Why LeeBeeBee?
In All Systems Red, we first encounter the main villain indirectly, at the end of the first chapter. Putting quote and discussion after a cut for book spoilers.
Then I found something weird. There was an “abort” order in the HubSystem command feed, the one that controlled, or currently believed it controlled, my governor module. It had to be a glitch. It didn’t matter, because when MedSystem has priority —
And then Murderbot suddenly shuts down, as though for repairs.
How the hell does anyone pull this off in a TV show?!
How do you introduce HubSystem and MedSystem and how they work together? How do you clue in viewers to its importance really really fast? How do you show its orders to Murderbot? How do you explain why/how Murderbot isn't following those orders? How do you make viewers understand how serious this is when even Gurathin (were he to investigate, and if he does, how do you avoid him discovering the governor module hack?) might not totally get it?
And does it even make sense to introduce GrayCris this early, when we barely know Murderbot or PresAux and we've barely assimilated the millipede attack?
Yeah. This structure, this specific cliffhanger, just wasn't gonna work. They had to do something different, and given that, they likely want to let GrayCris sit a bit because there are some starter villains to clear out before getting to GrayCris as the series-final boss.
More subtly and thematically, there's a question of humanity-calling-the-shots here. In ASR, PresAux doesn't even see a human associated with GrayCris until the final climactic negotiation with them -- until then it's all trails of destruction and SecUnits and note-passing through the feed. In a horror/suspense-aligned version of the show, that could be made to work, I guess -- but that's not the show they were writing. So they needed GrayCris to have a human face, not least to drive home that (in Murderbot's trenchant words) humans are greedy bastards.
It's quite possible to argue with exactly how they wrote LeeBeeBee the character. I would have been happier with like 90% less coercive sexuality, myself. But I can't argue with the need to delay GrayCris's intro, to give GrayCris a human face early-ish on, and to rework Murderbot/PresAux's initial encounter with GrayCris. Those were just necessary.
