Finally finished watching Murderbot, and after everything I came up with for how difficult it would be to communicate Murderbot's digital existence and basic inhumanity in a primarily visual medium, they did do as I expected and mostly just ignored the Feed to keep the effects budget under control. And ultimately I thought the result was satisfactory. Instead, the main thing that keeps me from calling it a great adaptation is something I noticed about the writing: the show has a kind of an ambivalent approach to handling Murderbot's agency that I don't entirely like.
One of the qualities of first-person POV is that you're committing to making the narrator an involved character, which can be awkward or frustrating when that character is no longer involved for whatever reason. The threat of being incapacitated or regoverned is constantly on Murderbot's mind, but Martha Wells follows through on that threat very strategically, so that it carries more emotional weight. (In fact, I think it took several books, and notably when it does it's because of a choice Murderbot made while fully expecting that result.)
The show is much more willing to show Murderbot subjugated. In hindsight, this is evident as early as the choice to set the first scene when it first hacks its governor module; however, the first time it actually stood out to me was in the DeltFall habitat, when Murderbot spends an entire episode with a control chip actually inserted into its neck port. In theory, this raises the stakes by showing the actual consequences of Murderbot failing to escape — in practice, all the tension evaporated for me as soon as it was actually in and Murderbot revealed it would take half an episode before it finally finished. The problem for me, I think, is that Murderbot never felt seriously threatened during this sequence, either with structural damage or exposure as a rogue, or with becoming an actual danger to its own clients — instead, the tension felt like it was deliberately kept relaxed by making the primary threat to Murderbot be humiliation.
In hindsight, that felt like a recurring theme. The threats to Murderbot never felt as serious as they could have, because they consistently took the form of Murderbot being portrayed less seriously and being treated less seriously. On the one hand, I can't argue that that feels unrealistic to the Corporate Rim being a hierarchy of petty abuse at every level and even the lowest ranks taking advantage of whatever they can find that lets them feel slightly in control. But on the other hand, it felt like I was supposed to find it at least a little funny as well, whether because Murderbot hallucinated itself into Sanctuary Moon or because other characters are specifically ordering it to act foolish for their own amusement? Or maybe I was expected to feel repulsed but not to the point of disengagement. I'm not sure. The last episode did finally throw more punches of the degree I'd've expected sooner, but they still didn't feel as impactful as they should have because of how much of that time had to be spent watching pathetic buffoons just fucking around.
Whatever the intent, despite the show and the book both being character-driven action- comedy, I felt this was one way that the show's comedy dragged its action down in places where the book's comedy and action supported each other.