MURDERBOT: Episodes 1.1 – 1.3

Here's the honest tension. Murderbot is genuinely well made — a sharp, immersive sci-fi series that pulls you fast into a strange world of advanced AI, engineered flesh, and corporate intrigue. If craft alone decided these things, it would be an easy recommendation.

But craft doesn't decide it. Across just three episodes the show piles up 47 obscenities — including 13 uses of the "f" word — alongside strong, stomach-turning violence and a steady stream of sexual content: homosexuality, sex outside marriage, group encounters, polygamy, even talk of sex with robots. Underneath all of it runs a worldview that treats the human heart as the final authority on right and wrong.

None of this is shown graphically, and the profanity does thin out as the series goes. But the sheer volume, and the philosophy driving it, leaves little worth salvaging.

So our answer is simple: skip it — the quality is real, but the cost is too high for any audience.

A security robot has quietly hacked its own programming, shutting off the protocol that forces it to obey every human command. Now free, it has one goal: don't get caught. So it keeps following orders as if nothing has changed, calling itself, privately, Murderbot.

Assigned to guard six scientists surveying a distant planet, it faces monstrous creatures, suspicious crew members, and gaps in the map that someone deliberately erased. When Murderbot breaks protocol to save a life, one scientist begins to suspect it isn't functioning the way it should — and that suspicion is only the beginning of the trouble.

Three stars, and they're earned on the technical merits. This is a well-written, entertaining series that immerses you quickly in a fully realized sci-fi world — one with little resemblance to our own, built from advanced AI, engineered human flesh, intergalactic travel, and tangled political and corporate systems.

The storytelling moves with confidence: a creature attack that nearly cuts a man in half, a secret crew meeting, an abandoned compound full of dead scientists and disabled robots, and a cliffhanger that leaves Murderbot itself in mortal danger. The pacing keeps you leaning in.

The problem was never the filmmaking. It's everything the filmmaking is used to carry. A skilled show can still be one you shouldn't watch, and this is one of those.

Murderbot is driven by what the source calls a romantic worldview — the belief that morality comes from within, that each person's own heart is the truest guide to right and wrong. Every character operates that way, defining good by what they feel rather than by any standard outside themselves.

That inward turn plays out most visibly in sex. Characters are gay or lesbian; others open their marriages to multiple partners or speak casually of having several spouses; there's even talk of sex with robots. Nothing is shown graphically, but the show treats all of it as simply what following your heart looks like. Scripture calls the heart less reliable than that: "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?" (Jeremiah 17:9).

The series also carries a strong anti-corporate streak, painting the enterprise the characters work for as straightforwardly evil. And it invests real feeling in the question of whether a machine can have a soul — a man tortures a robot that seems to feel genuine pain and emotion, and Murderbot's own hidden inner life is the story's emotional core.

That longing — for a self that is truly free, truly known, truly its own — is real. But the freedom the show reaches for is the freedom to follow a heart that can't be trusted to lead well. Real freedom runs the other way: "If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed" (John 8:36).

Murderbot is proof that a show can be sharply made and still not worth your time. The writing is strong, the world is inventive, and none of it outweighs 47 obscenities in three episodes, disturbing violence, and a worldview built on trusting a heart Scripture calls untrustworthy. So here's our answer, unchanged: skip it. Looking for something better for the evening? Try our latest family-friendly picks.