Alexander Skarsgård has proven over the past number of years that he’s very adept at dry comedy, where he can deadpan lines with utmost sincerity and generate laughs. In a new Apple TV+ sci fi comedy, he actually has his funniest lines in voice over. But he also does a pretty good job n scenes where his character, an AI security construct that gets free will, actually interacts with the “asshole” humans he’s supposed to protect.
Opening Shot: “Mining Station Aratake. Corporation Rim.” As a group of miners celebrate the end of a project, we hear a voice say, “Time to party! I mean, if you’re a human. I’m a security unit.”
The Gist: The security unit is a sentient AI construct, but it doesn’t have free will; a “governor module” forces him to do whatever any human he encounters tells him to do, including raise his arm so one of the miners can light a flame under it. But during his time on the mining planet, the sec unit has tried to hack that module, and he’s finally able to do it during the party. Wow! He now has free will! The first thing he tries to figure out is what to call himself. He goes with Murderbot (Alexander Skarsgård).
Sometime later, we see Murderbot standing guard on a mining expedition at the edge of the Corporation Rim. Why is he still working? Because if he showed free will to the company that owns him, they’d melt him down in a heartbeat. “Now I’m working for a new set of assholes,” he says about humans. “But these weren’t your usual greedy psychopaths. They were… weird,” we hear his inner monologue say. They were “hippies” in “handmade clothes,” who went to Port Freecommerce to get insured for their mission. Part of that insurance is to rent a sec unit. The leader of the expedition, Mensah (Noma Dumezweni) sees the refurbished Murderbot and picks him instead of a more advanced new model.
Murderbot already has the crew scoped out by the time they settle into their quarters. They were from a planetary commune, “which generally means ‘shitshow'”, he says. Pin-Lee (Sabrina Wu), her wife Arada (Tattiawna Jones) and Rathi (Akshay Khanna) all seemed to be attracted to each other in some configuration. Gurathin (David Dastmalchian) was an augmented human able to directly interface with data systems. Bharadwaj (Tamara Podemski) liked to steal soap. And Mensah has “millions of kids” (actually 7) and lots of stress.
He also was able to access lots of streaming entertainment, and he often watched his favorite sci fi soap, The Rise & Fall Of Sanctuary Moon, instead of paying much attention to what the crew was doing. But out on the expedition, he’s alerted to an invader and tries to warn Arada and Bharadwaj. They ignore his warnings, and a huge worm-like creature with two mouths grabs Bharadwaj. Murderbot fights it off and gets damaged, but Bharadwaj is critically injured. In order to help Arada’s shock and get them both out of there, he does something sec units are never supposed to do: He takes his helmet off and shows them his human face.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Created by Paul Weitz and Chris Weitz and based on the novel The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells, Murderbot has elements of funny sci fi series like Avenue 5, as well as other genre series like Fallout.
Our Take: There are elements of Murderbot that we wished were better. Skarsgård’s voice over as Murderbot’s constantly-streaming inner monologue can get irritating at times, but that’s something we’ve never been fans of — check out our reviews of other inner monologue-heavy shows like You and the Dexter spinoff. But what we do like about the voice over is that Skarsgård immediately makes Murderbot human. His voice inflections as he’s thinking to himself show that, even though he’s a robot, he’s a sentient construct that has emotions and desires. Of course, that desire is to just be left alone to watch his “stories,” but at least it’s someting.
The two most interesting aspects of this often-funny series is the dynamic among the members of the group that Murderbot is protecting; because they’ve lived on a commune, they are all each other’s family, and they work together that way. Everyone on the team gets moments that give insight into their characters, even if that insight is just there to generate laughs.
The other aspect of the series that we found interesting is that something happened in the mining planet after Murderbot hacked his governor module. He sees glimpses of it, and there’s always a chance that he’ll go off and kill everyone, as we see him think about after the worm incident, so he can just escape all the a-hole humans and fly himself to a remote galaxy. That is certainly a part of Murderbot’s new personality, as well as his extreme social anxiety when dealing face-to-face with the humans, where Skarsgård excels. We also like the fact that the explorers — especially Gurathin — don’t fully trust Murderbot, despite the fact that where they’re from, constructs are people and not enslaved beings.
As the crew explore to find out just what those beings are that are attacking them, and why the corporation’s machinery (and Murderbot) didn’t know about them beforehand, it’ll be fun to see how well Murderbot is integrated into this very tight-knit crew, or if he actually ends up killing them all and goes rogue. In the meantime, we hope we see more scenes from his favorite soap opera.
Sex and Skin: Any time anyone talks or even thinks of stress, Muderbot cringes and changes the subject. In the episode, we do see Murderbot completely naked, though what we actually see is a little surprising.
Parting Shot: After getting another glimpse of what might have happened on the mining planet, Murderbot thinks, “Who knows what I could do?” And then he recites what he said to Arada: “Stay calm. It’ll be OK. You have my word.”
Sleeper Star: David Dastmalchian’s character Gurathin is the most uptight of the crew members and the most suspicious of Murderbot. But he cares about the crew just as much as anyone else does. Also, the scene from Murderbot’s favorite soap, featuring John Cho, Clark Gregg, DeWanda Wise and Jack McBrayer, was fun to watch.
Most Pilot-y Line: Like we said above, Murderbot’s inner monologue gets to be a bit much at times, and we hope that later in the season there’s a bit more of a balance.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Murderbot is certainly a quirky show, but it has a good combination of fun and human moments, punctuated by a surprisingly funny performance by Alexander Skarsgård.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.