My partner is a big fan of Martha Wells’s work, so I was alerted to the Murderbot novellas earlier than many. I’m a big fan of them, and they’re some of the few books to make it into my re-read rotation. Of course, television and film adaptations of books are frequently contentious for the changes they make; fans of the original work disliking the new product is hardly uncommon. There’s definitely a lot of “they didn’t make it like the books so it sucks” in my opinion, but I hope I have a little more to say about the adaptation than that.

I tried to keep an open mind coming into the series, but my first warning sign was in some of the first announcements: the casting for the title character. SecUnits are described in the books as being based on a wide mix of genetic material, and so looking very average. (More on this in a bit.) I have always interpreted this as placing SecUnit1 well outside the gender binary. SecUnits in general are constructed with cloned genetic material, which is regularly replaced with fresh cloned tissue in repair cubicles. Alexander Skarsgård is a forty-eight-year-old white man. In no way does he look like any of his tissues were cloned yesterday, and his face is quite distinctive. (I’ll confess that my background and upbringing has led me to picture SecUnit as white, so it’s only in coming to write this that I realise how strange Skarsgård’s race is for an “average” genetic profile.) As I understand it, Alexander Skarsgård is a fan of the books, and was responsible for getting the series greenlit, so I can’t begrudge him wanting to play his favourite character. But that doesn’t mean it’s a particularly good choice, and I feel like we have been robbed of the opportunity for an amazing non-binary or other gender-non-conforming actor to take a lead role.

That said, I tried to approach the series with an open mind. I watched the series with my partner, and will occasionally share their reactions as we go through.

The following will contain unmarked spoilers.

Plot

The first couple of episodes stick relatively closely to the books, albeit with some additional scenes from other characters’ perspectives, and a prologue loosely adapted from a spin-off short story published in Wired. I remember thinking that the latter twisted the original to breaking point just to make the point that the writers wanted; I didn’t take notes though, and don’t care to go back and re-watch to remind myself what frustrated me about it.

I was surprised that the episodes were only 22–25 minutes (aside from the last episode, which is closer to 35). This is a duration that in live action I’d associate more with sitcoms than with premium dramatic entertainment (although I’ll grant that it is also the standard episode length for anime of all genres, which I consume plenty of and for which it works fine). In these early episodes, the amount of content that managed to fit into this episode length was frustratingly small. After episode three, we speculated as to how many of the novellas would be adapted in the season; we had initially thought it might be all of them, but we revised our estimate down to at most two. After looking online and seeing that they were only adapting one novella in ten episodes, and anticipating the amount of padding that would be needed, my partner made the executive decision that we would come back after the end of the series and binge the rest.

This is probably the right choice; the remaining seven episodes dramatically increase the amount of filler. In anime, filler is what happens when an ongoing work is being adapted and the adaptation catches up with the original work; new plotlines or characters are created out of whole cloth by the adapters (with or without the input of the original author); these are usually lower quality than the original work, and typically cannot have significant impact on the wider plot, as the adaptation needs to connect back with the original work afterwards. In anime this is usually additional arcs or side-stories between main plot threads; The filler here is potentially more egregious: the entire plot is stretched, with additional events interspersed, additional characters and character arcs interwoven. It’s really disconcerting to be listening to Martha Wells’s dialogue in one line, only to jump to something written by the Weitz brothers.

In one particularly standout case, where SecUnit’s rogue nature is revealed, two lines that occur on the same page of the book are separated by two episodes and an entire extra subplot. The lines in question are some of my favourite: SecUnit reflexively correcting the crew on the plot of Sanctuary Moon, and Gurathin revealing “It calls itself Murderbot”/”That was private”. Neither line is delivered in the way that I had imagined from the books, although that’s not necessarily a crime in and of itself. The latter exchange is significantly recontextualised however, as in the adaptation SecUnit has just killed a human in front of the crew.

I had thought that the adaptation would try to converge back with the book for the denouement, but I hadn’t anticipated how late they’d leave it—the last two episodes parallel similar events to the ending of the book, but approach is rather differently. Partially I guess this was done to better include all characters, and partially as a (in my opinion, hamfisted) way to increase the emotional intensity. (In the books, SecUnit is taken by Preservation while returning to Port FreeCommerce and never sees the inside of a repair cubicle. In the TV series, SecUnit has a memory purge, gets another assignment, then gets its memories restored via Gurathin’s augments. It’s all very silly.) Only in the final scene do things connect back up, with SecUnit signing off letting Mensah know about it’s decision to leave.

I had wondered going in how the casting would work, given that the cast of the first and last of the first four novellas are largely shared, but the books in between have only SecUnit in common. I can only assume that the decision to stretch the first novella out was made so that the casting was for main characters across a season, rather than a larger number of recurring characters.

It’s reported that the second season will adapt the remaining three novellas, so perhaps others agree about this and the pacing will be tighter next time.

Casting and characterisation

SecUnit

I talked a bit up top about SecUnit’s casting, but there’s more to say here.

Book SecUnit is frequently described by readers as an unreliable narrator. I’m an unfortunately credulous reader, so I don’t always pick up on such things, or if I do, I pass them off as sarcasm. (My partner agrees that the dry, acerbic wit is an important aspect of the character’s likeability.) That the events on screen, and in particular SecUnit’s visible reactions to them, don’t tie up with the impression given by the narration in the books could therefore be seen as a reflection of this; however, the series really seems to diverge too far here.

I’m aware that SecUnit’s character was originally written based on Martha Wells’s own experiences with anxiety, and SecUnit definitely comes across as anxious. But the anxiety portrayed on screen seems to overt to the casual observer; the impression I got from the books (via the unreliable narrator or otherwise) was that SecUnit was better at masking it.

While in the books I’m convinced that SecUnit masks sufficiently to avoid outing itself as rogue, I can’t suspend my disbelief enough for the adaptation.

Smaller changes:

  • In the books, SecUnit describes making its visor opaque or transparent. The TV version of the visor doesn’t have an obvious way that could be done, and more generally looks really weird. I guess they wanted it to look “future-retro quirky” to emphasise SecUnit being an “older model”, or to give it a distinctive design language so the viewer could tell it apart.
  • SecUnits are described in the books as all looking near-identical; the adaptation adds a scene to explicitly point out that this isn’t the case there. I can see why this would make casting and stunt work easier (Alexander Skarsgård doesn’t have to fight himself), but there are aspects of future books that it will affect.
  • In the books, it is obvious to an onlooker that a SecUnit is at least a heavily augmented human, even if it is clothed. In the adaptation, we see SecUnit naked in its repair cubicle, and aside from the Barbie-doll-style smoothness between its legs, it by and large looks like the very human Alexander Skarsgård.

All in all, the changes significantly deemphasise the “inhumanity” of SecUnit. The series revolves around SecUnit coming to terms with its humanity, that it is more human than it wishes to admit to itself, but there is always a tension between that and its inhuman aspects. In the adaptation, SecUnit is little different from human protagonists like Jason Bourne.

Ayda Mensah

Of all the characters, Mensah’s portrayal varies the most based on who is writing her at a given time. In the books, she has the strength, security, and presence of mind of a planetary leader, while also acting as something of a surrogate parent to SecUnit. Obviously, we see this through SecUnit’s rose-tinted glasses, as All Systems Red is revealed to be a long letter to her at the end, so perhaps she is not quite that perfect.

However, in the adaptation, in the scenes closest to Martha Wells’s writing, she reflects this characterisation, but in the filler content she becomes more inclined to be pointedly mean, as well as the gratuitous panic attacks the writers gave her. (I need to re-read the books, but as I recall, these only manifested later in the series as a result of the events of Exit Strategy).

That said, aside from writing and directorial choices I disagree with, Noma Dumezwani does a fantastic job with her, almost exactly matching the image I had in my head for Mensah.

Gurathin

Outside of Mensah, I have never had particularly strong impressions of any of the other survey team members. However, the one impression I did have for Gurathin is of him as something like Batou from Ghost in the Shell: gruff, muscular, and with relatively obvious augments.

The decision to cast David Dastmalchian, and have him play Gurathin in the style of the more snivelling end of Alan Rickman’s repertoire, is inexplicable to me. The addition of the drug addiction backstory and the uncomfortable crush on Mensah overcomplicate the series to little gain.

Book Gurathin I mildly disliked because he was mean about our favourite protagonist; TV Gurathin I can’t stand. (No slight intended to Dastmalchian, who I assume is doing a great job of performing as directed, just in a character direction I disagree with.)

Overse

Overse doesn’t appear in the adaptation. When reading (and even re-reading) All Systems Red, I have felt that there are too many survey team characters to keep track of, so thinning out the cast like this was probably a good move.

Pin-Lee

Pin-Lee is female in the books, but has been rewritten as non-binary in the adaptation, and is played by non-binary actor Sabrina Wu.

I’m all for increasing non-binary representation in media, although Pin-Lee might not have been my first choice; I’d probably have nominated Arada or Bharadwaj.

Not to the same degree as Mensah, but Pin-Lee’s characterisation seems to wobble from scene to scene.

It’s interesting that removing Overse and changing Pin-Lee’s gender evens up the gender balance and avoids having more female main cast members than mail.

Arada

With Overse written out, Arada gets to be in a relationship with Pin-Lee instead. I’d always envisaged book Pin-Lee as aromantic, or married to her job, so this relationship seems a little forced.

I have very few thoughts about Arada as a character in the books; Tattiawna Jones does a fine job with her here.

Bharadwaj

Based purely on racist readings of names, I had imagined Bharadwaj as of south Asian ethnicity rather than mixed-race Polish–Israeli/Canadian First-Nations. (I half wonder if the casting director imposed a one-Indian limit on the series.)

Similarly to Arada, I have no strong opinions about Bharadwaj’s book characterisation beyond that; similarly to others, her characterisation in the adaptation is a little bit wobbly, but one could blame that on the amount of trauma she experiences.

Ratthi

Ratthi in the books is sometimes used to inject a little levity into scenes, and to represent a certain amount of naïvité. In the adaptation, his portrayal by Akshay Khanna is of a dangerously incompetent jokester, a clown who does his best to destroy most scenes he’s in.

How much of this is acting and how much direction is anyone’s guess, but it’s really offputting and is a significant part of my lack of enjoyment of the series.

Opening

I don’t watch much western television, but based on this and Star Trek: Picard, it seems that generic brooding loops half a step above elevator music are in fashion for sci-fi series.

The visuals of claymation(?) SecUnit floating in space don’t make very much sense, beyond establishing “this is a sci-fi series with space travel”.

Sanctuary Moon

The snippets of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon that we are shown are very fun, and clearly the people working on them had a great time with it. They suffer from the same problem suffered by many shows-within-shows and similar vignettes of supposedly larger works, that they end up a little too self-contained with no obvious connections to the larger work. (The last scene we are shown has the entire cast that we’ve seen being killed.) That it is portrayed as a massively camped-up pastiche of original Star Trek and similar series is hard to reconcile with the fact that it is supposed to be set on a colony (presumably on a moon), something which is retained in the dialog discussing the show.

More generally, that the media is described as “shows” rather than “(entertainment) media” is irritating; it seems to insult the (American) audience’s intelligence.

Setting and themes

In the books, particularly the earlier ones, SecUnit is pointedly uninterested in the humans’ activities beyond what information is needed to make a bare minimum effort towards their safety. This leaves little room for detailing everyday life of Preservation society, so the series has to invent a lot to be able to have something to depict on screen.

One thing that is picked out from the books and expanded is Preservation’s emphasis on consensus-based decision making. The series misses no opportunity to mock this; it is portrayed with the same sort of sneer that a suit-wearer might use to describe a flower-garland-wearing Woodstock attendee, or Maddox on vegans.

At one point, Ratthi objects to an executive decision made by Mensah not reaching consensus, describing consensus decision-making as “our whole thing”. The idea that someone from within a society would describe it on those terms is patently ridiculous, and contributes to my dislike of Ratthi’s portrayal in the series; this is the kind of dismissive language that you might expect someone from the Corporation Rim to use.

The books acknowledge the limitations of consensus decision-making, and the effort needed to strike a balance for operational situations where quick action is required. The series engages with this less, instead “simplifying” the message to, basically, Preservation is naïve and hippy, aren’t they silly, they need to grow up and be more like the Corporation Rim.

This speaks to a bigger complaint I have with the politics of the series. I’m no political scientist, so take this interpretation with a pinch of salt, but the adaptation seems far more authoritarian, verging on fascist, than the source material.

I won’t claim that the books take a particularly anti-authoritarian stance, but they are fiercely critical of large corporations and hypercapitalist society in general. Based on that, I had been surprised at Apple of all companies choosing to adapt it. But this messaging is much diluted in the series; there is still an element of the “simple country folk go to the big city to get scammed” mood from the books, but the adaptation is much less ready to condemn the culture of the city.

Conflicts are solved by application of authority. The last episode introduces a subplot where SecUnit is deployed as part of a policing operation against a workers’ revolt; while we are not directly encouraged to sympathise with the jackbooted thugs, the revolting slaves are also portrayed in a very negative light, as a violent mob little better than a herd of feral animals. The series shrugs its shoulders and says “well, who can say who is in the right there, both sides amirite?”, to a situation where enslaved people are fighting for basic rights. Again, the series sneers at the idea of the great unwashed improving their situation, by any means available to them, instead seemingly adopting the “radical centrist” position that nothing can ever really improve, those who have money are basically correct by definition, and we’re doomed to slide into fascism.

The books, while not in any sense Marxist, and still having a protagonist who solves problems with violence, seemed rather more optimistic about there being another way of living.

Conclusions

Beyond episode 3, my partner and I found each episode more tortuous to watch than the previous. I doubt we’ll watch the second season together; I might try it out of morbid curiosity.

I don’t normally subscribe to Apple TV+; I paid £17.98 to watch just this series, which given the lack of ability to rewatch outside of the subscription, I don’t think was terribly good value. The distortion of the politics of the original in a reactionary authoritarian direction has put me off watching other Apple TV+ adaptations; in principle I might have been interested in watching Foundation, but at this point I’d rather not.

I hope Martha Wells got paid well for the rights and the production credit, and that lots of people go and read the books off the back of watching this, as I don’t think the adaptation in itself does anything to advance the vision that she set out in the books.

If you are curious, I’d definitely recommend the books. At least try the first four novellas, which form a relatively closed arc; the sequels are good too, if you’re still hungry for more.

Footnotes

Changelog

  • 2025-08-10 0130 Original version
  • 2025-08-10 1330 Added discussion of Sanctuary Moon, and an extra paragraph of conclusion

  1. I’ll use this name for the title character, since unlike some of the characters in the books, it never gives the reader permission to use the name it chose for itself. ↩