Love, Death & Robots: Season 1 recap and review

Netflix

Fish Night

This is a really weird story of two traveling salesmen who get stranded in the Arizona desert when their car breaks down. The radiator is dead and no one is likely to come along the backroad they’re on.

The older man suggests they spend the night there and start walking early in the morning to the last service station they saw. The younger man is restless and frustrated, while the older man just accepts their situation for what it is and rests in the shade of the car.

As the sun goes down the light changes and makes the desert floor look like the bottom of the ocean. The older man talks about how the desert used to be an ancient seabed and wonders if the ghosts of creatures can haunt where they used to live, like ghosts in a house.

The men go to sleep, but when they awake in the middle of the night the air is filled with luminous, incorporeal sea creatures. They marvel at the beauty of it and the younger man decides he wants to swim with them.

He strips off his clothes and swims up into the air. The older man worries at his rashness and sees a giant shark coming his way. He tries to warn him, but its too late. The creatures may be incorporeal, but the shark had no trouble eating the younger man. Then the creatures disappear and the old man is left alone in the moonlight.

I really enjoyed the desert scenery and how it transformed into a fantasy seabed. The animation created this really beautiful variety of neon sealife and this really cool scenario in which to explore it.