brendan halpin

I have read all of the Murderbot books and really liked them, so I was excited to see that Apple was making them into a series. I watched the first 2 eps and have some thoughts!

I am approaching this as a fan of the books, and so this is not so much a review of the series as its own thing as much as it’s thoughts on the series as an adaptation of the books. I hate it when people conflate these 2 things, so I want to make it very clear where I’m coming from.

Let me start with my one major complaint: over the course of the novels, I really got a sense of Murderbot as a genderless being. Which of course helped me to understand my nonbinary friends and neighbors better. (I was born in 1968, and so understanding gender as more than a binary has come slowly to me, though I was never an asshole about it and always did my best to respect people’s pronoun choices.) And so having a not-even-really-androgynous man playing Murderbot kind of took that away for me. Yes, I know that folks who look like Alexander Skarsgard (Sorry, can’t figure out how to do that cool little circle accent on this platform) can be nonbinary, but thus far, the series doesn’t seem to be interested in Murderbot’s lack of gender, except for one very pointed look at his Ken doll crotch. It feels like a missed opportunity to do something important within the context of a science fiction action show.

The show is leaning very heavily into the “being a cyborg as thinly veiled metaphor for autism” part of the source material, though. So heavily that I don’t think the veil is even thin—it’s pretty much ripped off in the second episode, which is titled “eye contact.”

While the pace of the books is best described as breakneck, the series is definitely taking a more leisurely approach. This may be because the humans are being developed as actual characters. My one beef with the books is that I could never keep the humans straight, and when they reappeared after being offstage for a book or two, it didn’t hit for me as a big reveal because I couldn’t remember who the hell they were. The human cast is fantastic as well as easily differentiated. But this does come at the expense of the more or less nonstop action of the books. It’s too early for me to conclude what I think about this decision.

They’ve made the choice to shoot clips from the Sanctuary Moon series that Murderbot is obsessed with (Featuring John Cho and Jack McBrayer in the first episode), which is kind of brilliant but then also maybe not because those scenes are so great and hilarious that they made me go, “actually, I think I’d rather watch that show.”

So I know how fandoms are, and I know if you loved the books you’re going to watch the show no matter what anyone says, and if you didn’t love the books I can’t make a recommendation because I don’t have any insight into how you’re approaching the show, so I guess rather than making a recommendation (or not) I will ask you to tell me what you think! Click on the old contact me link at the top of the page and, you know, contact me!