Murderbot: Alexander Skarsgard’s sentient robot just wants to be left alone

Would you trust a robot if you discovered they had overridden their programming so it was no longer under your command? Even worse, that it had given itself the moniker Murderbot?

Unless you’re already familiar with the Martha Wells novels The Murderbot Diaries, you might expect the TV adaption to be an ominous warning about our technological future, but this show has a few surprises up its sleeves.

For one thing, it’s damn funny at times. Not roll-in-the-aisles ha-ha, but it’s incredibly droll, and that lowkey and wry sense of humour serves it very well. It’s not as absurd as something like the satirical Galaxy Quest or as silly as Red Dwarf but there are shades.

Murderbot also clips along very well, each episode a tidy 25 minutes with enough plot momentum, character moments and quirky scenarios to leave you wanting more each week.

The cyborg in question (Alexander Skarsgard) is technically called Security Unit 238776431 but as it correctly noted, it doesn’t have the same ring to it. Murderbot is catchier, and maybe accurate. It has fuzzy memories of a massacre from before its most recent refurbishment — was it a glitch or was it ordered to?

If androids can dream of electric sheep then cyborgs can certainly have repressed PTSD.

Murderbot is assigned as a SecUnit for scientists exploring an uninhabited planet. The group – leader Mensah (Noma Dumezweni), enhanced human Gurathin (David Dastmalchian), Pin-Lee (Sabrina Wu), Arada (Tattiawna Jones) and Ratthi (Akshay Khanna) – come from a “freehold” planet that believes in equality versus the commerce-driven power centres’ philosophy of greed. Or as Murderbot classifies its new clients, they’re a hippie commune.

Murderbot’s main preoccupation though is to ensure its newfound free will remains hidden from the scientists, who would be obliged to report it to central command. All it really wants to do is to be left alone to watch his shows.

After its digital jailbreak, Murderbot downloaded a huge library of “content” and has already watched 7000 hours of TV, including its favourite soap, The Rise of Fall of Sanctuary Moon.

We get glimpses of this ludicrous show-within-the-show which features a storyline of a forbidden romance between the captain and a navigation bot — with John Cho, Jack McBrayer, Clark Gregg and DeWanda Wise gamely guest starring as the actors — which Murderbot insists is premium programming.

It views the humans as idiots charting their own doomed fates but intervenes to rescue them whenever they fail, which is often.

It’s not the misanthrope it considers itself and learns to understand the humans and even, shock, has empathy for them. From the start, most of the scientists struggle to view Murderbot as a piece of equipment to serve utilitarian needs.

For them, the fact it has sentience and is essentially indentured goes against their beliefs, but their mission wouldn’t have been bonded without agreeing to take a SecUnit. Everyone is just lucky that this was the combination.

Much of the show’s humour comes from Skarsgard’s performance, especially his voiceover narration of Murderbot’s internal monologue. His small modulations in what is supposed to be a monotone really captures the character’s growing empathy.

It uses lines of dialogue and plot points from Sanctuary Moon to mimic what it believes is “normal” human behaviour, in order to connect with the scientists. It’s not born out of desire, certainly not at first, but necessity, such as when it needs to calm one of them down during a crisis.

That Murderbot, which could be read as neurodivergent, can identify what Mensah needs to pull her out of a panic attack speaks to the power of storytelling in being the bridge between human connections, or in this case, cyborg-to-human connections.

This first season doesn’t go too deep on the distinctions and similarities between machines and humans, but if the series continues (the book series has seven volumes), it’s a solid start. In the meantime, there are plenty of chuckles to be had.

Murderbot is on Apple TV+ from Friday, May 16