What I Read

Posted by Erin Ptah

https://erinptah.wordpress.com/2025/07/16/erin-watches-murderbot-tv-season-1/

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Got an Apple TV trial, just in time to binge the whole Murderbot TV adaptation before the Friday finale.

(General note: The platform doesn’t have a watchlist? Just a “continue watching” list, which removes anything you finish — no saving a list of faves to rewatch! — and adds stuff it autoplays, whether you want to see more or not? Weird and unpleasant design choice.)

I like it! Plot-wise, it’s a very close adaptation of the first book, All Systems Red. Same overarching plot, a few things rearranged along the way. Character-wise…a bunch of things have been shifted around. Everyone is recognizable as a version of their original self, but. If you’re already a book fan, the question of “will you like the TV series?” may hinge on “when they changed Character X, did they keep or discard the traits you were most invested in?”

General, no-spoilers overview:

Some of the changes are obvious “doing it this way worked better on-screen” things. Scenes that were just-MB in the book become group efforts, giving the PresAux actors more to do. Plot points that were just inner-monologue realizations in the book are delivered in conversations instead.

I mostly like them! Even with the characters, even a few dramatic personality shifts — look, I’ll be mad if some of them start bleeding into book!fandom, and fans stop writing the original versions of the characters. But as a standalone AU, most of them work really well.

The few changes I actively don’t like are all “why did you even add this, what was the point?” kind of things. No huge dealbreakers. Just some low-key annoyances.

There are a few particular exchanges from the book that you really have to get right to make a satisfying adaptation. They’ve all landed. And a bunch of the comedy moments have been had-to-stop-the-episode-while-I-cracked-up funny.

The biggest advantage of doing Murderbot on TV is, The Rise And Fall Of Sanctuary Moon is also TV. Which means the showrunners can film Actual 100% Authentic Sanctuary Moon Footage, and cut to it while MB is watching. It’s ridiculous and amazing.

Detailed reaction, with spoilers:

On MB itself:

I’ve seen a lot of fans say that Show!MB feels like a younger, less-experienced, less-jaded version of Book!MB. That tracks. The pilot sets you up for that — it cuts directly from “the job when MB hacks its governor module” to “the PresAux job,” so it seems like this MB doesn’t have years of unrelated terrible job experience in between.

Show!MB seems to pick the name “Murderbot” on the grounds of “wow, that sounds like a cool dramatic adventure-serial name,” rather than Book!MB’s mix of anger (at the Company for defining that function, at itself for fulfilling it), defiance (“they want to soften what I do with corporate doublespeak and marketing fluff, screw that”), and dark trauma-survivor sarcasm. The first time Show!MB kills a hostile human in front of its team, it seems earnestly, naively surprised that they aren’t happy about the rescue! Book!MB would just go “it figures, nobody is ever happy to see a terrifying murderbot.”

Book!MB makes some general comments about “learning how to be a person” from watching media, including Sanctuary Moon. Show!MB, though, regularly quotes specific scenes when it can’t think of something to say on its own. The whole Worm Rescue pep talk — which Book!MB gets from its cheap-but-realistic training modules about patients in shock — Show!MB is pulling melodramatic lines from a Sanctuary Moon episode with an injured character. (We even get to see the original clip!)

These aren’t bad differences (mostly). (There are a few moments where it gets too silly, hits the embarrassment squick. Other than that, it’s fine.) It’s just distinctly “yeah, this is an AU variant of Book!MB, not a portrayal of Book!MB.”

Related: there are Sanctuary Moon clips that Book!MB would have strong opinions on. We keep seeing bits of a “construct falls in love with a human” arc. I kept waiting for Show!MB’s narration to go “ugh, this is stupid and unrealistic, skipping to the next scene immediately.” But it never does? I can’t tell if that’s supposed to be a characterization change, or if the writers just decided it’s not important enough to explicitly spell out for the viewers.

(It’s not a thing where they’re foreshadowing that MB will also fall in love with a human. Thankfully.)

One thing they did spell out: Murderbot being an it, not a him. There’s a scene where Arada says “he” and Gurathin immediately corrects her to “it.” In a later episode, Gurathin says “him”, then immediately corrects himself. Some viewers will be determined to miss the pronoun choice no matter what…but I appreciate the writers hammering it home for everyone else.

On the PresAux characters:

Overse and Volescu got cut entirely, their plot roles divvied up among the other cast. (Bharadwaj gets to be almost eaten by a worm, Pin-Lee gets to be married to Arada, etc.)

No complaints about that. Book!MB can seamlessly keep up with the full-size team while narrating, but you need the TV team small enough that viewers can keep track of their faces all by ourselves. And those are the two with the least development in the books.

Pin-Lee/Arada: They get this weird little polyamory drama with Ratthi? Don’t care for it.

Arada and Pin-Lee are a really cute couple when they’re just being sweet to each other! But every time they get into a conversation about polyam stuff, it starts feeling tense and awkward and “are these two sure they want to be married?” Ratthi and Pin-Lee have a great, fun dynamic…in all the scenes that are just about them doing platonic Plot Stuff together! Whenever the polyam comes up, it drags that down too.

(Book!Pin-Lee goes by she/her, TV!Pin-Lee goes by they/them. If I ever mix up the pronouns for either one, that’s why.)

The whole arc is really minor. If somebody told me it got less than 5 minutes of total screen time, I’d believe it. And I can’t prove Martha Wells didn’t intend something like this was happening in the original books, given that it’s the kind of content Book!MB would cut from its narrative as much as unit-ly possible. But why add it back in? What does it add to the show?

It doesn’t go anywhere. It doesn’t even get mentioned in the finale, where all three characters are occupied trying to get MB safely back to them. Pin-Lee in particular, they use 100% of that screentime to do Lawyer Stuff. Which is great to see, especially since it barely came up in the previous episodes, and I was really feeling the lack.

Would’ve been even nicer if the five minutes of pointless love-triangle had been allocated to Pin-Lee delivering other worldbuilding about Corporation Rim law. By which I mean, invigorating expletive-laden rants about Corporation Rim law.

Ratthi: Aside from the polyam drag, he’s an absolute delight. Gets some of the best lines.

His goofiness and excitement are turned up from the book version. There’s an element of “comic relief from him doing things badly” (not his Actual Job, other things), including physical comedy from him basically tripping over his own enthusiasm. It’s fun and endearing.

And it ties in perfectly with his stubborn determination to Make Friends With The SecUnit. Which he is also bad at! But his efforts are important! It leads to a genuine friendship with MB in the future!

And for this season, it gives us an important contrast with (a) Mensah’s more subdued effort to connect with MB, and (b) Gurathin’s stubborn determination to Figure Out What The SecUnit Is Up To.

Mensah, and also Bharadwaj: Not much to say about these two. Mensah is very close to her book portrayal, excellent, no notes. Her developing relationship with MB — slowly figuring out its deal, adapting the way she interacts with it, and earning its trust — is one of the biggest things the show needed to get right, and it did.

Bharadwaj gets the third-least development in the books, so she’s mostly fleshed-out with new characterization. She’s still…not the least developed in the TV cast, but the least dramatic. No exaggerated character traits. Trauma and nightmares, but it’s from almost getting eaten in episode 1, not from any info about her backstory. She’s fine.

Gurathin: The only PresAux member originally from the Corporation Rim, so he’s the only one with a realistic idea of “how suspicious/wary we should be around SecUnits.” In the books, there’s a Dramatic Reveal that he’s been quietly tracking evidence of MB’s non-governed behavior, until he had enough to make an accusation. In the show, his suspicion gets dialed up to “from day one, he’s anxiously telling Mensah to turn MB off, insisting that its ability to reassure injured humans was Anomalous and therefore Dangerous.”

Like with TV!MB, this works for me as “TV!Gurathin having the same traumatic backstory as his book counterpart, but not as much time to process.” The trauma is fresher. The PTSD from his angsty CR backstory is right out in the open. He hasn’t healed or stabilized enough to reach the same level of confident patience that Book!Gurathin has.

(His backstory is “used to be a CR spy, who was controlled via access to the designer drugs they got him addicted to.” This is never spelled out in the books, but it makes so much sense that I fully believe it’s what Martha Wells had in mind from the start.)

If you like Book!Gurathin mainly for competence-kink reasons, you’ll probably be disappointed by TV!Gurathin. If your favorite flavor of woobie is “twitchy feral rescue cat with a mountain of barely-restrained emotional damage and an unhealthy fixation on the one (1) person they’ve come to trust,” you will be way more into TV!Gurathin.

My least favorite thing about the show, pretty easily, is this Gurathin’s fixation on Mensah. You don’t have to read it as sexual or romantic, but the writers sure are inviting you in that direction. (There’s a scene where Mensah is away from the habitat, MB is remotely monitoring the cameras, and it catches Gurathin sneaking into her bedroom to sniff her pillow. Which prompts MB to grumble about humans and their stupid pheromones.) With bonus hints of “Gurathin is jealous of the way MB cares about Mensah.”

It might be less unpleasant on a second watch, when you know the Creeper Gurathin subplot is also not going anywhere? Guess I’ll find out.

On the plus side: when it comes to New Things Innovated For The Show that I really like, “Gurathin’s actions in the finale” has to be in my top five.

A bunch of miscellaneous plot + worldbuilding things:

In no particular order…

One of my other top-five favorite New Show Things: when MB has its dramatic confrontation with the GrayCris survey members, it puts on a bluff of “I went rogue and started killing my survey team.” To back this up, it pulls out…a severed head. Specifically, the head of one of GrayCris’s own SecUnits, which was killed a few action-sequences earlier.

MB gambles its whole plan on the idea that the GrayCris humans won’t call this out immediately, because they’ve never bothered to look at their SecUnits’ faces! And it’s absolutely right! What a smooth move. From it, and from the writers.

One worrying New Show Thing: There’s a scene where Mensah and MB are stranded in a hopper they have to repair, and they end up extracting some connecting fiber from MB’s systems. Like the organic neural equivalent of an extra USB cord. MB makes an offhand reference to something like “they’re using this in experimental spaceships now.” So…this is clearly foreshadowing something about ART, right? (It never comes up again in S1.) I really hope it’s more like “PUMNT is spreading conspiracy theories about experimental construct-spacecraft to distract from their actual conspiracy of anti-corporate espionage,” and not “ART is going to also be a construct in the TV series.”

I’ve read a few people talking about the show’s limited budget. I mostly would not have noticed — it all looks good. It did kinda throw me that we see MB’s undressed and un-armored body a few times, and its outsides are almost entirely human skin — nothing to inspire people’s later reactions of “wow, you have all those metal prosthetics because you were in an explosion? It must have been such a bad explosion.” But then, okay, I can see how that would be visually expensive. A few practical metal props, with just enough CGI to erase the nipples/genitals into Ken-doll smoothness, is way more cost-effective.

(Another budget thing I noticed: there are multiple times when MB gets a dramatic injury to its torso, we see the horrible convincing close-ups, then we get a bunch of shots where it’s conveniently only filmed from the chest up.)

A simple-but-effective flourish we see a lot is “digital readouts from MB’s various systems hovering around its head.” I don’t think it ever mentions its performance reliability out loud — but there’s a moment when the number appears…it’s approaching the PresAux crew for A Social Interaction…and the number ticks down a percentage point as it gets closer.

There are a lot of details about How Governor Modules Work that gets glossed-over, to the point where I assume some of them just aren’t canon in this world. The “distance limit from clients” never comes up. The plot thread about HubSystem getting compromised software updates is left out, so “a govmod would’ve forced MB to install it, leading to more murders” never comes up. And MB’s original hack isn’t based on the incredible lucky fluke that it got access to a copy of its own systems manual — it just Hacked Really Hard until it succeeded.

I know it would’ve been tough to portray every single one of these on-screen. And none of the things that got dropped were plot-essential — the writing smoothly worked around them. (For instance, our heroes don’t find the DeltFall habitat compromised by malware either, just destroyed by GrayCris SecUnits.)

But throughout the books, they add up to a really effective depiction of the Constant Suffocating Background Horror of being trapped as a governed unit. And I do wish the show had leaned into that a little harder.

A thing they were able to lean into more than the books, and to good effect: CR scenes that aren’t just MB’s memories. We get a conversation in a factory where SecUnits are being assembled; we get some techs bantering over MB’s unconscious body as they refurbish it.

All the settings in general looked great. One of the things MB rarely describes, except to the extent that it’s analyzing them for security hazards, is the scenery or architecture around it…so I’m probably just going to be picturing these when I revisit the books from now on. The PresAux habitat was lovely and homey; the mining installations were grimy and terrible. Preservation Station hit a great balance of “this is The Future” and “this is a big transit hub, the signage and the traffic flow are familiar from every airport or train station you’ve ever been in.”

The season finale:

I didn’t actually manage to watch this until a few days after it dropped. Was a little nervous about the ways it might fumble the landing. Good news, though: it dropped all the plot threads and character beats I didn’t care about, and leaned into all the ones I did.

This has the longest chunk of time that MB spends unconscious (and then, in the show, memory-wiped). So the writing takes full advantage of “this version isn’t tightly limited to MB’s POV” to follow the PresAux team on an active rescue-from-the-Company adventure. It’s great. Everyone chips in.

Mensah starts pulling rank on the corporates who try to push her team around! (“You will address me as Madam President.”)

Ratthi physically tracks down the “refurbished” MB, and confirms its memories have been removed when he baffles it (and everyone else) by being friendly at it!

Pin-Lee gets to run into a room yelling “STOP! I have an injunction against destroying this SecUnit!”

Gurathin sneaks into a Company data center, and retrieves a backup of MB’s memories from their data-mining systems! He finds the right backup by searching Sanctuary Moon filenames! Then downloads the whole thing onto his own augments (including as many episodes as he could fit without brain damage) to smuggle it out!

Arada and Bharadwaj are also there!

Between the extraction and the reinstall of MB’s memories, the team gets to see it in a really bad, vulnerable shape, which gives some nice texture to their “we’re bringing you back to Preservation!” decision. From their POV, it’s like if a human had suffered a severe brain injury, and is now recovering from surgery. They’re not just assuming “of course MB will want to come with us,” they’re thinking “we would be callous and irresponsible to leave it alone in this condition.”

And instead of MB just sneaking out unnoticed, Gurathin wakes up in time to see it leaving. Another of those “taking exposition that was just narrated in the books, and delivering it through a conversation” scenes. Gurathin gets an accurate read on MB’s reluctance to become a CR-refugee Preservation rescue project. Addresses some of the most obvious concerns MB would have. Offers to help show it around. Recognizes and appreciates MB’s need to leave anyway.

(This is going to fuel so much shipping. It’s a gift-wrapped treat for every fan who shipped it already. And if you don’t, it’s still a meaningful, heartwarming interaction for non-shippy character-development reasons. Feral cats finally bonding! Not a trace of Creepy!Gurathin in sight.)

In the final voiceover narration as MB sneaks off-station, we tie back into the “this was all compiled as a farewell message for Mensah” framing device of the books. and we get to see her reaction. Not saying anything out loud, it would’ve come off like a rehash of a lot of the notes Gurathin hit, so instead we just see all the feelings move across her face. That’s some good acting.

I know some fans were hoping the season would end with an ART-related cliffhanger — but since we only just found out that the show’s been renewed, I’m glad it didn’t. It ends on a hopeful, forward-looking note, something that feels complete, not a tease for a future plot when the writers had no idea if they’d be able to deliver.

And I’m glad we’re getting a season 2. I’ll be there.

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