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Murderbot: Season 1

An unstoppable killer android has decided it doesn't really want to do all that murdering any more and has decided to strike out on its own, with a personal mission to stay low and watch as much TV as possible. But the self-styled "Murderbot" is drawn into a survey mission on a planet that goes wrong, and discovers that keeping its identity a secret is going to be very difficult.

Murderbot is an Apple TV+ adaptation of Martha Wells's award-festooned Murderbot Diaries series of novellas and short novels, depicting the adventures of the titular Murderbot (note: does not do that much murdering). This first season of ten (short) episodes adapts All Systems Red, the (very short) first book in the series, but adds a lot of new material to flesh out the story.

As adaptations go, Murderbot is solid. I was wary of Alexander Skarsgård's casting as Murderbot, not because of any lack of acting skill, but because I'd always seen Murderbot as a much more anonymous character and Skarsgård has one of the most recognisable faces on television. I shouldn't have had such doubts as Skarsgård is excellent, delivering a performance that is simultaneously very human and very inhuman at the same time. The next-most-famous castmember is the splendid David Dastmalchian as Gurathin, the science team member most suspicious of Murderbot, who does a great job of making Gurathin seem like both a threat and a potential ally. But it's Noma Dumezweni's empathetic performance as Mensah that emerges as the most important, giving the team a strong moral core and Murderbot something to aspire to.

The cast is exemplerary, and this is backed up by the physical production. The show manages to feel appropriately futuristic without the generic vaguely iMac-inspired design a lot of SF shows settle on these days. Production design is impressive, and the effects are, as you'd expect these guys, very good, with a strong sense of physicality even to the all-CGI parts of the battle sequences to make them feel more real.

The show's biggest challenge might be its tone. The Murderbot books are inherently dramatic with a comedic edge to them, but the TV show perhaps leans into the comedy a bit more. This keeps the show feeling light, even its darker moments, and maybe risking being a bit too lightweight. It's again Skarsgård who helps this by ensuring the melancholic and even tragic aspects of Murderbot's situation come through.

The show's biggest comic success is its depiction of the show-within-a-show, Sanctuary Moon, in which surprisingly big hitters (like John Cho, Clark Gregg, DeWanda Wise and Jack McBrayer) get into ludicrous hijinks in short excerpts from Murderbot's favourite media. It feels inevitable at some point that we'll get to see a full episode of this madcap show.

More controversial are the short episode lengths, with most episodes only clocking in at half an hour, some less. This is an unavoidable side-effect of having ten episodes to adapt such a short (sub-150 pages) book. In retrospect it might have been better to have had five hour-long episodes, or to have binge-released the series rather than stretching it out over ten weeks, which risked becoming interminable.

The show does get better as it goes along, and the last few episodes where Murderbot has less to hide and more to sacrifice for its newfound friends, make for a compelling end to the season. But it will be interesting to see where the show goes from here, given the new few books are also extremely short.

Murderbot: Season 1 (****) is available to watch now globally on Apple TV+. A second season is in production right now for airing in 2027. Meanwhile, the eighth Murderbot book, Platform Decay, is due out later this month.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett

For many years the game of foot-the-ball has been played in the back alleys of Ankh-Morpork, with teams formed from street communities coming together in sporting comradeship (involving violence and pies, not necessarily in that order). But the game is starting to turn ugly, and in the spirit of maintaining civic order, the Patrician has decided to make the game legitimate, with professionally-organised teams and codified rules. The wizards of Unseen University are invited to form a team and Archchancellor Ridcully enthusiastically agrees, with new staffmember Mr. Nutt proving an invaluable asset. But the old street game isn't going to die peacefully...

Unseen Academicals, the thirty-seventh Discworld novel, was published in 2009 and bears a somewhat difficult legacy. It was the first novel in the series to be published after Sir Terry was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's, a mark that would also hang over the remaining four books in the series, with melancholic (and probably futile) analyses of what impact the illness had on Pratchett's writing. From a personal perspective, it was also the last Discworld novel that I read whilst Pratchett was still with us; the four subsequent books will be all-new to me as I wrap-up this long (long) gestating reread project.

It is also the longest novel in the Discworld series at over 530 pages in paperback, making for a surprisingly chunky volume for an author who was never keen on the shelf-destroying bricks taking up shelf-space in the fantasy sections of bookshops. The length is down to two things: Pratchett trying to do a lot more in this book than he normally attempts in a single novel, and a lessening of focus in the novel's second half. The length is even more notable than it might be otherwise because the core premise is decidedly slight. The book comes off very much as a throwback to the Discworld concept of "introduce real-life idea XXX to Ankh-Morpork and see what happens," previously achieved with the cinema, theatre, shopping centres, rock music, war, guns, post office, banks, newspapers, war (again) and tourism, and in particular to the earlier books in the series which embraced that idea without getting overwhelmed by it. Moving Pictures seems to be a particular touchstone, as that novel even gets a rare continuity mention in this one.

The book opens well with football fervour already sweeping the city and the Patrician - much chattier here than normal and, decidedly overused - decides to head off an inevitable problem by regulating it. Not willing to interfere with the game himself, he fobs the idea off on Unseen University, on the grounds they are already a sporting institution (especially the sport of eating) and have rules and a hierarchy already in place. So far so good, and the first 200 pages or so of the novel are very strong. We meet Mr. Nutt, a goblin who is trying to rehabilitate his species' unsavoury reputation single-handed and who is also a fine potential football player, as well as his friend Trevor who has promised never to play again. We also meet Glenda, our typical Hypercompetent Pratchett Protagonist Who Is The Only Sane Person In The Room, a trope which might be a bit more annoying if Pratchett wasn't so damned good at executing it.

However, the book then throws more ideas into the mix than it really has time to deal with. The former Dean of Unseen University has been poached by a rival institution in Pseudopolis and is continuing his long-standing rivalry with Ridcully from a position of (according to him, anyway) equals. The UU has also neutralised the very threat posed to reality by an evil wizard/Dark Lord by giving him the one thing greater than land or gold or magical immortality: tenure. We also touch base with Rincewind and the Luggage for the first time in a very long time, though alas they are limited here to some extended cameos. We also get hints of a romance between the Patrician and another morally-questionable ruler, Glenda's best friend becoming possibly Ankh-Morpork's first supermodel, the continued rise to criminal power by a former back-alley thug, the continued misadventures of the editor of the Ankh-Morpork Times, the City Watch getting involved...this is a book not so much stuffed to the gills, but the fins and backbone as well, and even the swollen page-count can't do them all justice.

The lack of focus can be seen with the fact we are given two reasons why UU has to form a football team. The institution is enjoying the fruits of a bequest from a deceased member, but his will stipulates they need to get on top of the situation or lose access to that cash. But then the Patrician just insists they need to form a team anyway. It feels like one of these ideas should have been jettisoned at least.

The book also feels like it can't work out what to do about Nutt. Rehabilitating a single goblin doesn't even register on the radar given Ankh-Morpork is home to the Vampire Temperance League and thousands of trolls who have agreed to abide by local laws, with werewolves serving in the City Watch and golems doing a lot of work in the city. There's nothing really noteworthy about Nutt also going against the grain of his species and being trusted, and a late-book revelation about his backstory doesn't really change that at all. As a result, a lot of the tension in Nutt's story fizzles out. If this had been a book much earlier in the timeline, that storyline would have had more legs to it.

Still, when the book works, it works well. Ankh-Morpork holds a strong claim to being the single greatest fantasy metropolis ever depicted in print, and Unseen Academical's greatest strength is fleshing that out in much greater detail. We get a strong sense of life on the Ankh-Morpork street for ordinary people that we haven't seen for a long while, and for the first time a reader can feel how the city has shifted from its medieval origins in The Colour of Magic to something more Victorian, even proto-steampunk and industrial. The atmosphere of the changing city is Pratchett's greatest triumph in the latter run of novels in the series.

But the lack of focus continues to hurt the book. For a book about football, there isn't very much football in it, and I don't get the sense Pratchett is that interested in the game. What he is interested in is the impact it has on people, and how people can wrap their hopes and fears for life itself into their support for their football team. It's an interesting theme which he does explore, but maybe in not as much depth as you'd normally expect.

Unseen Academicals (***) is well-written and amusing, with superb worldbuilding, but it is also a little flabby, somewhat overlong and unfocused, and is unfortunately towards the weaker end of the Discworld series in quality.

A previous version of this review was published in 2010.

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NIVALIS gets new trailer, name and release date

Ion Lands have revealed the release date and new name for their long-heralded futuristic game Nivalis. Now retitled Nivalis Nights, the game will hit Steam on 29 September this year. They have also released a new trailer for the game.

The game is a spiritual successor to their 2020 title Cloudpunk, which saw the player driving a flying taxi cab around the city of Nivalis and gradually getting drawn into a complex series of stories involving their passengers. An expansion almost as long as the original game, City of Ghosts, followed in 2021. The game was told primarily from behind the dashboard of the taxi, but also allowed the player to get out of the car and explore some areas on-foot with some low-fi, Minecraft-esque voxel graphics.

Nivalis Nights maintains that look, but at a much higher degree of fidelity. This time around your character is running a business, starting off as a noodle bar, but can acquire more businesses and properties. The goal is to work your way up above the clouds. However, a serial killer on the loose may throw a wrench in your plans.

The game has been delayed multiple times, as it sounds like the scope and scale became significantly more ambitious.

The game certainly looks extremely impressive. Hopefully it can avoid getting swamped by all the other games launching in August and September as they seek to get out of the way of the all-consuming behemoth of Grand Theft Auto VI in November.

Widow's Bay: Season 1

Widow's Bay is a picturesque island off the coast of New England, with wonderful sea views and friendly locals. Mayor Tom Loftis is determined to make Widow's Bay the "new Martha's Vineyard," by getting a feature in a national newspaper and website. But a great many locals are convinced the island is cursed, to Tom's disgust. The tolling of the church bell for the first time in decades and the beginning of a new series of unusual events starts to make even Tom wonder if something really strange is going on.

Widow's Bay is a new Apple TV show that attempts to merge the uncanny weirdness of, say, Twin Peaks, with more comedic sensibilities. Showrunner-writer Katie Dippold (Parks & Recreation) nails the vibe of offbeat humour just perfectly, creating a show that feels like it could be a Stephen King novel with a laughter track (perhaps inevitably, King is a big fan), or maybe a TV version of the movie Cabin in the Woods.

Matthew Rhys (The Americans) stars as Mayor Loftis, the harried everyman who is trying to make the island more attractive to investment and tourism, to the disdain of his constituents who seem to simultaneously decry the state of the economy but also complain about any attempt to fix it. Loftis is a determined believer in science and rationality...up to a point. His assistant Patricia (Kate O'Flynn) still bears the scars of a close encounter with a serial killer when she was a teenager. Local eccentric Wyck Crawford (Stephen Root) claims that disaster is about to befall the island, to Loftis's scorn...until some odd events see him reluctantly seeking Crawford's advice.

The show starts off in an episodic mode, with each episode seeing a different weird event happening on the island, with Loftis investigating and scoffing at any idea there is a supernatural explanation. Early episodes end inconclusively, with it being unclear if supernatural shenanigans are to blame or perhaps sabotage-minded locals keen to keep tourists away. Eventually the show takes a stand and a more serialised storyline develops, as the backstory of the island is developed through flashbacks to 300 years ago. The show is also not afraid to experiment; one self-contained storyline about what appears to be an evil self-help book is particularly genius. The transition from episodic to serialised also works quite well.

Superb performances by leads and bit-players alike anchor the show, with O'Flynn emerging as the most impressive player, stealing scenes from out under her more famous co-stars Rhys and Root. Betty Gilpin (GLOW) also steals the entire flashback episode she leads.

Where the show falters is in two areas. The young teens of the island, led by Loftis's son, are not particularly interesting or sympathetic, making that whole storyline fall a bit flat. The show's pacing also flags on the home straight, with the feeling that maybe eight episodes would have been better than ten to tighten up the narrative. The amount of comic invention on display is impressive, but can feel a little diluted by overuse. An entire episode where one of the characters is out of their mind on drugs also falters, though the idea is handled better than in some other shows.

But it's hard to criticise the show too much. Widow's Bay (****½) is darkly comic, occasionally scary, but mostly a well-played drama and horror where the darkness comes as much from the interior of the characters and their experiences as it does from the exterior, maybe-supernatural causes. The season is available now on Apple TV+. A second season has been greenlit.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Russell T. Davies leaves DOCTOR WHO (again), 2026 Christmas special cancelled

Russell T. Davies has confirmed that his second stint as Doctor Who showrunner has come to an end after four years, two seasons and five specials. Bad Wolf Productions are also ending their association with the franchise, and the BBC is now looking for a new production partner and showrunner to take the show forwards. As a result, the planned 2026 Christmas special has been cancelled.

It's fair to say that Davies's second stint as showrunner has been variable at best. A small number of great-to-excellent episodes were offset by some of the weakest episodes since the franchise's relaunch in 2005 (with Space Babies arguably being the weakest episode in that time), and muddled and confusing serialised plotting. More damning is that both season finales, previously a strength of Davies, were a total mess. There was clear behind-the-scenes chaos on the show, with new companion Ruby Sunday (a splendid Millie Gibson) demoted to a recurring character between seasons for unclear reasons. Ncuti Gatwa also ended his time as the Fifteenth Doctor after just two seasons, despite previously indicating he would do at least three. Spin-off show The War Between the Land and the Sea failed to make a splash (so to speak) and co-production partner Disney terminated their agreement with the BBC after just 26 episodes produced in total. Ratings tumbled across Davies's run, and the show failed to make much of an impression on Disney+ either.

The good news is that the BBC is committed to continuing to produce new Doctor Who and enhance its international profile. They recently partnered with AMC in the United States to relaunch the show's existing library there, though so far they have not committed to any kind of co-production deal. The BBC is talking to other independent production companies to see what interest there is in working on the show, and the current plan is to bring the show back with a full season rather than a single TV special.

Bad Wolf Productions was set up by ex-BBC and ex-Doctor Who personnel from Davies's first run and have produced a series of hit shows including A Discovery of Witches and His Dark Materials. They were recently acquired by Sony. Why Bad Wolf is leaving the project - despite the name, Davies is not affiliated to Bad Wolf directly - is unclear. However, ex-Ninth Doctor Christopher Eccleston had previously criticised the team there with having enabled bad behaviour during his own stint on the show in 2005, and indicated he would not be interested in any future cameo appearances until they left the picture.

The cancellation of the 2026 Christmas Special does mark a historical moment, as it means that 2026 will be the first calendar year since 2004 that will see no new Doctor Who content aired at all, bringing to an end twenty-one years of continuous production, a remarkable feat in modern television and almost equal to the original show's twenty-six-year continuous production run (from 1963 to 1989).

Davies himself has won some recent critical acclaim with his new drama series Tip Toe, and is already planning future projects.

Subterranean Press to shut down

In sad news, premium genre publisher Subterranean Press is to cease operations in 2027.

Founded in 1995 by William Schafer and Tim Holt, the press is based in Burton, Michigan. The press publishes science fiction, fantasy, horror and some mystery. The press was noted for being an early adopter of the luxury/limited print book format, publishing, among others, George R.R. Martin, Scott Lynch, Joe Abercrombie, Arkady Martine, Joe Hill and Robin Hobb. Arguably Subterranean Press's success helped pave the way for the likes of Broken Binding.

According to the press release, Subterranean will continue fulfilling its 2026 and 2027 release schedule, but will terminate operations in late 2027 or early 2028 depending on the schedule being hit. Some ongoing projects will be transferred to other publishers with plans to coordinate art and design to ensure a consistency of appearance with new publishers.

Subterranean Press were due to publish three novellas by Scott Lynch in the near future to act as a prelude to his novel The Thorn of Emberlain. It is unclear how this project will be impacted.

Subterranean Press produced many beautiful editions of classic genre novels over the years, getting ahead of the rest of the game. They will be missed.

Creative Assembly unveils ALIEN: ISOLATION 2

Creative Assembly and Sega have lifted the lid on their new survival horror game, Alien: Isolation 2.

The game is, as subtly hinted by the title, the sequel to Alien: Isolation, released in 2014. That game saw the player take on the role of Amanda Ripley, the daughter of the movies' Ellen Ripley, as she is summoned to the Sevastopol space station only to find it infested with the traditional xenomorphs.

The sequel takes place planetside, at the Kurasaki Colony. A crashed ship, possibly related to the events of the original game, has unleashed at least one xenomorph upon the facility. The protagonist - Amanda's return has not yet been confirmed - takes on the xeno in the new setting. I'm assuming, like the first game, this one will de-emphasise combat in favour of stealth, horror and survival mechanics. The trailer does hint at the return of the Sevastopol androids, who provided a far more beatable enemy to go alongside the standard acid-and-claw threat of the xeno.

Alien: Isolation 2 does not yet have a release date, but based on the pre-alpha state of the footage, 2028 might be a more realistic guess than 2027.

Daredevil: Born Again - Season 1

Matt Murdock hangs up the mantle of Daredevil after a personal tragedy and so he can focus on his work as an attorney in New York City. The unexpected election of convicted ex-convict and former crime lord Wilson Fisk to the position of Mayor brings Murdock - and Daredevil - back into play.

The Netflix-Marvel collaborative series Daredevil (2015-18) was a huge success, a premium TV show featuring one of Marvel's most interesting and conflicted characters. Superb casting, including for-the-ages performances from Vincent D'Onofrio, Charlie Cox, Jon Bernthal and Deborah Ann Woll, rewarded it with a committed fanbase and a whole slew of spin-off shows, including Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist and team-up mini-series The Defenders, though the quality of these shows became increasingly questionable. With Marvel's parent company Disney launching a rival streaming platform, these shows entered a canonical limbo, with Disney reluctant to commit to them being official in the Marvel Cinematic Universe even after they regained the rights to air the shows on Disney+ and started using Cox and D'Onofrio in other projects.

Daredevil: Born Again, insanely, started off as a reboot of the previous show using some of the same actors (but randomly recasting others) in a new continuity. Fortunately, sanity prevailed and the entire Marvel-Netflixverse was moved into the mainline MCU canon. Less fortunately, this decision was made only some time into the show's production, resulting in substantial reshoots, some actors replaced by their original counterparts and a lot of work needing to be done to have the resulting story make sense.

Your view of Born Again's first season will likely depend on your appreciation for the above. On the one hand, that the season is as cohesive and well-acted as it is, is nothing short of miraculous. On the other, there's a distinctly off-kilter feeling in the season as it moves between newly-shot material (mostly book-ending the season) and trying to incorporate the original concept of a more episodic series with stand-alone cases. In practice this really only survives with an episode about Murdock trapped in a bank (without his  Daredevil gear) during a robbery, which ironically might be the best episode of the season. Other storylines feel a bit all over the place, with Vanessa Fisk's infidelity feeling particularly like a storyline that eats up time without bringing much of value to the series.

The disjointedness can also be found in the casting: Deborah Ann Woll's Karen Page is the heart, soul and sometimes common sense of the series, but she spends most of the season benched in San Francisco. Jon Bernthal's Punisher also makes a welcome return, but has little to do. More successful is the introduction of serial killer Muse and his pursuit of therapist Heather Glenn (Murdock's love interest for the season), resulting in a morally murky, emotionally conflicted storyline that is quite successful.

Elsewhere the season's biggest success is Wilson Fisk. That Vincent D'Onofrio has made this character his own, imbuing him with menace but also a rough charm and a romantic (ish) heart, was well-established a decade ago. Here he has to play Fisk with restraint and political savvy, as his go-to solutions of violence and terror may have worked as Kingpin, but cannot fly as Mayor. There's a whole bunch of subplots about Fisk's staff, who are won over by his charm but also scared of his reputation, which work surprisingly well. Putting constraints around Fisk and watching him try to operate within those constraints is a clever move which helps overcome the vague feeling that Marvel know what they have here and are risking over-using it (a much bigger problem in the subsequent season).

The integration of the sub-franchise into the wider MCU is also a mixed bag. Bringing in characters like Swordsman and Ms. Marvel's family are interesting moves, but with the show now fully integrated into the wider universe, questions like, "where the hell is Spider-Man?" (especially since Murdock met Parker in the last movie) feel more germane than they were during the original show, without many good answers.

The season finale is pretty strong, seeing Fisk finally deciding how he is going to use his newfound status and power, and Murdock calling on his full array of allies for help, setting up a potentially more interesting second season.

Daredevil: Born Again's first season (***½) is not the slam-dunk, home run fans of the Netflix original series may have been hoping for, with some messy pacing and side-plots that don't feel well-developed. That a large chunk of the original cast is missing is also frustrating. But some of the new characters are interesting, D'Onofrio and Cox's formidable charisma are always fun to watch on-screen and some great groundwork is laid for future seasons. The season is available on Disney+ now.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Square confirm FINAL FANTASY VII: REVELATION for early 2027 release, completing the REMAKE trilogy

Square has confirmed that their long-gestating Final Fantasy Remake Trilogy will finally be completed early next year, with the release of Final Fantasy VII Revelation.

The game follows Final Fantasy VII Remake (2020) and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (2024). The trilogy retells the story of the original Final Fantasy VII (1997), a pivotal and influential title for the original PlayStation console and the biggest-selling game in the venerable Japanese roleplaying series (currently up to sixteen mainline titles). The remake trilogy expands on the original storyline by adding numerous new subplots, quests, side-quests, characters and Easter eggs, with some hints that this remake story is a parallel universe version of the original instead of a straight retelling.

Fan response to the trilogy has been mixed, with some praising the radically improved graphics and deeper exploration of areas and characters only lightly touched on by the original game, but others unimpressed by the monstrously bloated length (Rebirth alone is roughly three times longer than the original entire game), the move away from turn-based combat and changes to the original story/canon. Most annoying is the fact that a new "man in the van" character, the profoundly irritating Chadley, has more dialogue lines than anyone else in the games. Hopefully his presence in the third game has been moderated.

Another shift this time around is that the game will be a multi-platform release, launching simultaneously on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and PC in Spring 2027.