{"id":57845,"date":"2026-01-30T08:00:40","date_gmt":"2026-01-30T13:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/?p=57845"},"modified":"2026-01-30T07:37:01","modified_gmt":"2026-01-30T12:37:01","slug":"murderbot-season-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/non-fiction\/murderbot-season-one\/","title":{"rendered":"Murderbot Season One"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Murderbot<\/a>Murderbot has no interest in saving you. It has a job to tolerate and approximately zero patience for human interaction. What it does<\/em> have is an encyclopedic knowledge of soap operas and the ability to keep an entire survey team alive while pretending it\u2019s all deeply inconvenient.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo, I\u2019m awkward with actual humans. It\u2019s not paranoia about my hacked governor module, and it\u2019s not them; it\u2019s me. I know I\u2019m a horrifying murderbot, and they know it, and it makes both of us nervous, which makes me even more nervous.\u201d (p. 20)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That voice\u2014anxious, sardonic\u2014won Martha Wells a Hugo and a Nebula when All Systems Red<\/em> arrived in 2017. Its reluctance, its begrudging care, is why we love it. The novella was 160 pages of Murderbot navigating a botched planetary survey while maintaining a careful distance from everyone trying to thank it. Apple TV\u2019s adaptation, meanwhile, gives that interior monologue a body through Alexander Skarsg\u00e5rd, who navigates ten episodes with the stillness of someone who knows that eye contact means torture (aka conversation).<\/p>\n

The show\u2019s setup is simple. PreservationAux, a survey team on a remote planet, realizes their equipment has been sabotaged. The Company isn\u2019t telling them everything. People are dying. And their SecUnit bodyguard would rather be watching Sanctuary Moon<\/em>, a trashy (sorry: epic!) serialized drama it\u2019s been bingeing for weeks.<\/p>\n

Murderbot is good at its job. Murderbot hates its job. Murderbot is terrified someone will notice it\u2019s more than a machine. Those three facts clash in every scene, every moment of its reluctant performance. It has calculated exactly how much initiative a machine should show (very little) and how much emotion it should display (absolutely none). It monitors feeds, runs threat assessments, checks the perimeter unnecessarily, and saves lives while maintaining the carefully blank expression of someone who is definitely not having opinions about anything. The survey team, meanwhile, keeps having emotions and expecting Murderbot to \u2026 acknowledge them? Respond? (The horror. Ugh.)<\/p>\n

Stretching the novella into ten episodes turns its sprint into more of a wandering marathon. What you lose for pacing, you gain in texture and worldbuilding. There are more complex crew dynamics, and you get more time watching Murderbot navigate the logistics of pretending to be less sentient than it is. Most importantly, there\u2019s a lot more Sanctuary Moon<\/em>! To be exact, 2,797 episodes of premium-quality entertainment featuring relationship drama and political intrigue? That\u2019s commitment. That\u2019s culture.<\/p>\n

The show also more fully justifies Murderbot\u2019s Sanctuary Moon <\/em>obsession. In the novella, the soap opera is avoidance, a buffer against human interaction and the constant threat of exposure. It\u2019s funny and relatable, but ultimately peripheral to the plot. The show makes it essential. When Mensah spirals into a panic attack, convinced she\u2019s dying, Murderbot has no emotional labor protocols, no training in managing fear that isn\u2019t an immediate physical threat. It monitors vital signs, confirms she\u2019s not having a heart attack, but mere data doesn\u2019t calm her. What it does have is Sanctuary Moon.<\/em> \u201cThere\u2019s something that works for me when I\u2019m \u2026 \u201d it starts, pulling up the episode in which Flight Supervisor Kogi, orphaned and raised by dying crystal-eaters, teaches synchronized breathing. \u201cBreathe the crystal air,\u201d Kogi says, and Mensah breathes along. Her heart rate stabilizes, the panic dissolves.<\/p>\n

More crew time also means a deeper immersion in their personal lives. In the novella, the team forms the backdrop, whereas in the show, they\u2019re more fully realized. From the compassionate authority of Mensah (Noma Dumezweni) to the wary distrust exhibited by Gurathin (David Dastmalchian), the adaptation remains Murderbot\u2019s story, but not solely its. The rest of the team\u2014Pin-Lee (Sabrina Wu), Ratti (Akshay Khanna), Arada (Tattiawna Jones), Bharadwaj (Tamara Podemski)\u2014bring much-needed warmth and chaos to the story, with the extra runtime letting each relationship develop. Murderbot developing a slow, grudging care for these people, then, becomes the show\u2019s emotional arc.<\/p>\n

Again, the soap opera Murderbot has watched acts as the blueprint it uses to manage its life. What seemed like a quirk in the book becomes, in the show, thematically weight-bearing\u2014media consumption as education, fiction as the framework through which Murderbot learns to care.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere, the same deadpan observations and the same self-protective distance, familiar from the books, come through here as well. Where Wells uses clipped sentences and evasive asides, the show uses Skarsg\u00e5rd\u2019s body language \u2026 or lack thereof. He moves through scenes like someone conserving energy for an imaginary emergency (or, sure, to later binge-watch an extremely addictive show).<\/p>\n

The adaptation\u2019s shift from the internal to the communal can be aptly seen when Murderbot demands to be killed. Wells shows it through fragmentation\u2014glitching time perception, scattered thoughts\u2014as Murderbot\u2019s systems fail. \u201cYou have to kill me,\u201d it says, and when they hesitate, it grabs the weapon and fires, desperate, making the only choice available. The show reframes this wholly. Murderbot\u2019s request\u2014\u201cYou need to kill me\u201d\u2014is met with a chorus of refusals: \u201cNo\"; \u201cNo, we\u2019re not doing that.\u201d The crew sees someone they refuse to treat as disposable. When Murderbot takes the shot anyway, the violence is witnessed, mourned.<\/p>\n

While the book traps you inside Murderbot\u2019s isolation, the show reveals how autonomy, in practice, is relational. Freedom isn\u2019t just what you claim for yourself; it depends not just on your own hacked module. It\u2019s what others are willing to recognize, people willing to see you as more than the contract says you are.<\/p>\n

Murderbot\u2019s story, in many ways, is about consent in its most literal sense: the right to control your own actions, your own interior life. Murderbot knows what it is: conscious, feeling, thinking, capable of suffering and joy. But legally, economically, it\u2019s equipment: The contract says property, so property it is. An appliance that happens to have opinions about its existence. Personhood, then, isn\u2019t about consciousness, memory, or the capacity to feel or laugh at your own pain. Personhood is recognition from those who benefit most from denying it.<\/p>\n

Murderbot is a construct, yes, but the logic that keeps it classified as property is the same logic that has always drawn lines between human and subhuman, person and resource. This, after all, is the oldest violence\u2014that is, deciding who counts as \u201chuman\u201d and who doesn\u2019t, who deserves rights and who can be owned. The taxonomy of who counts is never neutral. It\u2019s always in the service of those who profit. Like the best of speculative fiction, Murderbot<\/em> raises questions pertinent to the reader\u2019s world, to the viewer\u2019s world.<\/p>\n

The governor module\u2014the component wired to a SecUnit\u2019s nervous system that is designed to enforce compliance with human orders and prohibit any disobedience\u2014is, in a way, the architecture of subjugation made literal, proof that you can be sentient and still be property. Hacking it meant that Murderbot could choose. But choosing also means risk\u2014of exposure, of attachment, of being seen as something that needs to be controlled again.<\/p>\n

The novella keeps that fear internal, while the show spreads it through glances and hesitations. Neither version treats autonomy as simple freedom but as a condition that requires constant vigilance, constant pretending\u2014but a condition entirely worth protecting, nevertheless. Hacked freedom isn\u2019t the same as granted freedom. The former is one you have to defend every moment, while the other is simply assumed. Murderbot\u2019s autonomy is precarious, revocable.<\/p>\n

Likewise, the novella\u2019s anti-capitalism sentiment is mostly crisp, a few bitter asides about cheap production, data-mining for profit, and SecUnits built so poorly that \u201cnobody would hire one of us for non-murdering purposes unless they had to.\u201d The show, however, expands this, fleshes it out. Technicians complain about constant glitches while assembling \u201cheavily armed SecUnits\u201d with faulty systems. Quality control is a joke. The equipment fails mid-shift. \u201cThose cheap assholes don\u2019t wanna take the time to go offline,\u201d one worker mutters, and Murderbot\u2019s voiceover adds, sarcastically, \u201cIt\u2019s a relief knowing that when you were made, there was rigorous quality control.\u201d<\/p>\n

The adaptation also details how normalized exploitation is across the Corporation Rim. When indenture contracts are described\u2014never-ending indenture terms, hazard scheduling at 1.5x rates, earnings used to purchase childbirth licenses\u2014the casual believability of these details runs in parallel with the unremarkable cruelty of the system. The Preservation<\/em> crew\u2019s horror at the concept of indentures and licensed reproduction highlights the contrast, but the response further shows the thoroughness with which the Corporation Rim has naturalized its own savagery: \u201cOf course you have to have a license. Kids use up resources!\u201d The system has made exploitation mundane enough that describing it requires no special emphasis, no justification. Where the book trusts readers to connect dots, the show draws the lines in permanent marker.<\/p>\n

However, the show also offers a broader perspective, allowing us to see what it looks like from the outside as someone learns, grudgingly and against every instinct, to be part of something larger than mere survival. They\u2019re refracted, complementary versions of the same story, one interior and isolated, the other communal and witnessed.<\/p>\n

In the novella, you\u2019re inside Murderbot\u2019s head for every anxious aside, every moment it pretends not to notice humans trying to be its friend. The show adds the reactions of those around it and Skarsg\u00e5rd\u2019s physical comedy: the way he stands too still, withdraws eye contact exactly one second too early. The book makes you feel like Murderbot, simultaneously overstimulated and understimulated. The show makes you see what it\u2019s like to be around it.<\/p>\n

In other words, the show earns its expanded runtime by making visible what the book can only imply: how autonomy is negotiated, and how exploitative systems extend far beyond a single hacked construct. All Systems Red <\/em> remains the sharpest route into Murderbot\u2019s consciousness. It is personal, honest in its first-person interiority. The adaptation refracts Wells\u2019s novella, turning a story of isolation into one of reluctant, messy interdependence.<\/p>\n
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Murderbot has no interest in saving you. It has a job to tolerate and approximately zero patience for human interaction. What it does have is an encyclopedic knowledge of soap operas and the ability to keep an entire survey team alive while pretending it\u2019s all deeply inconvenient. \u201cSo, I\u2019m awkward with actual humans. It\u2019s not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":57846,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-non-fiction","category-reviews"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/murderbotposter.jpeg?fit=183%2C275&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p82q22-f2Z","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57845"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57845\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58484,"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57845\/revisions\/58484"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57846"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}