I’ve been a huge fan of The Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells for a few years now, and was very excited to see it adapted to television on Apple TV+. Every adaptation of a story to a new medium has to make creative choices and tradeoffs; it’s fun to pick apart the work to identify what’s been changed, think about why that might have been done, and examine the impact on the story.

As a fan of the books, I’m thrilled to see them adapted at all and I don’t want anyone thinking that I dislike the show. It was a joy to see The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon show-within-a-show come to life.

This is an ensemble show, based on a single-person narrative novella. That was always going to be hard to adapt, so it makes sense that the production uses an ensemble cast to tell a larger story. More points of view makes it easier to tell a more complete story, and gives the audience more characters to relate to. But too many characters can create confusion, too. The show combined a few characters together and rearranged some of the relationships, to keep the story focused.

So we have this ensemble cast telling a story from multiple perspectives, adapted from a very first-person limited-perspective book. The tradeoff here is that you get less time with the titular protagonist, who is admittedly a weirdo. It could be difficult for audiences to relate to SecUnit, especially in a visual format.

These changes from the source material seem motivated to me, and so I find it easy to accept them and have fun with the story. Even as I wish we could spent more time with the inner life of SecUnit, I understand how that would be very difficult to portray.

The story itself also had to be adapted to fit into ten episodes. This change was less effectively executed than the character changes, in my opinion. The pacing of the show would speed up and slow down so quickly that it felt kind of clumsy. Life-or-death action scenes would be punctuated by relationship drama. The seams of the adaptation were visible.

The television show also nerfed the characters. This was a bummer, honestly. The human characters and SecUnit all make poor decisions and get themselves into unnecessary trouble. And I kind of see why. It’s hard to tell a compelling story when all the characters are hyper-competent (that’s part of why Star Trek Voyager is the way it is). Having the characters make mistakes also allows for more a more dynamic story, making it easier to adapt to television. This was harder for me to roll with, but I see the utility in it from a production and storytelling perspective.

I’ve given these examples as a way to show that motivated changes can lead to a story that works better for a television audience, even as I (a fan) would have preferred something different. I’m not saying that the motivation is good or bad, or that the motivation makes the changes good or bad. I’m saying that I understand it, so I find it easy to roll with as a viewer.

But there was one story shift that I don’t understand that’s been bothering me.

In the books, sprawling corporations fight each other for power and control of a lot of human-occupied space called the Corporation Rim. It’s a place ruled by contracts and force. The Corporation Rim is home to multigenerational indentured labour contracts, massive amounts of suffering, and wanton death – all for the sake of profit.

Our humans, in the Preservation Alliance, exist outside the Corporation Rim. But they do interact with it, and it disgusts them. This is a key thing I love about the books: Preservation Alliance is depicted as an actual, functioning utopia. The planetary alliance has built a society where everyone has access to food and shelter, where menial labour has been automated, and where violent crime does not exist.

By depicting Preservation Alliance this way, the books implicitly show that the cruelty and suffering of the Corporation Rim is a choice. It is optional. Something that our human characters avoid.

So it really bothered me when the television adaptation depicted Preservation Alliance as so hapless and resource-starved that they were considering joining the Corporation Rim. I don’t understand the motivation behind it. Granted, it’s a relatively minor change that doesn’t necessarily contradict anything in the books. But it does contradicts the story in my head. This was one of the most important background details of the setting to me and it kind of hurt to see it thrown away.

Adaptations and creators don’t owe anyone explanations about the story choices they make. But if I ever got the chance to ask the show runners a question, I know what I would ask.