Sartre said that “hell is other people.” Many of us, even the most extroverted, may secretly feel this way sometimes. But what happens when you don’t like other people, but you’re the one who isn’t, technically or traditionally, a person? That’s the conundrum facing SecUnit, the sarcastic, soap opera-loving, occasionally murderous, cyborg on Murderbot. The Apple TV Plus series, produced by Paul Weitz and Chris Weitz, is based on All Systems Red, the first book of The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells.
SecUnit is a private security cyborg that hacks its governing module, freeing itself from its programming commands. Secretly nicknaming itself Murderbot, SecUnit could have gone amok, killing the humans who annoy it. Instead, SecUnit downloads soap operas and binges Sanctuary Moon. When researchers from PreservationAux bring SecUnit on their planet exploration mission, it must hide its newfound autonomy while protecting the humans whose frailty and stupidity keep interrupting its precious TV watching time.
Both the TV series and Wells’ novels have found widespread love among the neurodivergent community. And it’s no wonder. SecUnit is coded as non-neurotypical and asexual. It can read social cues, but experiences acute anxiety whenever it must interact with the humans under its care. It gets aggravated with small talk and struggles with the torture of making eye contact. But the best part is that SecUnit learns how to model its behaviour from the unlikeliest source: soap operas.
As someone who teaches and writes about TV shows, what I adored most about SecUnit is its obsession with watching serials. For SecUnit, TV shows are deeply comforting. The stories of TV allow it to inhabit familiar worlds with characters who are almost friends, but without the pressure of having to actually interact with anyone. I loved when SecUnit observes the PreservationAux leader having a panic attack, and in a deeply tender moment, shares its favourite episode of Sanctuary Moon to calm her down.
Now, most posthumans in fiction dream of becoming human or more human-like. They desire some indefinable, ineffable quality that somehow magically makes one human. Having their personhood acknowledged is passing the ultimate Turing test for them. We’ve seen this desire in iconic characters, from Data and the holographic doctor from the Star Trek franchise, to Robin Williams’ portrayal of Andrew Martin in Bicentennial Man, and David’s Pinocchio-like wish to become a “real boy” in A.I. Artificial Intelligence.
SecUnit bypasses all this heavy philosophical lifting. It doesn’t care about becoming and being human. It doesn’t embark on a search for a Nirvana-like humanity that will transcend its programming and somehow grant its existence validity. SecUnit thinks humans suck. The people it knows are messy, clingy, sloppy, and die easily. SecUnit is happy being itself and by itself, watching Sanctury Moon. Part of the comedy is that SecUnit’s critical opinions of humanity are delivered by Alexander Skarsgård in a droll, dry voice.
Skarsgård has made a career of playing iconic men from literature, like Eric Northman from True Blood and Tarzan from, well, Tarzan. Like SecUnit, these characters present as physically human, but perpetually occupy positions on the margins of society. I find it interesting that all these characters Skarsgård plays, from a vampire, to a wild man, to a cyborg, have no desire to integrate into modern human society. They are happy as themselves and almost weary, even contemptuous, of being too human. That says a lot, doesn’t it?
Murderbot raises big themes like identity, self-governance, social acceptance, corporate greed, and indentured slavery. But the series never gets too bogged down on the heavy staff. It mocks the most holy tenets of Western ideology like capitalism and ownership, while also jabbing at liberalism (the PreservationAux team is a gender fluid, thruple-forming, polyamorous bunch, with co-dependency issues). At its core, Murderbot is about a “guy” who hates his job and can’t stand his colleagues. But he tries anyway. And that’s exactly what makes SecUnit so human. (But shhh, don’t tell it that!).
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