MurderBot Season One (TV/blu-ray review).
I’ve watched the first series of ‘MurderBot’ with no real knowledge of the books, so I’m not sure how accurate they are to it. The Security Unit, or Ser Unit (actor Alexander Skarsgård), finds a way to turn off his governing module while on a mission with the research team, the Preservation Aux, or PresAux Team, on planet 898. To pass the time, he downloads and watches SF soaps to pass the time and, hopefully, not reveal he could ignore orders if he wanted to.
Of course, he has to rescue members of the team from a toothy two-headed creature, resulting in some damage to himself. It’s then we see he actually has a human body under his full body armour. Occasionally, he is described as an android, but there is no telling where organics and mechanics end.
Later, they are called to another company’s base, and the Sec Unit tells his human team to stay where they were and goes in alone and ends up facing off against three rogue Security Units and gets some serious damage and an implant in the back of his neck. Immobilised, he can only watch as the humans rescue him.
Back at their camp, repairs are made and the implant is removed, but the team member who did the repairs spots that his governing module is turned off and immobilises his body. That doesn’t last, and he says they need to use the antenna and call for a spacecraft. When that doesn’t work, he and the base commander, Mensah (actress Noma Dumezweni), go out in a hopper to activate it in person, only it explodes. Between episodes they spend some time repairing it, even using some of Ser Unit’s own circuitry.
They have to establish some kind of contact with the other team and mutually agree to use the second beacon for rescue. Their company isn’t happy, especially with the evidence carried by their Ser Unit, taking it away to wipe its memory and then melt it down. His team wants him back, and Mensah has to exert a lot of pressure. It’s then up to one of the team to get his memory. What happens next is a spoiler.
For a 35-minute episode over ten episodes show, a lot is packed in, with probably only character depth that is lost. Well, apart from the Ser Unit. What this story really concentrates on is what makes any being sentient and the freedom to do what it wants. Considering the reality it lives in is a combination of robots and cyborgs, it’s a bit difficult to decide which is which and who are actually humans. In some respects, a mixture of both does make sense, as both use the same sort of technology. The fact that the likes of the Security Units are given human proportions and the real difference is with the armour they wear, which has weapons in both arms. You would have thought they would have been built more imposingly and bigger. Even more so as the survey team wasn’t aware of what was under the armour.
The name ‘MurderBot’ didn’t really sink in with anyone on the survey team, who found it creepy. His speech inflections and metaphors come more from the SF soaps he watches, and it’s only the lack of accompanying emotions that would make you guess he was a mechanical man.
There is the obvious expectation that there will be more series, but they’re going to have to consider making the episodes longer to pack more in.
I’m still not sure what to make of the series. Its strength is from the questioning of what an artificial intelligence is and why it would not be granted independence. The fact that it is an SF soap opera addict shows all it really wants is an ordinary life but gets chucked into unusual circumstances. It also questions something I wrote a while back: whether SF shows could exist in an SF reality. Here, it seems it does.
GF Willmetts
December 2025
(pub: AppleTV+, 2025. 2 Blu-ray discs. 350 minutes, 10*35-minute episodes. Price: varies. ASIN: W3892. I pulled a Chinese release version.
