Murderbot (Alexander Skarsgard) and the humans they are extremely reluctantly guarding continue to investigate their new world. But they aren’t alone and they are very, very far from safe.

Murderbot‘s structure is one of the most interesting elements of the show. Weekly 22-25 minute episodes subtly mirror the telenovelas and soap operas Murderbot loves and keeps the narrative to a very tight, logical progression. It also feels, at first, like nothing much is happening but as this first half season shows that’s not true.

The best element of the show is Murderbot themself. The easy approach of ‘Marvin the Paranoid Android with a gun’ is never even close to being taken and the show does its best work exploring Murderbot’s depression, annoyance and fear. Skarsgard is an extraordinary physical actor and there are multiple moments in these first episodes where he makes us laugh and then draws us up short in the same breath. Murderbot’s exasperation is hilarious but their anxiety is very real and the pain they’re in is something they don’t quite have the vocabulary to understand. The fact Mensah (Noma Dumezweni) especially sees and respects that is one of the show’s emotional engines. Murderbot doesn’t want to care about these people. But they care about Murderbot and that’s starting to have an impact.

The scientists also continue to be delightful to spend time with. the show manages to write a group of different people, all decent and all well-meaning, with a wide variety of foibles and quirks that put you in Murderbot’s combat boots. Pin-Lee (Sabrina Wu), Arada (Tattiawna Jones) and Gurathin (David Dastmalchian) all have wildly different approaches and all shift from annoyance to antagonist to friend and back again. Dumezweni’s Mensah is something different, and the nascent friendship she has with Murderbot is one of the show’s sweetest elements. Akshay Khanna’s Ratthi is another, a gangly puppy of a man who is super invested, wants to help and has no idea how. All of them orbiting Skarsgard’s mournful, methodical, hyper-competent robotic soldier.

The show’s genius comes from making us care about this dysfunctional group of magnificent idiots by placing them in escalating and multiple kinds of danger. There’s deadly wildlife where there shouldn’t be, a possible alien artifact and something terrible moving under the surface of everything they’re seeing. Episodes 5 and 6 bring this out into the light as the team visit the other scientists on world and find them slaughtered, apparently by their own murderbots. It’s a great, edgy pair of episodes and it breaks the polite lie they’ve been told and the lies they’ve told themselves wide open. Murderbot can’t stand them but attempts suicide rather than be hacked to kill them. They don’t trust him but move Heaven and Earth to repair him. The company has lied to everyone and Murderbot’s secret, that he’s free, is out in the open. Danger becomes the great leveller, putting everyone on the same page and propelling them all into something new and dangerous. The ground is levelled and then detonated as the season reaches a mid-way point that plunges everyone into danger and builds on everything methodically put in place before hand.

Verdict: It’s becoming a cliche to say AppleTV do the best genre work on TV, but most truisms are. Murderbot is fantastic and looks to be only getting better. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart