‘Murderbot’ Review: Alexander Skarsgard Is a Droll Delight as a Lethal Cyborg Who’d Rather Be Watching TV in Uneven Apple Series (2025)

Although it’s a science-fiction series with evil corporate villains, murderous robots and hungry alien creatures, Martha Wells’ The Murderbot Diaries represents a tricky piece of adaptation.

The genre trappings are all there for a blockbuster, but the brand, which includes novels, novellas and short stories, is thin on plot, light on description and only a few of its supporting characters are memorable.

What it has going for it is an utterly singular, wholly relatable central voice — that of the title character, a cyborg Security Unit assigned to protect research missions, but much more interested in streaming “premium quality entertainment.” For various reasons, this SecUnit has taken the self-applied name of “Murderbot,” reflective of their life’s sole stated purpose, an activity they were made for but do not feel especially invested in.

Murderbot is weary, disaffected and generally hates people, though that’s changing. And Murderbot isn’t good with change. They struggle with eye contact, can’t read social cues, have no demonstrable gender and their memories and personality traits are subject to occasional rebooting or modification.

The Murderbot Diaries as a series is, then, anchored not by Wells’ storytelling, but by her creation of a vibe built around a main character who is, themself, an open text. Fans have interpreted Murderbot as asexual, gender-fluid and on the autism spectrum.

Adaptation is always a form of locking down a text, of making the choices that define what was previously left up to the discretion of the reader. It’s a process that’s expansive and restrictive at once.

Alexander Skarsgard is not the Murderbot I imagined when I read the books. I’m sure I won’t be the only reader who thinks he doesn’t look or sound like what was in my head. But after 10 episodes of the new Apple TV+ series, Skarsgard’s interpretation of the character became one I appreciated tremendously.

Creators Chris Weitz and Paul Weitz’s grasp on the property’s tone and world-building is less effective for me and, unlike with Skarsgard’s performance, I never came around to fully embracing its validity.

Still, I like Skarsgard more than I dislike the bland overall approach, and there’s a lot to be said for a show that just charges forward with most of its episodes coming in at under 25 minutes apiece.

The first season is based on the first Murderbot novella, All Systems Red.

The PreservationAux survey team, a group of hippies in a corner of the galaxy ruled by corporate interests, arrives on an alien planet for… research-based reasons (lots of the plot is really, really, really fuzzy). In order to get insurance for their mission, PreservationAux has been forced to bring along a security unit, but to save money, they’ve accepted a slightly outdated, refurbished model.

Skarsgard’s Murderbot has recently discovered the ability to disable its “governor module,” the device that forces SecUnits to follow orders, prevents them from harming their human overlords and requires that they focus their energies on the mission at hand rather than downloading thousands of hours of streaming television instead. So Murderbot, generally confused by human behavior, is much more invested in 2,797 episodes of a serial called The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon — a show featuring Clark Gregg, John Cho, DeWanda Wise and Jack McBrayer in brief snippets — than his clients, though he still reluctantly saves them from carnivorous centipede creatures and whatnot.

However dyspeptic Murderbot may be, they do their job, which quickly earns unexpected warmth from the PreservationAux team, which is led by Noma Dumezweni’s Mensah and includes married couple Pin-Lee (Sabrina Wu) and Arada (Tattiawna Jones); scientists Ratthi (Akshay Khanna) and Bharadwaj (Tamara Podemski); and Gurathin (David Dastmalchian), an augmented human who instantly distrusts Murderbot.

It soon becomes clear that everything on this alien planet is not as it seems and that there’s some sort of potentially dangerous conspiracy afoot, which forces Murderbot to set aside their digital streaming queue and become a hero.

The Murderbot Diaries is a comedy on the page, but it’s a strange comedy. The story is a dull, genre-standard drama that gets passed through the withering gaze of an entity with no sense of humor, who is therefore hilarious. The humor is in the lack of effort to be humorous, as cleverly devised by Wells.

The writing for the TV show— the Brothers Weitz collaborated on all 10 episodes — has a solid sense of Wells’ voice. The direction — Paul Weitz helmed the first two episodes and several additional, but not the whole thing — is less sure.

The books are comedies that don’t try to be comedies. The TV series is just an overt comedy and it’s trying very hard. Murderbot’s voice is intended to generate laughs, but much of the rest of the series, generally overlit and visually flat (albeit with decent special effects), wants to be funny as well. Unfortunately, almost nothing else is. There’s an added subplot involving a throuple with Arada, Pin-Lee and Ratthi that’s excruciating. All of the footage from The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon makes the show-within-a-show look silly, which the series confuses with humorousness. Anna Konkle makes a multi-episode appearance as a mysterious woman with a funny name and ample punchlines that mostly fall flat, despite Konkle’s game efforts.

Skarsgard isn’t hugely logical casting on a textual level. Making Murderbot, who mostly would prefer to wear a mask, an undeniable hunk raises questions. Giving a killer robot killer cheekbones and killer abs, but repeatedly showing us his Ken doll-style absence of genitals, becomes a peculiar piece of world-building that even supplemental dialogue can’t fix.

But with Skarsgard and our awareness of his career choices it almost makes sense. He comes from a family of siblings blessed and cursed to have the appearance of male models with the souls of a bunch of weirdos. Bill Skarsgard (It) gravitates toward roles in which makeup or prosthetics cover his face entirely. Gustaf Skarsgard (Vikings) is drawn to wild-eyed eccentrics so thoroughly that when he pops up on-screen I say, “It’s Floki!” even when he’s playing a normie.

Alexander Skarsgard’s tendency is toward characters who maintain the unavoidable aspect of beauty, but are uncomfortable looking like Alexander Skarsgard, or work to hide their beauty under buckets of blood or threats of abuse. In a resumé driven by performative dysmorphia, Murderbot fits. Though the elements of the character that point toward autism or asexuality remain, Skarsgard foregrounds something more child-like — an innocent who is unencumbered by a socially mandated version of morality, only to begin to recognize that on a ledger divided between “good” and “bad,” his actions might have been bad. And even then, he’d still choose screen time over doing the right thing.

He’s not cruel. He’s candid (at least in his own head). He isn’t disgusted by sexuality, just innocent and uninterested. For an actor who has often tended toward parts that let him be feral and animalistic, the absence of those attributes becomes poignant in addition to being funny; Skarsgard’s inherently sad eyes take on, perhaps for the first time, a Buster Keaton quality.

Murderbot’s past, at this moment in the story, is just one data point, an awful thing he begins to realize he did without understanding how or why he did it. Few of the other characters have more than that. Dastmalchian, an actor easily capable of matching Skarsgard’s sad eyes, keeps Gurathin from ever feeling like a simple adversary, underlining an insecurity or an inferiority complex born from a rare situation in which his own cybernetic augmentation is outstripped. He and Dumezweni, the show’s primary source of warmth, give the best of the supporting performances, but that leaves a lot of members of the PreservationAux team who are either annoying or just underserved.

The show, though, isn’t called Murderbot & Friends, and given how the next few seasons should go if Apple sticks to the books, the most important thing in the first season is developing affection for its title character and not a deep ensemble or rich sci-fi universe. In that respect, Skarsgard makes Murderbot a success, even if some readers will lament that he isn’t the Murderbot they extrapolated from the page.