(courtesy IMP Awards)
Watching a literary adaptation spring to life is always a fascinating exercise.
Will it spring fully formed from the page like the visual manifestation of all the little films your mind inevitably feeds you as you read or will it feel like another story entirely, one that channels the spirit of the story or series you love but with new clothes and a style that recalls rather than closely matches what you know?
Of course, if you’re a member of the “No-adaptation-will-match-the-book-I-love” then all the breathlessly anticipatory questions of the preceding paragraph are null and void, but if you’re the sort of reader who’s eternally intrigued by what might happen when a narrative you have heartily embraced finds fresh expression in another medium, then there’s much to enjoy when words jump from the page to the screen.
Murderbot, based on the brilliantly insightful and very funny The Murderbot Diaries series of novellas and e-books by Martha Wells, is the latest series of written-word stories to become a streaming darling, and the good news is that all the hopes and dreams you might have pinned on the adaptation largely find some form of pleasing fulfillment.
Of course, the one thing that really sets the stories apart – the interior monologue of the titular bot himself, who’s a security robot who’s managed to hack his programming to grant himself a singularly broad degree of self-determination unknown to his heavily-algorithmic compatriots – isn’t as present as it is in the books but then it was never going to be was it?
So, no use fretting over that.
BUT what you do get is a character who happily breaks the fourth wall, addressing audiences directly with the sardonic wit, world-weariness and scorn you have grown to know and love if you have read the books, and who gives you an insight about humanity that you might expect to get from an artificial lifeform.
He is the perfect objective onlooker in certain ways; charged with ensuring the safety and security of various corporate teams in a galaxy given over to capitalism and government with a few oversights, his view of the talent and competency of humanity is dim indeed.
The books are full of him silently dressing down humanity from within, his scorn and condescension so acidic at times that you marvel that it doesn’t ferociously chew through his organic and non-organic parts alike – yes, he is a mix of the two though he largely keeps his shiny, smooth mask on because, surprise, surprise, people do not like their robotic servants to look just like them – and so too is the show with Alexander Skarsgård doing a fine job of being both protector and scornful companion of his creator species of whom he thinks very little but whom he protects anyway because, self-determination or not, he feels annoyingly compelled to help.
And that’s perhaps the funniest part of the books, and now the series – the Murderbot, despite how much he dislikes those who gave him form and existence, helps them stay alive and even thrives at times, driven by some innate need to help but more importantly by a survival mentality that acknowledges that if he isn’t going to stick out like a sore thumb among all the other non-sentient robots out there that he must at least LOOK like he’s adhering to his programming.
After all, if human-like appearance freaks out people when it comes to their walking AI-in-a-metal-tube civilisational accessories, then appearing to have full free will, or, you know, actually having it, absolutely put the panicky cat among the pigeons and who knows what those idiotic humans will do if you make them uneasy, or worse, outright fearful?
Murderbot suspects he knows but he’s not keen to find it; not simply because he doesn’t want to be hauled in and melted down for recyclable scrap and parts but because all he wants, all he really wants, is to be left alone to watch the gigaton of streaming entertainment options he’s downloaded into all the programming space left by doing his own thing.
He’s a robotic introvert and he just wants significant amounts of alone time, thank you very much.
His frankly understandable antisocial tendencies – introverts are not, by and large, antisocial of course but Murderbot most certainly is – are given rich and hilarious form by Skarsgård who perfectly captures the character’s world-weary acceptance that he is to mostly be left to do his own thing that he must also pretend to be who was programmed to be.
He doesn’t like it, loathes it in fact, and he disparages those he does it for at every turn, but he does it anyway because it means he can be his authentic self, even if that self can occasionally slips out and start to make the humans around him – in these two episodes, that’s a hippy-techno science team from a fairly enlightened, liberated planet led by Mensah (Noma Dumezweni) who stumble upon a great corporate conspiracy which fuels the narrative of the books, and no doubt the series, and adds storyline weight to the protagonist’s amusingly caustic existential struggles – start to ask questions Murderbot does not particularly want to answer.
Richly funny sci-fi with far more grounded humanity that you might be used to from stories in the genre – while Murderbot and its superb source material tells first-rate, muscularly thoughtful sci-fi, it does with tongue planted very firmly in cheek, a delicious mix of the serious and the very much not – the series is that part evocation of the genre as a whole which is, at its heart, all about exploring and distilling what it means to be human.
It’s not as straightforward in Murderbot as it might be in other residents of the genre, but then that’s the whole point – here are books, and now a superlatively good streaming adaptation which seeks to do much the same thing as pretty much all sci-fi but with a world-weary wink-and-a-nod and a sense of fatalistic honestly which is hilarious and emotional impactful all at once, and which is realises with a flawless expression that will have happy that the protagonist of the stories managed to flick that self-determinatory switch to sentiency.
Murderbot streams on AppleTV+ with the tenth and final episode of series one releasing 11 July.