers if they could alter the character to use them, too.
Thank you for sharing the experience of having masking slip. I think that Murderbot’s experience of being denied the right to have its helmet closed mirrors that experience.
why it chose the name Murderbot for itself. The adaptation alters this, and I feel like it undermines a significant part of Murderbot’s character.
Out of all the changes they made from the book, this is the only one (so far) that I felt undermined the character rather than simply furthering the presentation of the story. In fact, the choice doesn’t even make sense within the show because it is given no context to back it up. I don’t know–maybe they’ll expand on it later?
No, the massacre is Artificial Condition, from what I vaguely remember and also from @twiff’s comment above. That’s what I’m referencing. Murderbot having flashes to the memory of the massacre is not in All Systems Red.
You’re both right. Gurathin uses the massacre to try to convince everyone that Murderbot is a dangerous rogue when he thinks Murderbot is incapacitated by Hubsystem after they remove the combat override module from its data port. Murderbot then explains both to us and to PresAux that it disabled its governor module in order to prevent anything like that from happening again, and that it doesn’t actually remember the massacre because they wiped its memory and all it has are vague impressions. In Artificial Condition, Murderbot decides to investigate the mining incident to find out what happened and make sure that its version of events—that it disabled the governor after the massacre—is what actually happened.
I’m glad for the positive review. I’ve been looking forward to watching it. Murderbot is one of my favorite series.
Great review. Thanks. I was hesitant about an adaptation because I’ve read the books too many times to count. I felt Skarsgard was too tall and too male looking to be Murderbot. I can’t agree with the elimination of Overse and Volescu and turning the others into a throuple. At this point, I will skip the show and reread the books.
I re-read them EVERY SINGLE WEEK during lockdown, and it took until a couple of years later to realize why, when someone used the term “competency porn.”
The “Psychological danger, not physical danger, so not my problem.” quote makes me wonder if Murderbot is going to help Mensah with her panic attacks somehow, perhaps with a line learned from his soap operas.
Skarsgard is also an executive producer which might mean some of the decision in his casting came down to helping the show’s budget. His performance is growing on me and I feel that he is a fan of the work.
I suspect that you might also assume that Skarsgard is the executive producer because he helped it get made and if you want to make the show, having him star in it is a good thing.
Star power, possible interest in the subject to begin with, and a variety of other factors.
“Skarsgard is also an executive producer which might mean some of the decision in his casting came down to helping the show’s budget.”
I don’t know about that. Some executive producers get the credit because they’re financial investors, but that’s just one of the umpteen different reasons that the executive producer credit is given. More usually it means a financial partner on the receiving end of the profits rather than the investing end, and lead actors often get EP credit as part of their contracts.
Note from someone utterly unfamiliar with this property. Paragraph 4: What or who is PresAux? It’s not clear.
Preservation Alliance. It’s mentioned in the show with that nickname.
As I mentioned, the Murderbot wiki says that PreservationAux is a research organization within the larger society called the Preservation Alliance. If the show has conflated them, that’s a change from the books.
https://murderbot.fandom.com/wiki/Category:PreservationAux
I was just being hasty in my reply. You’re correct. I meant more that the term PresAux is mentioned in the show. It’s not a thing I came up with.
Short for PreservationAux, Dr. Mensah’s research organization within the Preservation Alliance. It’s the group the main human characters belong to.
Because he realizes that PreservationAux is going to go as cheap as reasonable for everything, and they’ve already made it clear that SecUnits are NOT something they want to deal with. Choose your battles, find something they’re more likely to go for.
My thoughts on Alexander Skarsgård’s casting are in a similar vein: he was not who I envisioned as Murderbot while reading the books, but given that the rest of the cast was going to be high on PoC and various gender orientations, it was kind of a given that Apple would try to cast a known cis-male-white entity as the main character to attract the elusive Average Viewer(tm).
The good thing is that, among the possible actors in that pool, I feel that Skarsgård has both the acting range and the physicality to pull off the role. He’s not my book Murderbot, but he’s already a great TV Murderbot for me.
I’m less fond of removing/conflating characters and making Ratthi/Arada/Pin-Lee into a throuple, but that too is the nature of TV. Volescu appears only once, and if you need to drop/merge another character to limit the size of the main cast, Overse or Arada were the most likely candidates.
I’m not sold over on Pin-Lee yet, but that’s mostly because this version is very different from the “strong but compassionate solicitor in sharp business suits” I pictured in my mind. Hopefully they’ll get more time to shine as the show goes on.
I miss Volescu, if only because I liked the novelty of the rescuee that MB coaxes with empathy being an older middle-aged dude, but I get it, since otherwise he, Overse, and Arada didn’t really have much to do.
I really liked the choice to introduce Ganaka Pit and the significance of the alien remnants early on, as well as having MB’s governor module removal be much more recent and fresh, but I wasn’t sure about the choice to give Mensah panic attacks so early on, since part of her arc is developing PTSD later on…
I thought we were getting past the point where a show needed a white male lead to be marketable. Look at another Apple show, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, where the four top-billed actors are three Japanese people and a Black woman. (Although it also has Kurt Russell in the supporting cast, so there’s that.) Apple is generally pretty good with inclusive casting.
When I read the books, I found the human characters in PresAux hard to keep track of, so it makes sense to me to streamline the cast.
I haven’t seen Monarch but the poster on Wikipedia shows only the names of Kurt and Wyatt Russell, so I guess they were supposed to be the draw-ins even if the other actors were the actual main characters.
Still, I don’t think that Skarsgård was just a stunt casting here, he’s actually really good in the role.
That’s my point, that it seems unlikely that an Apple show would’ve cast him solely because he’s a conventional white leading-man type, rather than for a more substantial reason.
Although that’s not to say there aren’t other current productions that would do that. The MonsterVerse movies have had a bad habit of centering on white male leads who were less interesting or appealing than the rest of the cast, as if they were presumed to be worthy of attention just for being white and male and thus weren’t given any other noteworthy traits by the filmmakers. Monarch was the first MonsterVerse production to break that bad habit, although Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire followed suit by making Rebecca Hall the lead (although the real lead character was Kong).
The misgendering in reviews is *incredibly* frustrating, especially when it’s from supposed-to-be-well-researched establishments like NPR and time magazine. Like cmon guys you couldn’t give this a Google? You couldn’t listen to the dialogue? (NPR corrected their review and added a corrections notice after fans let them know, Time has not)
I wish I could afford to buy another streaming subscription, but alas.
There are frequent sales and special offers if you buy an Apple device, plus Black Friday / Cyber Monday deals. Also, no reason to keep a subscription all year unless you get and annual discount or actually use it that much.
Murderbot’s backstory IS discussed in the first book; and there’s also no 7 second clip: it just explains that bio memories can’t be wiped.
I was disappointed that Murderbot wasn’t cast as the racially-ambiguous gender-neutral character I picture from the books, but at the same time – well, Murderbot as a SecUnit stands out in a group of humans as Different, and Potentially Dangerous. Saying that Different, and Potentially Dangerous, looks more like a white cis man than a genderqueer and/or nonwhite person does avoid one possible bad message. Especially since in a real world group with the composition of the PresAux cast, the white cis man would be the most alarming presence there.
I am very curious how the Pin-Lee/Arada/Ratthi throuple is going to work out, given that 1) book!Ratthi doesn’t seem great at/interested in long-term romances but 2) book!Ratthi is also very good at romance generally and preserving friendship thereafter – I wonder whether the show will have some of the romantic Drama! that shows like so much, or have PresAux give an example of healthy ways to have people both join and leave throuples, or if this throuple will be long-term where book!Ratthi was merely Arada + Arada’s Spouse’s Best Friend.
Cool, Nice writeup, interesting perspectives, great photos. Thanks a bunch for this!
I’m not much of a TV person, but I’m likely to check this one out.
Re: Murderbot’s ‘gender’
For unknown reasons that I can fathom – when I read the books I thought Murderbot was ‘female’…
I read Murderbot as woman-presenting too — one key moment was at the very beginning when Murderbot is rescuing Volescu and Bharadwaj from the big chompy alien, and the book says “I made my voice firm and warm and gentle, and said, ‘Dr. Volescu, it’s gonna be fine, okay? But you need to get up and come help me get her out of here.'” That … does not sound like a man is saying it.
Since when were men incapable of being warm and gentle? Reassuring panicking people in a crisis is not a gendered skill. Heck, I’m sure it’s part of basic training for medical or emergency personnel.
First things first: Vico Ortiz should have been Murderbot, and I will die mad about that.
I haven’t seen the series yet (my particular flavor of neurospice makes me pro-spoiler and very late to watching anything, even/especially adaptations of books I love and identify with so much). I’m glad you think Skarsgård does a good job; that helps allay my main concern, which was having a white man constantly saving the day, especially for a team led by a Black woman. That felt extremely opposed to the message I took from the series.