Maybe. Maybe not. You know the premise and the basics of the characters, likely where the plot is going. I don’t and to me it is moving along briskly! To me the interrogation scene was interesting mainly because I am unsure what the Gurathin is thinking. They hinted at some sexual attraction he may be feeling? And that his attitude towards Secbot is more complicated than the “it’s malfunctioning” he portrays it to his friends.
They’ve established characters, set up some relationship complexities in slightly humorous ways, introduced putative “monsters”, hinted at at least two mysteries (Secbot’s fragmented memory and the Corporation’s hiding information), and teased the murder of the other team as the cliff hanger. All keeping to a somewhat goofy tone. That seems moving along to this naive viewer. (In comparison El Eternaut took forever to move it along!)
I was totally ignorant of the books going in. The most interesting thing for me so far is that for the audience SecUnit is an open book; it’s the human characters that are the mystery (and all sorts of flavors of neurodiversity.)
If the show continues to follow the story lines from the books, then Mensah will be dealing with PTSD later on.
The show hasn’t explored this yet, in the books the Corporate Rim is an unspecified number of planetary systems under the control of an unspecified number of multi-planetary corporations. Our SecUnit is the property of one such company, the other survey team we know about on the planet is from yet another company called DeltFall. There are also an unspecified number of other planetary systems that are not affiliated with any corporate confederations, an example being PreservationAlliance where Dr. Mensah and crew hail from. Not to spoiler from the books, but we’ve not met all of the main players in the story yet.
Ah. And from the opening sequence of the show with the action figures, and the closer today (yeah already watched), I’m guessing there are some issues between members of the corporate alliance. Although I’d entertain the direction of other less benign sec units that have gotten past their governors. Hope not though. Be more - done.
If that’s your take so far, then the show creators have succeeded in capturing the flavour of the books. The opening chapter in “Condition Red” the first of the seven books in the series so far is:
“I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don’t know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.”
What hooked me in the books was how Martha Wells explores the concept of how a sentient construct, designed and manufactured as a type of appliance, deals with our very human concepts of free will and self-awareness.
Also, Murderbot hates the company that made/owned it so much that it systematically scrubs all mentions of its actual name from its memory. It’s not actually called “The Corporation”; that’s just the stand-in Murderbot uses for whatever its actual name is.
Just what I was going to mention. We see everything through Murderbot’s senses, and so everytime someone says the actual name, we just read/hear “The Corporation”
Not to get too nit-picky, but Murderbot refers to them as “the company”. Here is a short quote from “Network Effect”, book 6 in the series, which is a transcript of a conversation between Murderbot and Dr. Bharadwaj. The first speaker is Dr. Bharadwaj.
“I noticed a thing about your transcript.”
“Was the font wrong?”
“No, the font was lovely. But whenever the company is mentioned you edit out the company and change it to the company” Checks session recording. “In fact, you’ve done it just now”
In the story universe, corporate warfare uses real guns. Most humans in the Corporate Rim are little more than indentured slaves and breaches of contract often have fatal consequences. What we learn of corporate alliances is that loyalty is a commodity, not a virtue.
It would be a nice little nod if, in the series, whenever any other character mentions the company, that bit of audio were dubbed over, possibly in Murderbot’s own voice.
Good ep this week. I had to relisten to a small bit because I thought I heard him say Stormtroopers and Star Wars. Obviously it was the joke just Shock Troopers and Galaxy Strife. But my brain really had heard the former first time.
Murderbot was alerted to the hijacking device precisely because of this bad aiming. It realized the other secunit wanted Murderbot to survive, and added it up. But why didn’t the other secunit just keep out of the way until Murderbot had been fully hijacked, and killed the survey team?
In the book Murderbot is alerted to the inserted override module by his subsystems suddenly becoming glitchy. I can see that would be hard to represent on screen without it mostly being Murderbots voiceover.
Thinking more about it, both book and show have this plot-holeish bit:
Inside the habitat Murderbot is almost shot by another secunit, and is saved at the last second by Mensah, who kills it with a drill. This is after the enemy secunits have planted the override module.
Before that Murderbot noticed that a body had been sloppyly staged, so the explanation could be that all seemingly plot-holes are just incompetence by the enemy.
I liked how Murderbot imagined being a character on Sanctuary Moon, complete with giant hair! It’s not the greatest tv-show, buit I still enjoy it. It’s nice with a mostly relaxing half-hour after watcing Silo.
Now at Episode 8, and still looking forward to Fridays. A few thoughts:
As mentioned upthread I’d have preferred SecUnit’s internal dialogue to be displayed as text, as opposed to a voiceover in its voice.
The first departure from the books: An extra character is introduced and later got rid of in a way that works very well in reminding the PresAux crew that their SecUnit may be a moral person but is not a nice person.
The Sanctuary Moon snippets are very well done in a deliberately over the top way.
From the books my mental image of SecUnit’s appearance was ‘androgynous’; in the TV show it presents as ‘prickless hunk’ instead.
I’m not sure SecUnit’s internal dialogue as text would have worked as well. Something about Alexander Skaarsgard’s sarcastic tone is what drew me to this show. Reminds me of Eric in True Blood.
So the season is done. Overall I think it was very good – not all time great TV, but about as good an adaptation of the books as reasonably achievable. A second season has been announced.
Not having read the books its merits as an adaptation do not matter to me. It was simply very good. All time great TV? Little gets to that list but really very good. Fun. With just enough to actually think about. Good characters that I hope I get to see more of.
Last ep was a bit of a tonal shift though? A coda that was more serious science fiction than the rest. As a stand alone it was more of an Expanse feel than the gentle goofiness of the rest (which was more similar in tone to The Orville.)
I am understanding that the book pretty much ended at where the penultimate ep ended with only a little bit of the aftermath? This seemed like more of an addition to story? Adding more to the world building?