Reviewed by Alicia Glass 

Based on the book series The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells, the show features a security android taking on a very different kind of dangerous mission, while struggling with concepts of identity, place, emotions, free will and isolationism. 

Honestly, if the main bot of the show was played by anyone other than Alexander Skarsgard, this would be a very different and possibly considerably less popular show. Given that the shows network, AppleTV+, despite putting out a ton of really fantastic TV shows, is still struggling to find its own place and popular fanbase, this is a perfect place for the “birth” of a show about a futuristic robot attempting to do the exact same thing. Make sure your government control module is completely hacked and lets get into this! 

So, here in the future the corporations pretty much run everything, as is to be expected, including the potentially murderous security robot units, which they rent and sell out to clientele all over the known universe. These SecUnits are supposed to be completely controlled by their government command modules, and new-owner protocols, and can be memory-wiped and even smelted down completely should something untoward happen, like oh, a bot starts thinking for itself, refusing orders, or even worse, starts wanting freedom and autonomy. Which is more or less exactly what happened to our main bot boy, who unfortunately decided to name himself, Murderbot. 

So Murderbot may have hacked his government module and gained autonomy, but he/it is still subject to the whims of the corporate company, and these pacifistic researchers have reluctantly taken him onto their mission for insurance purposes, as the whole cyborg SecUnit thing seems to them a bit too much like slavery. Led by the President of the Preservation Alliance, empathetic terraforming specialist Ayda Mensah (Noma Dumezweni), the rest of the crew features Pin-Lee (Sabrina Wu), scientist and legal counsel for the team; Bharadwaj (Tamara Podemski), their geochemist; Ratthi (Akshay Khanna) their wormhole expert, who also enters into an odd attempt at a throuple amongst the crew while all this other nonsense is going on; unfortunate biologist Arada (Tattiawna Jones), and finally, Gurathin (David Dastmalchian), an augmented human and their tech expert. 

Initially, Murderbot wants very little to do with the humans that “hired” his SecUnit services, noting that humans are boring and stupid, weird and occasionally murderous, preferring instead to spend his time going through his backlog of the several-hundred-episodes of the space drama The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. 

The meta of Murderbot loving and using whole scenes and quotes from Sanctuary Moon to try and better relate to his charges, to better understand a fantasized version of humanity set in his own future, is very 3rd-wall-breaking and vastly amusing. We ourselves idolize our beloved Star Trek and Star Wars and other futuristic space-faring shows for exactly the same reasons – current reality kinda sucks balls, lets ostrich ourselves into the characters we desperately hope are better versions of ourselves here on the screen. It only helps that the stars of the semi-constant episodes of Sanctuary Moon Murderbot likes to play are the likes of John Cho, Clark Gregg, Jack McBrayer and Dewanda Wise, as well. 

Each show is only half an hour long, but manages to deal with heavy concepts pretty constantly, and from both the war-mongering and peace-loving human side, but also in theory from the newly-autonomous robot side. If a cyborg, a robot, has enough brain power to ask why me?, and the free will once unfettered from the government control module enough to say NO., humanity seems once again to have reverted back to that age-old concept of slavery, just now with a different species. Appropriately enough, the one person that was suspicious of Murderbot from the very start, who becomes a kind of frenemy as the show progresses, is someone else who suffers from things like mental slavery, addiction, and of course, imposter syndrome, that only a cyborg could truly appreciate. 

Decide the concepts of robotic autonomy for yourself in Murderbot Season 1, on AppleTV+ now!