Mickey 17: Everything You Need To Know
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VOICE OVER: Rebecca Brayton
Dive into the mind-bending world of "Mickey 17", a sci-fi adventure that explores the concept of expendable clones and interstellar colonization. Join us as we break down Edward Ashton's novel, its unique premise, and the upcoming film adaptation starring Robert Pattinson and directed by Bong Joon-ho. Our deep dive covers the fascinating plot, including Mickey's dangerous missions, the mysterious Creepers, and the complex moral dilemmas of consciousness uploading and clone survival. Have you read the book? Are you exited for the movie? Share in the comments.
Mickey7: MojoNotes
Notes: The book is called “Mickey7”, the movie is “Mickey 17”, video title may need changing.
Caitlin Johnson
Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we’re taking a deep-dive into Edward Ashton’s novel “Mickey7”, being adapted into the movie “Mickey 17” in 2025.
We’re going to be going over the ENTIRE plot of the book so if you still want to read it for yourself or want to avoid spoilers before you see the movie, look away!
The first in a series, “Mickey7” was one of 2022’s most popular sci-fi outings. Winning critical praise, Ashton has said that the book came to him as a way to explore “uploaded consciousness”. This is the current idea in speculative science that one day, we could digitize our consciousness and upload it into a new form - potentially a digital afterlife but also, as in the case of “Mickey7”, a cloned copy, called an “Expendable”. Throughout the book we learn the full story of what the Expendables are and why people are so wary of them. While immortality sounds good on paper, in practice, nobody wants to be in Mickey’s place as the resident Expendable on the Drakkar[a] and later Niflheim, the planet the crew of Drakkar are trying to colonize.
Mickey Barnes is the only person who signed up to be the Expendable on the colony mission, which he does to escape gambling debt collectors on his home planet, Midgard, despite it generally being a utopia. Because he’s primarily a historian, Midgard’s utilitarian society has no real use for him, and he’s being threatened by general ne’er-do-ell Darius Black[b]. Black comes to Mickey’s apartment with a device called a “neural inducer” that forces his pain receptors to fire, inflicting extreme agony on whoever it comes into contact with. Facing that kind of pain and with no way to pay Darius off, Mickey asks for the help of his friend Berto Gomez - who, incidentally, is the athlete Mickey was betting against to get into all that trouble - to get an interview for the Expendable posting. Looking to escape, he signs up, despite everybody along the way trying to persuade him that it’s a bad idea.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. Though he dies a handful of times in some extremely painful ways - including by exposure to massive amounts of space radiation and, at one point, getting trapped outside of the ship while conducting repairs - he also meets Nasha[c], his girlfriend, and they’ve been together for years by the time the books starts. Despite being vital to their mission by performing dangerous tasks like taking off his spacesuit on Niflheim to see if there are any deadly pathogens in the air so that the scientists can develop a vaccine, he’s looked down on by many of his fellow colonists. Chief among them is Commander Marshall, played by Mark Ruffalo in the movie, who believes that the very concept of an Expendable is morally wrong; people who believe this are called “Natalists”. This puts him and Mickey into direct conflict because, though Mickey needs to die to help them learn, doing so is extraordinarily resource-intensive. It takes a lot of power and resources to grow him a new body in the tank every time he needs one, and the colony is struggling to produce any food.
Niflheim is a tundra planet completely covered in snow and ice. It’s also populated by seemingly only one lifeform, a race of large worms nicknamed “Creepers” by the humans. While on a mission, Mickey falls into a crevasse and Berto, who’s now a pilot, refuses to come down and rescue him. He gets to say goodbye to Nasha over his comms - a device called an “ocular” - and fully expects to die down there, though he’s only got a few injuries - namely, his hand. But much to his surprise, a Creeper arrives and leads him through a complex tunnel network and, eventually, to safety. Now, he suspects that the Creepers may be more intelligent than the humans believe, and he remembers another disastrous beachhead colony mission he read about, Roanoke. That time, the humans were all killed by an unseen, sentient, alien race, that were masters in waging biological warfare, killing them off with contagions without ever being witnessed. He begins to worry that the Creepers may be just like that, though he keeps this information to himself.
Upon returning to the colony dome, Mickey7 goes back to his bunk and realizes that somebody else is already there: Mickey8. Nobody knows that there are two Mickeys. This is called being a “multiple” when it happens, and it’s extremely taboo because of another historical incident where one man created thousands of multiples of himself and waged war against the entire Union - which is what the human-populated planets are called, all of them founded long ago, after humans left Earth. Because of that, if anybody finds out that they’re multiple - particularly Marshall, the colony leader who hates Expendables on principle - they’ll both be killed.
There’s a big argument between the two Mickeys over which one should be killed and shoved into the “cycler”, a large garbage disposal chute that recycles everything into protein slurry that’s nicknamed “the corpse hole”. However, they can’t decide which one should live and which should die. Seven’s logic is that Eight was never supposed to exist and so he should die, while Eight thinks that Seven has had more than enough time and should make way for someone new. We also learn that Mickey hasn’t been keeping up with his consciousness uploads, so Mickey8 is weeks behind him and doesn’t have all of his new, secret knowledge about the Creepers.
Ultimately, they agree to live alongside each other, though this seems like a doomed exploit. They’re stuck hiding and don’t have enough rations, unable to afford anything to eat except cycler paste, as opposed to the luxurious yams and tomatoes that the people with more rations are able to enjoy.
While the two Mickeys struggle to exist side-by-side, the Creepers become bolder and start attacking the dome and doing real damage, which leads to various missions that Mickey, being the Expendable, joins. Mickey8 stays behind while Mickey7 does everything dangerous, teaming up with the security detail, Dugan[d] and Cat Chen. He advises them to wear less armor because he’s become convinced that the Creepers want their metal, but they don’t listen. Dugan gets eaten by Creepers before anybody can help him.
Back at the dome, Marshall wants to know exactly what’s going on with the Creepers, but Mickey has to maintain that he hasn’t been uploaded in a few weeks and has lost a lot of knowledge. He also starts spending more time with Cat as Mickey8 doesn’t want him in their room, because he’s invited Nasha over. Cat turns out to be fascinated with the idea of Mickey being an Expendable and what it means, and believes that it may be worth all that pain to be technically immortal, though he doesn’t paint it in a particularly romantic light. It becomes clear that Mickey7 and Mickey8 aren’t being very subtle, and Mickey8 keeps forgetting to wear a bandage on his hand to pretend he has Mickey7’s injury. And then it turns out that Mickey8 has already told Nasha everything about them being a multiple.
The two Mickeys and Nasha throw caution to the wind and have a threesome - yes, really - only to be caught in the afterglow by Marshall, because Seven made the mistake of confiding in Cat Chen. It turns out that Cat is angling to be the colony’s new Expendable. It’s now life or death for both Mickeys, since being a multiple absolutely cannot be allowed to happen. But Mickey7 leverages his knowledge about the Creepers, suggesting to Marshall that they’re intelligent. He’s also been getting strange messages through his ocular that don’t make any sense, but previously believed it was just Mickey8 sending him gibberish in his sleep. He then starts having dreams that he’s back home on Midgard, and that a large caterpillar has joined him at a campfire. It’s not just a dream, however; it’s the Creepers, trying to communicate.
When he explains this to Marshall, Marshall lets them both live - temporarily. He’s found out that the Creepers are at least partially technological, and he wants to wipe them out using “bubble bombs”. These devastating bombs use antimatter, and an antimatter conflict, called the “Bubble War”, is the very event that devastated Earth and led to humans colonizing the stars in the first place - those humans are collectively called “the Diaspora”. Because of the Bubble War, using these bombs is categorically forbidden, but that doesn’t stop Marshall. He equips each Mickey with a bubble bomb, made of Drakkar’s stored fuel, and sends them on a mission into the Creeper tunnels to try and wipe them out, despite Mickey7 arguing with him.
In the tunnels, Mickey8 is soon killed by the Creepers, which means they’ve now got their claws on a bubble bomb. Mickey7, meanwhile, keeps scheming, with the Creepers now able to use full sentences to talk to him via the ocular. Seven is too pragmatic to use the bomb as instructed, and returns to the dome to explain to Marshall and Command that he’s told the Creepers how to use the bubble bomb they now possess. He says that the Creepers are a hive mind and that if he didn’t explain what the bomb was, they may have learned how it works on their own anyway and activated it. Marshall wants to kill him despite the bomb he still has, but he says that he’s the only person who can communicate with the Creepers, so they let him live.
At the very end of the book, we find out that all this time, Niflheim has just been in the grips of a long winter, and the snow and ice begin to thaw. Mickey takes Nasha out of the dome into nature, and reveals his secret: The Creepers don’t have Mickey8’s antimatter bomb, he managed to get it back, and has hidden it as a contingency. He did all this to stop Marshall from killing him, and he’s planning on returning it to the colony once Marshall’s dead - though, they have no idea how long that will take.
In the meantime, the bubble bomb is out there; only Mickey and Nasha know about it; and it’s the only thing keeping Mickey alive. The sequel to “Mickey7”, “Antimatter Blues”, came out in 2023, and continues Mickey7’s story as the only surviving version of Mickey Barnes.
We don’t know how much of this will be in Bong Joon-ho’s movie, starring Robert Pattinson as Mickey - now upgraded from Mickey7 to Mickey 17 so that the movie can fit in more gruesome deaths for our unlikely hero. Edward Ashton has said that the movie is going to change a lot, but that he trusts Bong Joon-ho’s vision. Considering production wrapped all the way back in 2022, with the movie delayed various times because of the SAG-AFTRA strike, it may not incorporate much from the sequel, if at all. But we can’t wait to see what changes and what stays the same.
NIFFLE-hyme https://youtu.be/pHEADry6xso?si=BZtZhLsBG1lfJPJ4&t=3616
[b]dare-ee-iss blank https://youtu.be/pHEADry6xso?si=mEGcPOMumhsgWQD7&t=21002
BARE-toh https://youtu.be/hha_RiTW-TI?si=nz4pGF4AM45CeOqk&t=95
[c]NAW-shuh https://youtu.be/hha_RiTW-TI?si=hpuqsQcKwxN3RBdU&t=132
https://youtu.be/pHEADry6xso?si=bUKpSCOXELkRUAB9&t=3516
[d]DOO-ghin https://youtu.be/pHEADry6xso?si=mea9o92_w3Dvyo84&t=11800
https://youtu.be/pHEADry6xso?si=prKsaAbanRoz73CA&t=3619
Notes: The book is called “Mickey7”, the movie is “Mickey 17”, video title may need changing.
Caitlin Johnson
Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we’re taking a deep-dive into Edward Ashton’s novel “Mickey7”, being adapted into the movie “Mickey 17” in 2025.
We’re going to be going over the ENTIRE plot of the book so if you still want to read it for yourself or want to avoid spoilers before you see the movie, look away!
The first in a series, “Mickey7” was one of 2022’s most popular sci-fi outings. Winning critical praise, Ashton has said that the book came to him as a way to explore “uploaded consciousness”. This is the current idea in speculative science that one day, we could digitize our consciousness and upload it into a new form - potentially a digital afterlife but also, as in the case of “Mickey7”, a cloned copy, called an “Expendable”. Throughout the book we learn the full story of what the Expendables are and why people are so wary of them. While immortality sounds good on paper, in practice, nobody wants to be in Mickey’s place as the resident Expendable on the Drakkar[a] and later Niflheim, the planet the crew of Drakkar are trying to colonize.
Mickey Barnes is the only person who signed up to be the Expendable on the colony mission, which he does to escape gambling debt collectors on his home planet, Midgard, despite it generally being a utopia. Because he’s primarily a historian, Midgard’s utilitarian society has no real use for him, and he’s being threatened by general ne’er-do-ell Darius Black[b]. Black comes to Mickey’s apartment with a device called a “neural inducer” that forces his pain receptors to fire, inflicting extreme agony on whoever it comes into contact with. Facing that kind of pain and with no way to pay Darius off, Mickey asks for the help of his friend Berto Gomez - who, incidentally, is the athlete Mickey was betting against to get into all that trouble - to get an interview for the Expendable posting. Looking to escape, he signs up, despite everybody along the way trying to persuade him that it’s a bad idea.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. Though he dies a handful of times in some extremely painful ways - including by exposure to massive amounts of space radiation and, at one point, getting trapped outside of the ship while conducting repairs - he also meets Nasha[c], his girlfriend, and they’ve been together for years by the time the books starts. Despite being vital to their mission by performing dangerous tasks like taking off his spacesuit on Niflheim to see if there are any deadly pathogens in the air so that the scientists can develop a vaccine, he’s looked down on by many of his fellow colonists. Chief among them is Commander Marshall, played by Mark Ruffalo in the movie, who believes that the very concept of an Expendable is morally wrong; people who believe this are called “Natalists”. This puts him and Mickey into direct conflict because, though Mickey needs to die to help them learn, doing so is extraordinarily resource-intensive. It takes a lot of power and resources to grow him a new body in the tank every time he needs one, and the colony is struggling to produce any food.
Niflheim is a tundra planet completely covered in snow and ice. It’s also populated by seemingly only one lifeform, a race of large worms nicknamed “Creepers” by the humans. While on a mission, Mickey falls into a crevasse and Berto, who’s now a pilot, refuses to come down and rescue him. He gets to say goodbye to Nasha over his comms - a device called an “ocular” - and fully expects to die down there, though he’s only got a few injuries - namely, his hand. But much to his surprise, a Creeper arrives and leads him through a complex tunnel network and, eventually, to safety. Now, he suspects that the Creepers may be more intelligent than the humans believe, and he remembers another disastrous beachhead colony mission he read about, Roanoke. That time, the humans were all killed by an unseen, sentient, alien race, that were masters in waging biological warfare, killing them off with contagions without ever being witnessed. He begins to worry that the Creepers may be just like that, though he keeps this information to himself.
Upon returning to the colony dome, Mickey7 goes back to his bunk and realizes that somebody else is already there: Mickey8. Nobody knows that there are two Mickeys. This is called being a “multiple” when it happens, and it’s extremely taboo because of another historical incident where one man created thousands of multiples of himself and waged war against the entire Union - which is what the human-populated planets are called, all of them founded long ago, after humans left Earth. Because of that, if anybody finds out that they’re multiple - particularly Marshall, the colony leader who hates Expendables on principle - they’ll both be killed.
There’s a big argument between the two Mickeys over which one should be killed and shoved into the “cycler”, a large garbage disposal chute that recycles everything into protein slurry that’s nicknamed “the corpse hole”. However, they can’t decide which one should live and which should die. Seven’s logic is that Eight was never supposed to exist and so he should die, while Eight thinks that Seven has had more than enough time and should make way for someone new. We also learn that Mickey hasn’t been keeping up with his consciousness uploads, so Mickey8 is weeks behind him and doesn’t have all of his new, secret knowledge about the Creepers.
Ultimately, they agree to live alongside each other, though this seems like a doomed exploit. They’re stuck hiding and don’t have enough rations, unable to afford anything to eat except cycler paste, as opposed to the luxurious yams and tomatoes that the people with more rations are able to enjoy.
While the two Mickeys struggle to exist side-by-side, the Creepers become bolder and start attacking the dome and doing real damage, which leads to various missions that Mickey, being the Expendable, joins. Mickey8 stays behind while Mickey7 does everything dangerous, teaming up with the security detail, Dugan[d] and Cat Chen. He advises them to wear less armor because he’s become convinced that the Creepers want their metal, but they don’t listen. Dugan gets eaten by Creepers before anybody can help him.
Back at the dome, Marshall wants to know exactly what’s going on with the Creepers, but Mickey has to maintain that he hasn’t been uploaded in a few weeks and has lost a lot of knowledge. He also starts spending more time with Cat as Mickey8 doesn’t want him in their room, because he’s invited Nasha over. Cat turns out to be fascinated with the idea of Mickey being an Expendable and what it means, and believes that it may be worth all that pain to be technically immortal, though he doesn’t paint it in a particularly romantic light. It becomes clear that Mickey7 and Mickey8 aren’t being very subtle, and Mickey8 keeps forgetting to wear a bandage on his hand to pretend he has Mickey7’s injury. And then it turns out that Mickey8 has already told Nasha everything about them being a multiple.
The two Mickeys and Nasha throw caution to the wind and have a threesome - yes, really - only to be caught in the afterglow by Marshall, because Seven made the mistake of confiding in Cat Chen. It turns out that Cat is angling to be the colony’s new Expendable. It’s now life or death for both Mickeys, since being a multiple absolutely cannot be allowed to happen. But Mickey7 leverages his knowledge about the Creepers, suggesting to Marshall that they’re intelligent. He’s also been getting strange messages through his ocular that don’t make any sense, but previously believed it was just Mickey8 sending him gibberish in his sleep. He then starts having dreams that he’s back home on Midgard, and that a large caterpillar has joined him at a campfire. It’s not just a dream, however; it’s the Creepers, trying to communicate.
When he explains this to Marshall, Marshall lets them both live - temporarily. He’s found out that the Creepers are at least partially technological, and he wants to wipe them out using “bubble bombs”. These devastating bombs use antimatter, and an antimatter conflict, called the “Bubble War”, is the very event that devastated Earth and led to humans colonizing the stars in the first place - those humans are collectively called “the Diaspora”. Because of the Bubble War, using these bombs is categorically forbidden, but that doesn’t stop Marshall. He equips each Mickey with a bubble bomb, made of Drakkar’s stored fuel, and sends them on a mission into the Creeper tunnels to try and wipe them out, despite Mickey7 arguing with him.
In the tunnels, Mickey8 is soon killed by the Creepers, which means they’ve now got their claws on a bubble bomb. Mickey7, meanwhile, keeps scheming, with the Creepers now able to use full sentences to talk to him via the ocular. Seven is too pragmatic to use the bomb as instructed, and returns to the dome to explain to Marshall and Command that he’s told the Creepers how to use the bubble bomb they now possess. He says that the Creepers are a hive mind and that if he didn’t explain what the bomb was, they may have learned how it works on their own anyway and activated it. Marshall wants to kill him despite the bomb he still has, but he says that he’s the only person who can communicate with the Creepers, so they let him live.
At the very end of the book, we find out that all this time, Niflheim has just been in the grips of a long winter, and the snow and ice begin to thaw. Mickey takes Nasha out of the dome into nature, and reveals his secret: The Creepers don’t have Mickey8’s antimatter bomb, he managed to get it back, and has hidden it as a contingency. He did all this to stop Marshall from killing him, and he’s planning on returning it to the colony once Marshall’s dead - though, they have no idea how long that will take.
In the meantime, the bubble bomb is out there; only Mickey and Nasha know about it; and it’s the only thing keeping Mickey alive. The sequel to “Mickey7”, “Antimatter Blues”, came out in 2023, and continues Mickey7’s story as the only surviving version of Mickey Barnes.
We don’t know how much of this will be in Bong Joon-ho’s movie, starring Robert Pattinson as Mickey - now upgraded from Mickey7 to Mickey 17 so that the movie can fit in more gruesome deaths for our unlikely hero. Edward Ashton has said that the movie is going to change a lot, but that he trusts Bong Joon-ho’s vision. Considering production wrapped all the way back in 2022, with the movie delayed various times because of the SAG-AFTRA strike, it may not incorporate much from the sequel, if at all. But we can’t wait to see what changes and what stays the same.
Let us know if you’re going to read “Antimatter Blues” in the comments, and which scenes you hope make it into “Mickey 17”.
[a]druh-CAR https://youtu.be/pHEADry6xso?si=maNDypdZMRun_vcu&t=439NIFFLE-hyme https://youtu.be/pHEADry6xso?si=BZtZhLsBG1lfJPJ4&t=3616
[b]dare-ee-iss blank https://youtu.be/pHEADry6xso?si=mEGcPOMumhsgWQD7&t=21002
BARE-toh https://youtu.be/hha_RiTW-TI?si=nz4pGF4AM45CeOqk&t=95
[c]NAW-shuh https://youtu.be/hha_RiTW-TI?si=hpuqsQcKwxN3RBdU&t=132
https://youtu.be/pHEADry6xso?si=bUKpSCOXELkRUAB9&t=3516
[d]DOO-ghin https://youtu.be/pHEADry6xso?si=mea9o92_w3Dvyo84&t=11800
https://youtu.be/pHEADry6xso?si=prKsaAbanRoz73CA&t=3619
