‘Murderbot’ Episodes 1 and 2 Review
AppleTV+ have launched their latest sci-fi show with the two episode premiere of ‘Murderbot’, based on the book series ‘The Murderbot Diaries’ by Martha Wells.
The titular character is a SecUnit, designed to provide security and protection for humans. He’s assigned to a group of researchers heading out to a hostile planet. What they don’t know is that he’s secretly broken his programming that prevents him from disobeying orders, and now he has free will, he prefers to spend his time watching bad TV shows, rather than helping the humans he despises.
The series is off to a bad start with these two episodes. The main character is Murderbot, who is one of those typical characters, an android who doesn’t really know what it’s like to be an individual, and struggles to understand the nuances of human personalities. It’s a pretty old device, being used in things like ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ with Data, but there’s still room for interesting explorations if done right. The issue is the show doesn’t do it right.
The titular character isn’t very likable. He has little love for his human charges and considers them an inconvenience, and mainly sticks around because there’s not much else he can do, hiding the fact he’s broken his programming from them. Unfortunately that means he’s not very interesting, delivering long stretches of internal monologues that could be a lot more fun and snarky. He’s mostly awkward and uncomfortable around characters, which would make the decision to keep him behind his mask understandable, and work to good effect, like C-3PO, instead he removes it at every opportunity, meaning you’re watching a human face that doesn’t have emotion, rather than a blank mechanical one.
It might be helped if any of the other characters were likable or compelling, but they aren’t. There’s no chemistry between each other or the Murderbot, and they just come off as a collection of slightly odd eccentrics, neither acting in a natural way, or fully committing to their wacky characteristics. This just makes them dull, meaning there’s no reason to worry whether they live or die. They also follow the lead of the colonists in ‘Alien: Covenant’, frequently making bad decisions and seeming to be the worst possible choices for a mission like this. It could be the case that they will be developed more, but after the first two episodes there’s nothing to like about them.
In fact, the show reminds me of ‘Mickey 17’, which I also wasn’t a fan of. It has a similar plot with the mission to a remote planet, and a similar kind of humor, one that never fully commits, so ends up feeling more like a cringey attempt at being funny, rather than a proper comedy series.
I get the feeling that the ending could be similar too. There are some hints that the corporation that controls this section of space could be shady and untrustworthy, and it ends with just enough of a cliffhanger to keep hope alive that things will get more interesting next week, because these first two episodes have done nothing to sell the show to me.
