Love, Death & Robots: Season 1 recap and review

Netflix

Ice Age

Gail (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and Rob (Topher Grace), a couple moving into their new apartment, discover an ancient civilization living in their freezer. Over the course of the day, the pair witness the development of the civilization from medieval times to corporeal transcendence as the people live out their lives in accelerated time.

It all starts with Rob discovering a small, frozen woolly mammoth in an ice cube and then unearthing the civilization behind a wall of ice. They start out in the middle-ages, featuring clever details like the advancement of mining from a mountain of frozen peas.

Gail comments that this makes no sense, that this is clearly a medieval city but that woolly mammoth died out in the Neolithic period — because that’s obviously the only part of this scenario that doesn’t make sense.

They look away for ten minutes to bury the woolly mamouth and when they look again they have advanced to the industrial revolution. Rob wonders if they are their gods, but really they’re just wondering who the douchebags are who look at them all day.

When they advance to the present they put in a Starbucks and Rob comments that they really are everywhere. Not long later a nuclear war breaks out, giving Rob a nasty sunburn. Disappointed and sad, Rob and Gail decide to order pizza and hope for the best.

When they look again, they’ve advanced to the distant future. They made it through their nuclear winter and moved into the space age. They build a wonderous, shining city that looks like Oz without all the green, complete with flying cars.

As Rob and Gail watch, the civilization advances beyond their corporeal forms and escape the confines of the fridge, flying around the kitchen and disbursing into the air. When they look again the next morning, the timeline has started over as primitive monkeys are hunted by T-rexes.

It was cool to watch a microcosm of what our own civilization has been through and what it is potentially capable of. It’s probably inevitable that we face some kind of nuclear war — if climate change doesn’t get us first — but it’s nice to think there is hope for humanity beyond our own folly. If we don’t all die out first, there’s no telling what wonders and technological marvels are in our future.