Transcription
Hi, and welcome back to the Ruby Tuesday. My name's Ruben, and this is my review for Apple TV's new series called Murderbot. Have you heard of this? Did you know it was even coming out? Do you have an Apple subscription? Let's chat in the comments and jump in.
A security struggles with emotions and free will while balancing dangerous missions and a desire for isolation, evading detection of itself hacking as it finds its place. This comes from my book series called All Systems Read by Martha Wells and Paul White and Chris Whites. They adapted this for television, and I haven't read the books, but I hear a lot of strong emotions when connected with this. This is a hardcore fan base, as far as I'm aware.
So, I'm coming from the perspective of, okay, so I know it's a bunch of books, but this is always going to be adaptation. It's going to be something different. First and foremost, I think people are going to find the lack of episode length a deprivation to building character and story.
What I think works in this is Alexander Scarsgard. He plays Murderbot, and you get to hear the inner monologue, the narration, which is the thing that drives the story for most of the episodes. And the reason I talked about the episode length is that each episode's about 20 minutes, one pushing to about half an hour. I think that's the last one, maybe the first one. But they're really short, sharp moments in time as we see our murderbot have to protect a bunch of hippie scientists. The sort of people that'll get around and say, "you know, let's hold hands," and when somebody says, "okay, I let's talk about we can talk about that," and they'll click, you know, one of those people. If and so his internal monologue is something that's often dry comedy and a bit off-the-wall.
At the same time, he has a television series that he loves to watch. That's kind of his safe place. And for me, that's probably the second best thing about this series. We get to see a lot of segments from the television show as a real show. And I would love there to be a petition for people to go, "hey, we need to make the show within the show a real thing," because it's sort of Galaxy Quest, Star Trek, but even more sort of like Black Mirror. Put those things together, and that's kind of what you get here. And it's often humorous. The way our character Alexander Scarsgard's Murabot relates to that or the information he takes from those episodes and how he relates to that in his real-world experiences work wonders for this show.
So, even though each episode is really short, it's really fun to watch, easy to binge, that's going to be a negative for some of the people that love the books and they're coming to this because there's probably going to be nuances or depth to characters that we get within, you know, that first group of people that the Murbot meets that he learns to sort of go on a journey with and what it means to be a bot that no longer has ties. It's literally tied to the government. It's an interesting trajectory that we go along with the group of people as well as the motorbot themselves. How they knit themselves together and whether Moabbot is more than just a bot because he's not just robot. He's also, I think, synthetic parts, has a human heart, stuff like that. Like I'm not too sure because it doesn't tell us that much about what the internal mechanics are.
We get a little bit of insight into some of the characters and actors. Talking of which, David Dat Malachan, who plays Gathen—sorry if I'm decimating the names—he's one of my favorite characters in this series because he is an augmented human that um is very suspicious of the murderbot, and the others are more inviting, more loving, but he's got his feelers up, and the antagonistic relationship that plays out on screen is very interesting.
Then we have Noma Dmenzi. Wow. Dumen Wen Dmens Weni who plays Mensa. I love this character. She's kind of the mother of the group, and I think she plays it very well, trying to keep everybody together, but she sees something in Murbot and is kind of the first person that is wanting to give Alexander Scarsgard's bot a chance. And so we get to see how that integration connects with the group. There's a number of interesting dynamics within the group as well, with relationships that I think some people are going to go, "Oh, this is woke." Uh, if you have issue with that sort of thing, then just, you know, carry on and move on by. I don't know if it was the same in the books, but yeah, it makes sense because we're in a old galactic world with various species and peoples, and it seems to make sense that that's, you know, various relationships of different iterations would there would be.
And talking about the species, the special effects for the creature creations in this were great. The CGI I thought was a lot of fun, as well as the score complementing those intense moments. I thought it really helped to drive the—it's a sort of not quite slapstick, but it's comedy within the violence—um, as our characters are reacting to some of the moments. I laughed out loud a number of times when humans try to help the bot defending themselves, and the internal monologue that you get with the bot at that time is hilarious. So that is when this the story is working the most.
What I felt a little bit sad by is how quick the episodes were because it does leave you wanting more, which is a great place for a series to leave you. But it also made me go, "but I need more." I need more understanding of who these people were. And it's not really the show about the people. It's all about the motorbot, which is which is fine, but you don't really get to know the people that much. There's some moments that really work. There's some standout performances within the show within the show, like Clark Greg's character and John Cho as the captain. I think he was fantastic. Little moments that make this show shine.
So, I thought this was fantastic, but with a caveat that if you're a lover of the book, come into this with the understanding that it's an adaptation. It's going to be their iteration. I think they've got the heart of what the show is, but I'd love to know once you've watched it. Let me know your thoughts. I believe they're not dropping this all at once, which I think is going to be deprivation, which I think is going to be a detriment to the show because of the short episodes. It's definitely a show you need to watch at chunks at a time or all at once. It's a very short show to watch back to back. It lends itself into binge-watching, which makes it a strange, you know, if you're watching a 20-minute episodes and that's like one new episode of anime a week. It works for anime, but for a live-action series like this, I'm not sure that's the right way to go.
I definitely would recommend you watching this and getting an Apple TV subscription for watching this if you love sci-fi. You love inner inner thought monologues of stuff that you're not meant to hear, but we as the audience are getting to hear. That works wonderfully. Great CGI, great characters, interesting. I hope that we get more. So, I'm going to give this four and a half Nicholas Cages out of five. I guess I was pretty horny. Even with those caveats, it's still a great watch. I think you'll enjoy it. Let me know in the comments what is your favorite type of sci-fi with android symbiotic series. We, you know, it's easy to go back to like the Terminators and those movies, but in the franchise that's been going for a long time, I think of characters like Data, obviously from Star Trek, but I'd love to hear your thoughts of other sci-fi that we could be watching. Thanks so much for watching. But most of all, until next time, remember, live long and Tuesday.