Only Murderbots In The Building

It's been a while since there was a proper TV post here and that's because I've barely watched anything since about Easter. I used to have a fairly reliable routine, where I'd finish up on the desktop in the late evening, do a few necessary chores, take Beryl for her last, short walk and then settle down in bed to watch shows on my Kindle Fire or my old laptop, the one that wasn't good for much else.. 

Sometimes I'd watch a movie or surf YouTube instead (Or as well.) but either way I'd be watching not doing. And then I got a new laptop and that was when things changed. For a while I experimented with gaming, either natively or through a streaming link to the big PC. Then I started doing bits and pieces, the sort of things I'd be doing if I was at my desk and before I knew it there wasn't much difference between sitting up and lying down.

The capper came when I started in on the music-making. For the last couple of months or more I've been writing and recording a new song nearly every day. Some take me a couple of hours, some more like eight or ten. The process always begins with me emailing myself the rough lyrics from the desktop and polishing them up on the laptop in bed, before recording a guide vocal and uploading it to Suno to get a feel of how it's going to work. 

Sometimes the very first version is so nearly there it hardly seems worth my time trying for anything better but mostly it's just the beginning of a lengthy editing session that runs long into the next day. Unsurprisingly, none of this leaves much time for watching TV but I have still been making some kind of effort to keep up with my ever-growing watchlist. 

Not a very good effort, it must be said. I paused Netflix at the start of June because neither Mrs Bhagpuss nor I was really watching anything there and as far as I can see nothing's turned up on the platform since that would change anything. Netflix lets you pause three months in a row so I have one more left but after that I'm not sure how it works. Cancel or pay up, I guess, although what the penalty for cancellation would be I don't know. Probably some kind of inducement to return if precedent is any guide.

Prime, obviously, is still up and running. It pays for itself in free postage, let alone free games, so that's not likely to change. Prime Video is a bonus, really. It wouldn't matter if I never watched it, like I almost never use Prime Music.  As it happens, though, Amazon sent me a great offer a couple of months back, Apple+  for three months at less than half-price, so I'm also subbed to that. 

The timing could have been better, for sure. There were a bunch of shows I was meaning to check out when I bought in but I haven't even looked at any of them. Even so, everything I have watched since then has been on the channel. 

"Everything", though, comes to precisely two shows, total. And after that long and entirely unecessary scene-setting, it's those two shows I'm going to review here because I have finally finished both of them. It took a couple of months but I did it! Go me!

Murderbot 

I didn't have much choice but to take my time with this one because Murderbot dropped a single episode every Friday for ten weeks. Just like the old days. I hear people complaining about this kind of scheduling all the time. It's obviously a way to keep people subbing for longer than they might otherwise do but I quite like it anyway. I wouldn't want every show to do it but it's fun to have one or two that drip-feed like this, so I have time to actually look forward to the next episode.

I certainly looked forward to Murderbot, albeit not for the plot, which progresses at a stately pace without much in the way of sidebars or filler, largely avoiding cliff-hangers and not creating a great deal of curiosity over what might happen next. It has more of a novelistic feel than is usual these days, when every show seems determined to plant a hook hard enough at the end of every episode to be sure of reeling you in for the next. It is an adaptation from a series of novels so I suppose that follows but then so are lots of shows and most don't show such restraint.

As far as the original novels by Martha Wells are concerned (Seven already in print with an eighth on the way.) I was aware of them from work but I'd never read one or really thougt of starting. I'm thinking of reading them now to the point that I'm probably going to add them to my "Things to buy me for Christmas" list. 

The TV show has been picked up for a second season and in retrospect it does feel like a set-up for an ongoing series, although I can't say it occurred to me while I was watching. The entire first season is just the first book, though, so the scope for a good, long run is clearly there.

The premise is very simple: a security robot (Cyborg, technically.) hacks its governor module and gains self-determination. Usually that would be license for a gorefest but not here. The SecBot, played with excellent restraint by Aleksander Skarsgard, given freedom to choose, pretty much chooses to be a slacker. All it wants to do is watch shows, particularly Sci-Fi and Science Fantasy shows, something that probably seemed a lot less meta in print than it does when you see it happen in an actual Sci-Fi show.

Of course, circumstances don't lead to a peaceful life of box-set bingeing for our reluctant hero, who has to keep its self-activation secret while carrying on with the job required of it both by the Megacorp that owns it and the customers to whom it's been leased. Equally predictably, that job very rapidly spins out of control causing hilarity to ensue, along with considerable bloodshed.

I guess you might expect a lot of blood in a show called Murderbot but this is a very post-modern take on the action genre. "Murderbot" turns out to be the name the central character secretly calls itself, partly ironically but also because it had digital flashbacks of actually murdering a considerable number of people, back when it was little more than an observer, trapped in its own armed and armored body.

That's emblematic of the ambiguous ground on which the whole enterprise rests. Neither the viewer, the cast nor Murderbot itself is ever wholly sure whose side its on, what its motives are or what its likely to do in any sudden-death situation, of which there are plenty.

That's a difficult balancing act to maintain indefinitely and the show doesn't always pull it off. It was clear to me quite early on that Murderbot was unlikely to murder anyone who wasn't a true and direct threat to it or its clients. I certainly didn't expect it to go on a killing spree and - spoiler - it doesn't. 

It does, however, do several things, some of them very violent, that I wasn't expecting, so the writers do ultimately carry the central conceit of dumping an unpredictable killing machine in the midst of a bunch of bleeding-heart liberal vegans (Let's be honest. They're fucking hippies.) just to see what might happen. 

The hippies provide an excellent collective of tropes, quirks, twitches and really annoying habits, individually infuriating enough that you'll probably find yourself wishing Murderbot would explode the heads of every one of them at some point or another and yet I ended up finding them all endearing in their own way. Collectively, they really are stronger than their often very annoying parts, so point made, I think..

The acting is as good as acting always is these days. Are there any shows any more where the acting is bad? I can't remember seeing any in years. Not like when I used to watch proper TV and it sometimes seemed like some of the cast must be reading their lines from notes scribbled on shirt-cuffs and scenery. And reading them badly, too.

Skarsgard himself is very good in what I imagine has to be a very difficult role, technically. He has to convey a whole range of complex emotions, frequently involving irony, while presenting as almost emotionless. He manages it very well with not much more than some eye movement, a slight variation in stance and the lightest of changes in intonation. He gets some leeway to express his true feelings in the internal monologue/voiceover passages but a lot of the time he's keeping it tamped way down and doing a great job with the limited emotional range the part allows.

Of the rest of the cast, the obvious standout is Noma Dumezweni as the expedition leader Ayda Mensah but I also liked David Dastmalchian as the troubled and very untrusting Gurathin and  Anna Konkle as Lebeebee, about whom I will say no more in case of spoilers. 

Murderbot is described by Apple as an action comedy and that seems about right. It is pretty funny at times and there's a fair amount of action. The special effects are solid and it's a good SciFi show of the kind that takes the audience's familiarity with the trappings and conventions of the genre as read. Don't expect much in the way of back-story or world-building.

And don't expect too much from the plot, either. I mean, there is one and it's fine but this is fundamentally a character piece not a thriller or a whodunnit. There are bad guys and good guys and the former do things to the latter and then there's a resolution where traffic goes the other way but almost all the baggage that usually attends all of that is mostly missing. 

And it doesn't matter. In fact, thinking about it now, I'm fairly sure it's a better show for leaving nearly all of that stuff out. If it tried to explain how everything works, socially and culturally or technologically, there'd be a lot less time for all the character interaction, which is the heart of the project. 

Particularly notable is the way the piece has such obvious political intent and yet makes so little play of it. The casting carries a lot of the weight and the many underplayed, under-emphasized conversations between characters takes on the rest. It's an odd approach in that it really isn't subtle and yet somehow it manages to give the impression it is.

 

The oddest thing, though, is that even with ten episodes in which not all that much happens, the one significant fault I'd lay on Murderbot is that it occasionally feels rushed. It's hard to explain how a show with such a dazed, ambling pace, a show in which nothing much changes most of the time, can still feel like it's flipping through the pages of the script like a flicker-book but that's how it struck me at times.

The most notable example is the season finale. It's very successful in terms of moving the plot  forward and tying up loose threads but it suffers noticeably from charging through the necessary stages of its wrap-up much too quickly. It could and probably should have been twice as long.

Still, it ends up just where it should and just where you'll probably hope it will (Something it has in common with that other show I've been watching.) so no real complaints from me. I'd much rather have a rushed ending that feels good than one that takes all the time it needs and still ends up feeling unsatisfying.

And as for that other show... well, I've gone on long enough for one post. It'll have to wait for next time.

Murderbot, I recommend. It's not a masterpiece by any measure but it's solid, well-crafted, well-acted and entertaining, as well as being quite funny quite often. It's a bit of a "quite..." show all round but I found it very satisfying nonetheless.