Rating: TV-MA | Episodes: 10 | Runtime: 30 minutes
Release Date: May 16th, 2025 (USA)
Studio: Apple TV+
Creator(s): Chris Weitz & Paul Weitz / Martha Wells (novel All Systems Red)

Boldness is all!

As someone known to go home once plans dissolve into an amorphous loop of “What should we do now?” as well as being averse to “hanging out” without an activity-based purpose, I can relate to Murderbot’s (Alexander Skarsgård) desire to ignore the clients he’s been tasked to protect and binge watch his favorite show instead. Doing it anyway is what it is to be human, though. Finding ways to reconcile your selfish drive for personal pleasure with the social necessity of compromising those ambitions for a greater, communal good. It’s frustrating.

This is the beauty of Chris and Paul Weitz’s adaptation (and, presumably, author Martha Wells’ original intent) of All Systems Red into “Murderbot”. By focusing on a hybrid synthetic/organic construct, we watch an “adult” cultivating those core tenets of humanity (compassion and altruism) that we absorbed in our youth. Being conditioned to push aside (if not fully ignore) our self-indulgent impulses. Figuring out how to soften decisive pragmatism into more thoughtful white lies of comfort. That whole empathy thing conservatives now label a weakness.

It’s not something he seeks to learn. It’s more a product of his experiences while working with a research team from the Preservation Alliance—a group of freehold planets outside the jurisdiction of the Corporation Rim. Dr. Mensah’s (Noma Dumezweni) endeavor needs Corporation permission to travel to a colony in hopes of finding material that can help supply an influx of funds to the Alliance at a time when some have considered joining the Rim. They won’t grant it unless they take a SecUnit and Murderbot is the cheapest option.

What they don’t know is that Murderbot hacked the Governor Module serving as a failsafe to conscript it to its humans and ensure it can’t harm them. What it doesn’t know is that Mensah and her team are fully against the idea of constructs being treated like slaves and thus abhor the idea of the Governor Module. So, Murderbot does its best to play along and act as though it’s still under their control and they (mostly, considering David Dastmalchian’s Dr. Gurathin, an augmented human, knows something is amiss) are too naive to notice.

The game is two-fold. Murderbot, despite its irritation from its humans’ penchant for risking their lives every chance they get, finds itself spontaneously caring about their wellbeing (helped by the fact it needs them to eventually leave this particular planet) instead of simply letting them die. And they (Mensah, Gurathin, Sabrina Wu’s Pin-Lee, Tattiawna Jones’ Arada, Tamara Podemski’s Bharadwaj, and Akshay Khanna’s Ratthi) must learn to put their money where their mouths are upon discovering they wield absolutely no control over it.

“Murderbot” therefore progresses as a series of high-stakes scenarios wherein trust must be built by necessity insofar as allowing actions to trump fear. Mensah and company should not even consider the idea that Murderbot would ever put their needs above its survival (Gurathin is quick to constantly remind them of this), yet it seems to do exactly that every step of the way. You can write it off as mutually assured survival or call it latent muscle memory from when it was programmed to do so, but maybe it has just begun to grasp the value of life.

Sure, the truth is probably closer to Murderbot feeling like they are its pets (ironic considering Mensah must emphatically remind her crew that it isn’t their pet), but that doesn’t mean it’s not also thawing to the prospect of affection. The show it loves to binge (“Sanctuary Moon” stars a fun cast of known commodities in recurring cameos) does have a major plot line wherein a synthetic falls in love with a human, after all. Just like people watch foreign films to better learn a new language, Murderbot watches its serial slop to learn “human”.

Don’t call it slop in its presence, though. Murderbot considers “Sanctuary Moon” prestige television and has guns in its arms … so disparage it at your own peril. Not that it would ever harm you for that opinion. It will just argue against it with the same fervor as a fanboy stanning their fave on social media. That’s the type of relatable and zeitgeisty humor at the back of the action and mystery (someone or something is trying to stop Mensah and the others from leaving the planet alive). Murderbot’s sass vs. Preservation Alliance’s kumbaya nature vs. a cruel world.

It’s all very entertaining as a result considering we’re always privy to Murderbot’s uncensored internal monologue (Wells’ series is written as its personal diaries) in contrast to what it ultimately says aloud. So, you have the contrast of its true thoughts and its attempts to deceive its humans by saying something else as well as the dynamic of it believing those attempts are foolproof when reality shows they often earn the exact opposite reaction. The same can be said for the humans when their desire to humanize Murderbot inevitably makes them look silly.

That sense of honest fallibility is also what lends the show so much heart. Because both sides mean well regardless of their execution. They each care in their own way and hope to survive this whole ordeal to reckon with who they are to each other under much safer circumstances. As it is in this moment, however, they don’t have much choice but to give into trust. Mensah is Murderbot’s ride home and its security protocols and combat programming are the only things keeping her team alive long enough to provide it.

To make these “friends of convenience” transform into “friends with purpose” ultimately comes down to the performances allowing each character evolution to land. Plot only goes so far. We must appreciate the humans’ fear and Murderbot’s confusion. We must understand the internal switch to see the external switch as more than just a contract being honored. Skarsgård is a huge piece of this as Murderbot’s free will opens room for vulnerability and emotions. Dumezweni and Podemski are equally great at providing a mirror.

The others are too. Wu, Jones, and Khanna are the archetypical result of having too much empathy and Dastmalchian is a crucial counter to Murderbot as a human who’s adapted the other direction by using synthetic augmentation to foster mistrust. Add a bunch of supporting roles that span candidly off-putting (Anna Konkle) to enigmatic (Amanda Brugel) and there’s a mix of everything a good sci-fi classic and sci-fi spoof can offer. “Murderbot” finds that sweet spot in-between to deliver as many laughs as thrills.

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Alexander Skarsgård, Akshay Khanna, Tamara Podemski, Anna Konkle, Sabrina Wu, Tattiawna Jones and David Dastmalchian in MURDERBOT, now streaming on Apple TV+.