There’s a world out there, a world not so very different from our own, a world in which Apple TV+ rebrands as sci-fi specialty streaming service — a la Shudder for horror or Crunchyroll for anime — and makes a very strong go of it. Severance, Silo, Foundation, For All Mankind, Invasion, at least one other show I could name but won’t because it would spoil a pretty big surprise: Apple’s genre efforts are stylistically and thematically diverse, they provide a platform for a phalanx of terrific actors, and they look expensive as hell. It’s clear that this science fiction is treated with care and concern by the streamer. Apple TV+ wouldn’t have canceled Raised by Wolves, that’s for damn sure. (I’m still salty about that. Damn you, Zaslav!)
Judging from its premiere (both episodes one and two drop today), Murderbot fits neatly into this existing pattern of platforming bold and often beautiful science fiction visions. This one comes from author Martha Wells — her novel All Systems Red, the first in her Murderbot Diaries series, provides the basis for the show — and co-creators Chris and Paul Weitz, who also co-write the first two episodes and split the honors directing. Running at sitcom length, it has a mostly breezy and comedic vibe, between moments of sudden inhuman violence and cutaways to a psychedelic sci-fi show-within-the-show. The mix works.
It works in large part because of Alexander Skarsgård, who plays the show’s eponymous android. Told from his perspective with soft-spoken, obscenity-laden voiceover narration, Murderbot tells the story of a Security Unit, a robot built to protect and serve humankind…while broadcasting their every move back to the Company that makes these things and rents them out. It’s like if your Alexa, in addition to spying on you, could also blow your brains out. (There’s a great visual gag that riffs on this kind of metastasizing death-capitalism: Port Free Commerce, the giant space hub where the team rents their SecUnit, looks like a huge black space tumor.)
What makes our robot friend interesting is that he’s managed to disable his governor module, the technological whatsit that forces him to obey all human commands unless they’d harm the human. His reasoning for this is simple: Humans are assholes, and who wants to follow their orders anyway? He gives himself the name Murderbot, though until the end of the episode it’s not clear why that moniker would occur to him. He doesn’t like humans, but he has no particular interest in killing them either.
In fact, he risks his own cyber-organic hide to rescue them. Flashforward a few months from his moment of liberation, and Murderbot is still working for the Company. Apparently he hadn’t really thought through his future prospects if he left the life of being a Security Unit behind. This time, however, he’s not working for some big soulless corporation, but for a team of research scientists from a planet with a commune-style government beyond corporate jurisdiction. In order to acquire the necessary insurance, they’re forced to rent a SecUnit to take along for the ride as protection.
Led by Dr. Mensah (Noma Dumezweni), a terraforming specialist, the team also includes geochemist Bharadwaj (Tamara Podemski); “augmented human” Dr. Gurathin (David Dastmalchian), whose implants allow him to interface with digital data; and Pin Lee (Sabrina Wu), Arada (Tattiawna Jones), and Ratthi (Akshay Khanna), a trio of good-looking young scientists whose specialties I forget but whose romantic interests in one another are remarked upon by Murderbot with disgust. He doesn’t have much time for “feelings and exchanges of words and fluids” where the filthy flesh-bodied humans are concerned.
What he does have time to do is watch TV, and I mean a ton of it. With his governor module disabled, he’s no longer obligated to pay 100% attention to his job at all times. Trusting his very sophisticated sensors and datafeeds to warn him if trouble arises, he vegges out and watches a cheesy but gorgeous sci-fi show called The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, which has the tone of a soap opera and the day-glo color palette of James Cameron’s Avatar. (The cast includes surprise cameos John Cho, Jack McBrayer, Clark Gregg, and DeWanda Wise.)
Unfortunately, it’s a bad idea to second-screen guard duty on a hostile alien planet. Due to some kind of glitch with the expedition’s maps — maybe they’ve been tampered with, maybe the Company just gave them out of date maps, who knows — Arada and Bharadwaj wind up doing tests in an area inhabited by a gigantic centipede with heads on either end of its massive multi-legged body. It comes roaring out of the ground, bites Bharadwaj, and swallows Murderbot, who blasts his way free and scares off the beast. In order to snap Arada out of her shock long enough to get back to safety, he takes a big risk, one he wouldn’t be able to take if his governor module were still active: He removes his mask to reveal his human face, asking questions about Arada’s life to keep her focused until they’re back at their ship.
The problem for Murderbot is he’s done too good a job: No one’s ever seen a SecUnit unmask and display empathy in order to comfort and aid a client before. While Mensah is mostly just curious about what the obviously not-quite-normal robot is “going through,” Gurathin’s more afraid than anything else, because if Murderbot can defy his programming to help people, he can do it to hurt people too. A brief, glitchy seven-second flashback, all that remains of the robot’s memories prior to his most recent refurbishment, shows what looks like him mowing people down en masse.
But other than a lurid fantasy in which he shoots everyone to death so they won’t find out his secret and report him back to the Company (the moment is so convincing I actually thought they’d gone ahead and killed off the cast before the first 20 minutes was up.) he doesn’t seem to be a threat. Not yet, anyway, though his eerie repetition of his favorite show’s catchprhase — “Stay calm. It’ll be okay. You have my word” — indicates he could snap and become a walking mass-casualty event again at any time. Or, I suppose, he could turn into a superhero, which he’s also shown a propensity for. Quite the coin flip!
Murderbot’s pleasures are mostly pretty obvious. There’s a big killer robot who looks like Daft Punk and gets in a physical fight with a giant two-headed centipede. Meanwhile, sometimes there’s a show within the show that looks like Star Trek from the Sgt. Pepper universe. Perhaps this is just recency bias talking, but change a few proper nouns around and this feels more like Andor than anything else — the tone is way different, but it has that same feeling of taking place in a tucked-away corner of an otherwise familiar universe.
Its greatest strength, however, is that it’s the best use of Alexander Skarsgård I’ve seen since probably True Blood. News flash: Alexander Skarsgård is a handsome guy, but most of the time his good looks are tinged with a kind of gawky goofiness. His towering height, lanky frame (here shown with an anatomically incorrect crotch region), and blue-eyed blonde-haired Scandinavian farm-boy appearance make him hard to fully take seriously as a heavy or an antihero in a show or film that plays such things straight.
Neither True Blood nor Murderbot do so. This makes them a better fit for him than, say, The Stand or The Northman, which required him to be scary without winking at us. The thing is, he’ll always be one of the male models who burn themselves alive by having a gasoline fight in Zoolander to me; his best stuff makes use of his innate qualities as a comic presence on screen. If this winds up being the story of an ultraviolent robot killing machine bumbling his way through a series of splatstick battles and adventures to become a hero despite himself, the writing and design may set it up, but it’s Skarsgård who’ll make it work.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.