Chris Weitz knows a thing or two about fandemonium. He directed The Twilight Saga: New Moon after the first Twilight movie, directed by Catherine Hardwicke, was a runaway box office hit and proved there was a ravenous base of Stephenie Meyer readers just bursting to see her stories adapted to the big screen. At the time, Twilight was intensely beloved by its fans and reviled by those who were very vocal about the fact that they didn’t get the appeal of vampires that sparkle (and didn’t like seeing its mostly female fanbase have fun in Comic-Con‘s Hall H, apparently). The “Twi-hards,” as the fan community would commonly become known, didn’t let any of that nay-saying stop them from being proud fans of the franchise.

So when it came to crafting the titular character (played by Alexander Skarsgård) in his new Apple TV+ series Murderbot with brother Paul Weitz, he borrowed a bit from his experience with the “Twi-hard” community.

“Murderbot is kind of a Twi-hard. You can talk until the cows come home to a Twi-hard about the relative merits of the books or not, but it doesn’t really matter because they are feeling it on a very deep level,” Chris Weitz told TV Insider. Indeed, any Twilight fan can probably attest to hearing at least a dozen different versions of criticisms about the Saga — books and films alike — and defending their right to like something that others might not.

In the case of Murderbot, the security robot disables his governance device and thus gains free will at the start of the story. However, instead of running away or failing to protect his charges, he uses his freedom to watch his favorite campy space dramedy in secret. His obsession with the show is unbridled and even informative of his personality.

“I think the show has something to say about entertainment as escapism, which usually gets kind of a bad rap, but it has a real value to our central character as a kind of a release valve for its emotional dysregulation,” Weitz said of Murderbot’s fascination with the show.

The meta nature of Murderbot’s love of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon is compounded, of course, not just the fact that “moon” appears in the title of both the show-within-a-show and the fandom-heavy film Weitz was a part of — there’s also the fact that Murderbot is also a space dramedy in its own right that viewers are watching (though perhaps not through their helmet screens).

“We’re working in kind of a funny version of this genre, which is sort of a comedy of manners and space, which some people will probably see as this sort of disposable entertainment, but which we also think addresses really deep questions about humanity while being fun and enjoyable as well,” Chris Weitz said.

Paul Weitz echoed his brother’s sentiment by saying, “We love that Murderbot is a super fan of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. I’ve known various opera fanatics… Opera itself is — the emotions in it are so extreme and it’s so hand in hand with what might appear like incredibly bad taste but also is this incredibly high art form.”

Change a few words around in either of those last two quotes, and you could’ve easily been hearing them from a Twilight fan circa 2009 when New Moon was still in theaters.

Murderbot, series premiere, May 16, Apple TV+