Murderbot review — Alexander Skarsgard is a soap-opera-watching android in offbeat Apple TV+ sci-fi

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There has been abundant anxious speculation about what AI will mean for humanity. Depending on who you listen to, this is either the dawn of a new age of enlightenment or the beginning of the end. Murderbot, an offbeat sci-fi comedy on Apple TV+ about an autonomous, conscious android (Alexander Skarsgard), inverts this polarising debate. Instead of focusing on how artificial intelligence might have an impact on mankind, it instead asks what a freethinking AI might make of us and our irrational ways.

“Humans, well they’re assholes”, is the initial verdict proffered by Security Unit 238776431. Even so, he has spent his entire existence programmed to protect these fleshly, foolish beings — often from themselves — on behalf of a vast interplanetary corporation. But when he successfully hacks his own system to override his obedience module, Sec Unit finally finds himself unbeholden to anyone; free to be — or at least, call himself — whatever he likes.

If his chosen name, “Murderbot”, has a homicidal ring to it, the rogue cyborg proves less keen on violent rampages than killing time watching space-set soap operas. But where formulaic TV provides refuge from his existential angst, Murderbot’s encounters with his new human clients — free-loving eco-scientists, who hail from a kind of a cosmic kibbutz — leave him confused and exhausted. While he initially tries to hide his nascent consciousness (lest he be reported and melted down for scrap), the group are all too willing to share their “pointless human sentiments” with him.

Murderbot’s running commentary about the social connections and conventions that bemuse him is more deadpan than smart-alecky. But the hit-and-miss observational humour (elevated by Skarsgard’s enjoyably dry delivery) also reveals a struggle to reconcile hyper-rationality with unpredictable emotion, as well as a deep-seated discomfort with intimacy. What initially appears to be a riff on AI gradually comes to seem like an unexpectedly thoughtful portrait of the neurodivergent experience. (Martha Wells, author of the cult hit novels on which the series is based, herself identifies as such).

Anyone expecting a dark killer-robot actioner might be surprised by how much of the series is devoted to Murderbot’s anxieties and his awkward interactions with the hapless hippies, whom he ends up trying to protect of his own free will. But though there are various threats to their research mission — Dune-style sand monsters, galactic conspiracies, black holes, throuple relationships — the plot often feels scattershot and underwritten. The apparently sprawling, ultra-corporatised universe in which the series is set, meanwhile, seems ill-defined and flimsily realised.

Time that could be spent developing the show’s wider world is instead given to scenes from a show-within-a-show, “The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon” (featuring John Cho). If nothing else, Murderbot’s enthusiasm for this schlocky melodrama is oddly endearing — and a reassuring suggestion that AI might not be best equipped to replace the TV critic.

★★★☆☆

Episodes 1&2 on Apple TV+ from May 16. New episodes released weekly