Murderbot – Season 1

It is no secret that I am a big fan of Murderbot. Having one’s favourite fiction translated to screen is always a bit nerve-wracking, but I am pleased to say that this all turned out very well indeed.

One of the big questions in such an exercise will be, do the characters look like you expected? I gather than some people had envisaged Murderbot as more feminine, or as darker-skinned, and I don’t recall its appearance ever being defined. But in this case Alexander Skarsgård was producing the series and wanted to star in it, so a white man is what we got. True to the book, that was white man with Barbie genitals.

Most of the rest of the cast was fine, but weirdly I had a problem with Pin-Lee. I had been expecting someone slim, sharply dressed, and with long hair in a pony tail. That’s what Asian women lawyers look like, right? What we got was something very different, but I got used to it.

It has become fashionable online to describe the people from Preservation Alliance as ‘hippies’. Those of us old enough to remember the 1960s will beg to disagree, but I think it is fair to describe them as what hippies would be with an extra 60 years of social development behind them. Science fiction is always about today, after all.

Because the books are told from Murderbot’s point of view, they only show the humans through its eyes. With the TV series, we can see them for ourselves. This required giving them more depth and presence than they have in the books. Mensah and Gurathin both have quite a bit extra to them, and I particularly appreciated what was done with Gurathin.

The half hour format for each episode has come in for quite a bit of criticism, and I can see why. The shows did feel a bit thin. But they were also enjoyable and the narrative breaks between episodes worked well. I enjoyed the series so much that I would like to make time to re-watch it. I will be interested to see how it feels in longer chunks.

A major deviation from the books is the inclusion of excerpts from The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. It is every bit as cheesy as I expected. I was reminded in places of Galaxy Quest. Of course the point of including it was to throw light on what Murderbot is thinking, and from that point of view it worked quite well. Heaven help us if anyone actually tries to make a spin-off series from it.

There are other deviations from the book. I have not gone back and read it to see what they are because I don’t care. Murderbot works as a TV series, and it definitely needs a second season (if only so we can get ART in the cast. I understand that it has been renewed, so we have much to look forward to.