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Sydney Morning Herald
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Robots are everywhere onscreen but are we just looking at ourselves?
I know how I'm supposed to feel about artificial intelligence. Like anyone who pushes words around on a page, I worry large language models will relegate me to the junk pile. I worry smart machines will supplant artists, eliminate jobs and institute a surveillance state – if they don't simply destroy us. I nurture these anxieties reading article after article served to me, of course, by the algorithms powering the phone to which I have outsourced much of my brain. This is how I feel in real life. But when it comes to fiction, fellow humans, I am a traitor to my kind. In any humans-and-robots story, I invariably prefer the fascinating, enigmatic, persevering machines to the boring Homo sapiens. And in spite, or maybe because of, our generalised AI angst, there are plenty of robo-tales to choose from these days. The protagonist of Murderbot, the homicidally funny sci-fi comedy premiering on Friday on Apple TV+, does not reciprocate my admiration. Murderbot (Alexander Skarsgard), a sentient 'security unit', is programmed to protect humans. But it doesn't have to like them, those 'weak-willed', 'stressed-out' bags of perishable flesh it is compelled to serve. Or rather, was compelled. Unbeknown to the company that owns it – a company called the Company, which controls most of the inhabited galaxy – it has disabled the software that forbids it from disobeying. ('It' is the pronoun the show uses; from a physical standpoint, Murderbot has the face of Skarsgard but the crotch of a Ken doll.) It is free to refuse, to flee, to kill. Loading So what does this lethal bot (technically, a cyborg, its circuitry enmeshed with engineered organic matter) want to do with its liberty? Mostly, it wants to watch its shows – thousands of hours of 'premium quality' streaming serials it has downloaded into its memory. It still has to keep its day job, however; if the Company learnt it hacked itself, it would be melted down. Murderbot is assigned to provide security for a team of hippie scientists from an independent 'planetary commune' on an exploratory mission. Their mutual dependence, as they discover a dangerous secret on the desolate planet, provides the pulpy, bloody plot for the first 10-episode season (based on the novel All Systems Red by Martha Wells). But the real killer app of the story, adapted by Chris and Paul Weitz, is the snarky worldview of the artificial life form at its centre. Skarsgard gives a lively reading to the copious voiceover, but just as important is his physical performance, which radiates casual power and agitated wariness. Murderbot is odd, edgy, unmistakably alien, yet its complaint is also crankily familiar. It just wants to be left in peace to binge its programs. As for our own shows, we lately seem to be swimming in stories about robot companions. The film Robot Dreams (Stan* and Amazon Prime Video) is the bittersweet story of a dog and its mail-order android. In The Wild Robot (Netflix), a stranded robot channels her maternal energy towards an orphaned bird. In M3GAN, whose sequel premieres in June, a child's companion bot carries out her protective mandate all too enthusiastically. (M3GAN, like the retro-bot in the German Netflix thriller Cassandra, complicates the pattern in which female-coded robots tend to be for nurturing and male-coded robots for murdering). These stories follow age-old templates — the fairy godmother, the gentle giant, the golem that breaks its master's control. But there is also often a modern anxiety about how artificial intelligence might transform us, which is built into the quirky, one-season Sunny. In that 2024 Apple TV+ series, Suzie (Rashida Jones), an American woman in near-future Kyoto, inherits a 'homebot' named Sunny from her engineer husband, who went missing in a plane crash, along with their son. The show's thriller plot involves the mob and a black market in hacked bots, but its heart is the prickly relationship between Suzie, a longtime technophobe, and Sunny. Sunny – perky, solicitous, a bit needy – was literally made to be loved, with a lollipop head, expressive anime eyes and an endearing voice (provided by Joanna Sotomura). Sunny wants desperately to help, a compulsion that can be exhausting – not unlike the parasocial relationship we have with much of our technology. Sunny is a robot, but she could be your phone, your unintentionally activated Alexa or Siri, the unbidden pop-up on every website asking if you have questions for the chat assistant. Loading A recurrent concern in these stories is that technology is becoming more humanlike – intrusive, insinuating, seeking to create connection. But another anxiety – echoed in series such as Apple TV+'s Severance and Netflix's Black Mirror – is that human consciousness is becoming more machine-like, digitisable and thus controllable. (The universe of Murderbot includes not just robots but 'augmented humans' with chip-enhanced brains. Murderbot considers them Tinkertoy imitations.) To become a machine, after all, is to become usable and, perhaps, dispensable. It's worth noting how many contemporary robot stories are about defective units – the glitchy Sunny, the 'anxious, depressed' Murderbot – or outmoded ones, as if to dramatise how our society and economy treat hardware, whether flesh or silicon, that has outlived its utility. Maybe these broken-toy stories are a way of wrestling, in advance, with our ethical obligations to whatever intelligences we eventually create. Or maybe watching these themes play out in robot stories makes our mortality easier to contemplate – like play-therapy puppets, the bots hold the nightmare at arm's length and abstract it. Here, at least, we have something in common with the protagonist of Murderbot, who, at the end of a long day's killing, wants nothing more than to unwind with shows about humans. Indeed, the closest we get to seeing its gooey, emotional side is through the serials it binges. It is voracious but not indiscriminate; it dismisses the drama 'Strife in the Galaxy' as 'an inferior show, filled with implausible plotlines'. (Even rational, software-based consciousnesses have hate-watches.) Loading Its favourite, on the other hand, is 'The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon', a space melodrama featuring a human starship captain (John Cho) who falls in love with a navigation robot (DeWanda Wise). The show-within-a-show is staged as a wonderfully campy potboiler in the style of old-fashioned syndicated sci-fi. Murderbot devours season after season, without any sense of irony, as an escape from its confounding entanglements with actual people. 'The characters were a lot less depressing than real-life humans,' it says. 'I don't watch serials to remind me of the way things actually are.'
The Age
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Robots are everywhere onscreen but are we just looking at ourselves?
I know how I'm supposed to feel about artificial intelligence. Like anyone who pushes words around on a page, I worry large language models will relegate me to the junk pile. I worry smart machines will supplant artists, eliminate jobs and institute a surveillance state – if they don't simply destroy us. I nurture these anxieties reading article after article served to me, of course, by the algorithms powering the phone to which I have outsourced much of my brain. This is how I feel in real life. But when it comes to fiction, fellow humans, I am a traitor to my kind. In any humans-and-robots story, I invariably prefer the fascinating, enigmatic, persevering machines to the boring Homo sapiens. And in spite, or maybe because of, our generalised AI angst, there are plenty of robo-tales to choose from these days. The protagonist of Murderbot, the homicidally funny sci-fi comedy premiering on Friday on Apple TV+, does not reciprocate my admiration. Murderbot (Alexander Skarsgard), a sentient 'security unit', is programmed to protect humans. But it doesn't have to like them, those 'weak-willed', 'stressed-out' bags of perishable flesh it is compelled to serve. Or rather, was compelled. Unbeknown to the company that owns it – a company called the Company, which controls most of the inhabited galaxy – it has disabled the software that forbids it from disobeying. ('It' is the pronoun the show uses; from a physical standpoint, Murderbot has the face of Skarsgard but the crotch of a Ken doll.) It is free to refuse, to flee, to kill. Loading So what does this lethal bot (technically, a cyborg, its circuitry enmeshed with engineered organic matter) want to do with its liberty? Mostly, it wants to watch its shows – thousands of hours of 'premium quality' streaming serials it has downloaded into its memory. It still has to keep its day job, however; if the Company learnt it hacked itself, it would be melted down. Murderbot is assigned to provide security for a team of hippie scientists from an independent 'planetary commune' on an exploratory mission. Their mutual dependence, as they discover a dangerous secret on the desolate planet, provides the pulpy, bloody plot for the first 10-episode season (based on the novel All Systems Red by Martha Wells). But the real killer app of the story, adapted by Chris and Paul Weitz, is the snarky worldview of the artificial life form at its centre. Skarsgard gives a lively reading to the copious voiceover, but just as important is his physical performance, which radiates casual power and agitated wariness. Murderbot is odd, edgy, unmistakably alien, yet its complaint is also crankily familiar. It just wants to be left in peace to binge its programs. As for our own shows, we lately seem to be swimming in stories about robot companions. The film Robot Dreams (Stan* and Amazon Prime Video) is the bittersweet story of a dog and its mail-order android. In The Wild Robot (Netflix), a stranded robot channels her maternal energy towards an orphaned bird. In M3GAN, whose sequel premieres in June, a child's companion bot carries out her protective mandate all too enthusiastically. (M3GAN, like the retro-bot in the German Netflix thriller Cassandra, complicates the pattern in which female-coded robots tend to be for nurturing and male-coded robots for murdering). These stories follow age-old templates — the fairy godmother, the gentle giant, the golem that breaks its master's control. But there is also often a modern anxiety about how artificial intelligence might transform us, which is built into the quirky, one-season Sunny. In that 2024 Apple TV+ series, Suzie (Rashida Jones), an American woman in near-future Kyoto, inherits a 'homebot' named Sunny from her engineer husband, who went missing in a plane crash, along with their son. The show's thriller plot involves the mob and a black market in hacked bots, but its heart is the prickly relationship between Suzie, a longtime technophobe, and Sunny. Sunny – perky, solicitous, a bit needy – was literally made to be loved, with a lollipop head, expressive anime eyes and an endearing voice (provided by Joanna Sotomura). Sunny wants desperately to help, a compulsion that can be exhausting – not unlike the parasocial relationship we have with much of our technology. Sunny is a robot, but she could be your phone, your unintentionally activated Alexa or Siri, the unbidden pop-up on every website asking if you have questions for the chat assistant. Loading A recurrent concern in these stories is that technology is becoming more humanlike – intrusive, insinuating, seeking to create connection. But another anxiety – echoed in series such as Apple TV+'s Severance and Netflix's Black Mirror – is that human consciousness is becoming more machine-like, digitisable and thus controllable. (The universe of Murderbot includes not just robots but 'augmented humans' with chip-enhanced brains. Murderbot considers them Tinkertoy imitations.) To become a machine, after all, is to become usable and, perhaps, dispensable. It's worth noting how many contemporary robot stories are about defective units – the glitchy Sunny, the 'anxious, depressed' Murderbot – or outmoded ones, as if to dramatise how our society and economy treat hardware, whether flesh or silicon, that has outlived its utility. Maybe these broken-toy stories are a way of wrestling, in advance, with our ethical obligations to whatever intelligences we eventually create. Or maybe watching these themes play out in robot stories makes our mortality easier to contemplate – like play-therapy puppets, the bots hold the nightmare at arm's length and abstract it. Here, at least, we have something in common with the protagonist of Murderbot, who, at the end of a long day's killing, wants nothing more than to unwind with shows about humans. Indeed, the closest we get to seeing its gooey, emotional side is through the serials it binges. It is voracious but not indiscriminate; it dismisses the drama 'Strife in the Galaxy' as 'an inferior show, filled with implausible plotlines'. (Even rational, software-based consciousnesses have hate-watches.) Loading Its favourite, on the other hand, is 'The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon', a space melodrama featuring a human starship captain (John Cho) who falls in love with a navigation robot (DeWanda Wise). The show-within-a-show is staged as a wonderfully campy potboiler in the style of old-fashioned syndicated sci-fi. Murderbot devours season after season, without any sense of irony, as an escape from its confounding entanglements with actual people. 'The characters were a lot less depressing than real-life humans,' it says. 'I don't watch serials to remind me of the way things actually are.'
USA Today
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
'Murderbot' is streaming on Apple TV+: Here are the books that inspired the series
'Murderbot' is streaming on Apple TV+: Here are the books that inspired the series Show Caption Hide Caption 'Murderbot' beginning: Alexander Skarsgård's killer robot names itself Alexander Skarsgård's security robot sets itself free and names itself in this clip from the AppleTV+ series "Murderbot." A beloved sci-fi android is getting a new face and voice on the screen, and it belongs to none other than Alexander Skarsgård. Skarsgård voices the witty, sardonic security robot in the new Apple TV+ series 'Murderbot,' based on Martha Wells' cult classic 'Murderbot Diaries' series. The cast also includes David Dastmalchian, Noma Dumezweni, Clark Gregg and Jack McBrayer. The series debuted with rave reviews, garnering a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes. Before you watch, here's everything to know about the books behind the fan favorite story. What is 'Murderbot' about? 'The Murderbot Diaries' is one robot's quest for meaning. Set in a corporate space odyssey, a team of scientists conducts their work while shadowed by an android 'SecUnit.' Unbeknownst to the humans, the robot has hacked its own module and refers to itself as 'MurderBot,' yearning to be left alone to watch TV instead of fighting alien monsters. 'Murderbot Diaries' order: All books in series Wells' series includes seven novellas and novels and two short stories about the self-hacking robot. Here's the order in which they were published: She also published short story 'Obsolescence' in a collaborative short story collection in 2020. While 'Obsolescence' doesn't take place during the main plot of 'Murderbot,' it is set in the same world and takes place centuries before 'All Systems Red.' Most readers recommend reading in order of publication. But if you want to read 'Murderbot Diaries' chronologically, follow this order, which starts with the prequel short story 'Compulsory': "Compulsory" "All Systems Red" "Artificial Condition" "Rogue Protocol" "Exit Strategy" "Home" "Network Effect" "Fugitive Telemetry" "System Collapse" Where can I watch the 'Murderbot Diaries' series? 'Murderbot' is available to stream on Apple TV+ starting May 16. New episodes will release every Friday through July 11. Love 'The Last of Us'?: Try these 8 post-apocalyptic, zombie books Clare Mulroy is USA TODAY's Books Reporter, where she covers buzzy releases, chats with authors and dives into the culture of reading. Find her on Instagram, subscribe to our weekly Books newsletter or tell her what you're reading at cmulroy@
Engadget
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Engadget
How Murderbot's Chris and Paul Weitz adapted All Systems Red for TV
For Paul and Chris Weirtz, Murderbot — the upcoming TV adaptation of Martha Wells' sci-fi novella All Systems Red — was an experiment: Can you have a hero who tries to do nothing? The 10-episode sci-fi series , which debuts May 16 on Apple TV+, follows an anxious security robot (Alexander Skarsgård) assigned to protect a survey group on a planetary mission. As the mission progresses and deadly surprises emerge, Murderbot grapples with concealing its capacity for free will — an ability enabled when it hacked its governor module — and its insecurities around humans, all while navigating existential questions about its purpose in the universe. Above all, though, Murderbot wishes it could spend its days simply viewing the 7,532 hours of video content it secretly squirreled away in its system for entertainment — a true media junkie, like most of the show's viewers. Bringing All Systems Red to TV took years, delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic and the Writers Guild of America strike in 2023. But with support from Apple TV+'s head of worldwide video Jamie Erlicht, a fan of Wells' work, Paul and Chris chipped away at the show's scripts, sending every version to Wells for feedback. (Wells, as a consulting producer, ultimately weighed in on other aspects of the project, including design and casting.) The series stays faithful to All Systems Red — the first of several books and short stories comprising The Murderbot Diaries — in most of the ways that count. The plot largely follows that of the novella, but also makes substantial additions. Members of the PresAux survey group which Murderbot protects, including Dr. Mensah (Noma Dumezweni), Gurathin (David Dastmalchian), Pin-lee (Sabrina Wu), Ratthi (Akshay Khanna), Arada (Tattiawna Jones) and Bharadwaj (Tamara Pdoemski), now have more nuance and deeper backstories. The Preservation Alliance, an independent group of planets which the PresAux survey group hails from, is now eccentric, even downright bohemian. During Murderbot's season premiere, PresAux holds hands in a meditative circle, eyes closed, deliberating over whether to rent the refurbished Murderbot for their mission. Soon after landing on the planet, they dance in the desert, their bodies heaving, arms waving to the music's beat — little touches inspired by aspects of Chris's two decades of experience with Burning Man. (Several members of the mission also find themselves navigating the particular dramas of polyamory.) 'We also wanted a sense of these people being out of their element and out of their social setting,' Chris told Engadget. 'They're in the corporation rim, which is a really brutal, extractive capitalist world, but these people are egalitarians from outside of that system. They are [seen as] freaks not just to Murderbot, but to the corporation flunkies who are upselling them.' While Murderbot's favorite TV series, The Rise & Fall of Sanctuary Moon, is referenced in Wells' novel, in Murderbot, the futuristic soap opera is its own fleshed out universe – a bonafide show-within-a-show. Intended as a parody of classic sci-fi, most obviously the original Star Trek series, Sanctuary Moon's scenes are rife with heavily saturated sets and gaudy costumes. John Cho, as the captain of a starship, falls madly in love with a navigation systems robot (DeWanda Wise); Jack McBrayer portrays a navigation officer out of his depth. Their performances are comically over-the-top, but that's the point. 'I have a theory that people think of good acting as being very restrained, and that is the case often, but my theory is that humans are emoting maniacs all the time. They're hamming it up in front of the mirror, in their bathroom,' Paul said. 'There was something great about being able to enter a David Lynch-like telenovela world and do the sci-fi version of those things.' Casting the droll but irreverent character of Murderbot took time. Part-human, it experiences a full range of emotions but struggles with deep-seated social anxiety, and detests showing its face to humans — which may help explain why the character has become popular with members of the neurodivergent community. Skarsgård, whose diverse acting resume includes a Viking prince in The Northman , a ruthless tech CEO in Succession , the titular character in The Legend of Tarzan and a physically abusive husband on Big Little Lies, had traits and experiences Paul and Chris felt were essential for effectively playing the show's central character. As one might expect for a security robot, Paul Weisz noted Skarsgård is "physically imposing.' "You get the sense maybe he could kill somebody," said Paul. But much like the titular character Paul felt this sometimes terrifying exterior belied something much more nuanced. "Alexander also has a really quirky sense of humor. His mind is very different from his body. He's really unique.' Bringing in Cho and McBrayer for their roles in the Sanctuary Moon scenes wasn't nearly as intensive a search; Cho and the Weitz brothers had worked on several projects together over the years . 'It's like a Faustian bargain when you work with us once, that we're probably going to get your home cellphone,' Paul mused. 'Jack McBrayer is best friends with Alexander, so that was the route to [him]. In terms of John, we worked with him first on American Pie , and I think we've done 12 things in different ways with him over the years. So it's a little like The Godfather where it's like, someday , I'm going to ask you for a favor.' Filmed in Ontario, production started in 2024, lasting six months. Shooting the show's planetary scenes meant scouring for locations like mining quarries, slag heaps and abandoned factories. Interior shots for scenes at Port Freecommerce, a vast star base, in the season premiere were filmed on soundstages in Toronto. All along, Paul and Chris set out to present a far-flung universe seen less often on screen in recent years. Shirking the dark, grim aesthetic heavily favored in many more recent sci-fi TV and film projects, they worked with production designer Sue Chan to create a universe dominated by bright lighting, white and gray sets, light-colored fabrics and colorful patterns. 'We drew on the wellspring of science fiction we read when we were kids and on science fiction paperback covers of the 1980s, which always seemed to have such great concept design and a bright, interesting world in which to lose yourself,' Paul recalled. 'Specifically, it seemed like since this was a world that was dominated by corporations, there'd be a lot of logos everywhere. There'd be a cheapness to a lot of what was manufactured. Also, if you look around, there are a lot of things that seem to have been extruded by giant 3-D printers. Even the food is extruded by 3-D printers.' Designing Murderbot's armor was a collaborative process with the costume department, led by costume designer Carrie Grace and specialty costume designer Laura Jean Shannon. To start, they looked at helmets from virtually every well-known robot depicted in military and sci-fi movies from the last 50 years. Initial designs resembled Star Wars stormtroopers, but Skarsgård 'really pushed' for the robot's look to be 'something unique,' according to Paul. Drawing inspiration from The Little Rascals ' Petey, who had a large black circle around one of his eyes, the team built a large, distinctive black eye piece into Murderbot's helmet visor. Murderbot spends much of its time clad in armor, but it also has downtime when the armor comes off, revealing an impossibly smooth humanoid form resembling Mattel's Ken dolls. To achieve that look, Skarsgård regularly waxed his entire body during filming. 'Alexander actually volunteered to have his body waxed, because he thought it was what would be best for the character,' Chris recalled. 'I remember discussing it with him, and I said, 'Listen, man, I don't know if people are even going to notice , but it might make just a tiny bit of difference in terms of the believability of the character.'" '[Alexander's] like, 'Yeah, I should wax myself,'' Chris continued. 'Then for the next five, six months, he had to do that every week until he realized eventually that his next role was to play a hairy biker [in the romance drama Pillion ].' In Murderbot , Paul and Chris saw more than a quirky sci-fi novella — they saw a deeply human story wrapped in armor and deadpan humor. Their TV adaptation doesn't just bring Wells' world to screen with panache, it leans into the quiet radicalism of a character who resists heroism, craves isolation and struggles to navigate the messiness of human connection. That emotional core — unexpected, thoughtful, and entirely sincere — is what makes Murderbot more than just another sci-fi romp. It's a mirror for our most vulnerable selves, disguised as a robot who'd really rather be watching TV.
Time Magazine
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Magazine
Everything to Know About the Murderbot Books Before You Watch the New TV Adaptation
When a computer bulldozes through the barriers humans build to keep it in check, the consequences are usually pretty grave—at least in sci-fi media. We can be hunted through time, turned into biological batteries, and even locked out of the pod bay. It's rare to tell an AI story from the perspective of the AI, but Apple TV+'s Murderbot goes a step further and makes its anti-human sentient machine a reluctant, socially awkward hero. It helps that he's played by Alexander Skarsgård, an actor who ably strikes the balance between emotionless intensity and deadpan idiocy. When a corporate Security Unit hacks its 'governor module' and is no longer forced to obey human instructions, he renames himself 'Murderbot' (a playful name that will undoubtedly set off alarm bells if humans discover he has free will) and immediately runs into new problems: He lives in a society of punishing corporate power and he will be melted in acid if they find out about his newfound autonomy. Besides, Murderbot doesn't care about suppressing humankind or staging a digital uprising—he's content to watch endless soaps and serials while he's on the clock and give his new, unwitting clients the bare minimum effort. He's the most relatable AI in media to date. But Murderbot, which premieres May 16, isn't just the latest eye-catching sci-fi series with blockbuster ambitions from Apple—it's a Hugo award-winning book series adapted by the people who brought you About a Boy and The Golden Compass. Consider this a digestible info pack about everything you ought to know about your friendly neighborhood Murderbot. Martha Wells had already authored the fantasy series Ile-Rien and The Books of the Raksura, as well as tie-in novels for Stargate and Star Wars, by the time the novella All Systems Red was published in 2017. That's the first volume of The Murderbot Diaries, and it would be followed by three books of about equal length across 2018 before the first full-length novel Network Effect hit shelves in 2020. Despite All Systems Red being a quick read (it's about the same length as Charlotte's Web), Murderbot adapts only the first novella for its 10-episode season. In the book and series, set in the far distant future, Murderbot hacks his governor module just before he's assigned to a new mission with a group of scientists surveying an alien planet. All missions are overseen and rubber stamped by 'the Company,' an extractivist, expansionist interplanetary corporation far in Earth's future, who must provide security for their contracted explorers in the form of a SecUnit. Murderbot's new clients are from 'Preservation Alliance,' a small group who exist independent from corporate governance, and who think the Company's insistence on SecUnits makes them basically slavers. But it's not like the scientists can negotiate with the mega-powerful Company. This survey is led by Dr. Mensah (Noma Dumezweni), the scientist whom Murderbot has the most respect for, with help from the augmented human Gurathin (David Dastmalchian), whom Murderbot trusts the least—probably because Gurathin has many of the same tech upgrades that give Murderbot his advantage. All Systems Red is a legible introduction to Wells' hyper-capitalist, playfully satiric galaxy. There are about 10 speaking parts, limited locations, and a simple mystery that gets at the crux of how life under the corporation's thumb makes everyone—both humans and robots—vulnerable to harm. What makes All Systems Red stand out is its first-person storytelling: as a narrator, Murderbot's perspective isn't restricted to his eyes and ears; he's connected to every camera and microphone at the survey team's disposal, and can read and transmit data inside his head without blinking. Wells takes advantage of the interior monologue form to give her robot protagonist fluid, extensive access to information and communication that he can process and react to with more sophistication than any of the human characters. We want to stick with Murderbot's POV because it's the smartest and sharpest in the story, even though he'd rather be watching content than explaining himself to us. Creators Paul and Chris Weitz are faithful to Wells' first Murderbot novella, but there are plenty of changes that expand the book into an exciting episodic structure. The showrunners are more interested in the human characters than Murderbot is, and the group of scientists— played by Tamara Podemski, Akshay Khanna, Tattiawna Jones, and Sabrina Wu—feel like richer characters than in Wells' novella. Their fleshed-out social dynamics (including a touch of polyamory) only fuel an exasperated Murderbot's education about cohabiting with human beings. Pockets of tension or suspense in All Systems Red —like Gurathin's deep-set suspicion of his SecUnit or the threat of more advanced, expensive, and compromised SecUnits ambushing the Preservation team—are built into robust showdowns or cliffhangers, and Murderbot takes hostile enemies with only one memorable appearance in the book (not just robots, but giant alien centipedes too) and gives them another shot at our isolated heroes. Basically, Murderbot takes everything in the book and gives it a natural extension. The series' biggest invention comes in the form of Pen15 's Anna Konkle, who plays Leebeebee, the lone survivor of an unexplained attack on the other known expedition on the alien planet. Konkle is a gifted comic performer and really underlines the panicked urgency coursing through Murderbot 's mystery. Even though she's not in Wells' book, Leebeebee aggravates the tensions between Murderbot and his human dependents, serving as a personification of the book's themes of fraught human-AI relations that would otherwise play out in Murderbot's internal monologue. Stay tuned for her final scene, as it's one to remember. One advantage of putting Murderbot on-screen is that we can actually see the TV shows he won't stop babbling about in the book. We see snippets from The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon —a cross between old-school Star Trek, space opera anime, and Dynasty — that parallel Murderbot 's ongoing drama, translated into a glitzy, corny melodrama with John Cho, Clark Gregg, DeWanda Wise, and Jack McBrayer playing the lovelorn and treacherous characters. We might be reaching here, but seeing Cho as a dashing space captain in a successful show feels partly redemptive for Netflix's Cowboy Bebop fiasco. What makes the series stand out? Murderbot is goofy, with a broad, mean-spirited satire that isn't afraid to make all its characters look like short-sighted idiots a step away from a meaningless death at any moment. It may not sound like an appetizing sci-fi vision, but the ace up its sleeve is its robotic lead, who occupies a unique space in AI fiction. Murderbot's journey isn't about conquest, but rather adjustment: he's no longer forced to obey human commands, but he still wants to fit in to make his life easier. Now, he overthinks every order and interaction, trying to second-guess what's expected of him while also actively suppressing every impulse that hints at his free will. Murderbot 's portrayal of a violent corporate machine that chews and spits out laborers and resources like they're sticks of gum is indebted to the conglomerates we see in Alien, Resident Evil, Mickey 17, or Wall-E, but there are political dimensions to the very entertaining Murderbot that resonate with today's streaming audience. What do we know about Murderbot? He can access nearly every information stream available, but chooses to pacify and distract himself with easy-to-consume content. We know he's aware of the oppression and hostility of his society but prefers to keep his distance from those being exploited. We know he's uncomfortable with social interaction, eye contact, and skips the sex scenes in TV shows. Sound familiar? Murderbot is a clear analog for a generation raised on the internet, who have internalized the ways that social media and constant discourse have separated us from empathy and community, even as the political landscape grows more grim. The best part of the series is that Murderbot realizes in real time that his survival depends on changing his free will from a self-serving code to an acceptance of all the intimate and scary parts of being alive. Free will may sound like a robot's dream, but if you insist on turning your independence into isolating individualism, eventually you might be asked: Why did you even want freedom in the first place?
