Netflix
Love, Death & Robots certainly lives up to its name, with innovative stories abounding with all three.
Everything from monsters to robot tourists to lost civilizations is encountered as these series of shorts plays with theme and animation style, exploring how humanity fits into the world of the future or even playing with alternate pasts.
If you love sci-fi, there’s something for everyone in this ambitious anthology.
Sonnie’s Edge
In the gritty underbelly of a shining future city, a ragtag group of three arrive at an old church within an 18-wheeler truck marked with the graffitied logo “Predators.”
They unload the truck with what appears to be some kind of huge bio-stasis chamber as they busily consult among themselves about vital readings and software functions.
They run into some burly security as a rich looking man with a young and beautiful girl on his arm approaches them. Dicko apparently runs these little entertainments.
It is revealed that inside the bio-chamber is a huge, otherworldly creature, genetically designed to fight other creatures in an underground kaiju ring.
This one is unique for having the only female pilot in the business, and Sonnie has never lost a fight. And she’s not going to start now, despite the generous monetary incentive provided by Dicko to throw the fight.
It’s not about pride, money, or status – a year ago Sonnie was gang-raped and mutilated, so when she fights it’s like revenge by proxy.
These beastie fights are a flashy and popular production, with tiers of people cheering on the carnage. Each beastie has a pilot connected to it through a mental link through which they can control the creature.
Sonnie’s beastie Kharnivore is lithe and elegant compared to the hulk-like brutality of her competition, but she is dangerous and ruthless. After some close calls and calculated sacrifices, she wins the fight – which displeases Dicko immensely.
When the trio get home, Sonnie finds that Dicko’s eye candy Jennifer is waiting to see her. Sonnie finds her attractive and its easy for her to believe that this beautiful woman is simply stuck in an abusive and manipulative situation with Dicko.
But it turns out that she’s seducing Sonnie so she can kill her for Dicko. Sonnie lets her guard down, and as she kisses her, Jennifer runs some Wolverine claws up through Sonnie’s jaw and through her head as Dicko comes out from hiding. But she doesn’t die. Sonnie’s controlling her body like a beastie, her consciousness is actually inside Kharnivore.
Her edge is that she is literally fighting for her life every time she steps into the ring. She disposes of Dicko and Jennifer, asking them if they’re afraid now.
With a fun kaiju fight, a kickass female lead, and a darkly satisfying ending, Sonnie’s Edge comes together nicely as an entertainment, but trivializes the rape angle by using it as a convenient plot device on which to hang the story.
Netflix
Three Robots
An impressive looking robot looms above the apocalyptic remains of a city, pausing briefly to take in the surroundings before exclaiming to his straggling companions that they are lost.
Three robots on vacation tour the ruins of a post-apocalyptic world and offer humorous commentary on the hubris of humanity. There is the tall one, XBOT 4000, the little one and tour guide, K-VRC, and a Siri-voiced monolith who takes photos of everything.
First, they tour the gym of a high school, where Siri takes pictures of a dead cheerleader and XBOT pokes a hanged basketball player. They find a ball and discuss how humans would find great entertainment in bouncing it, or sometimes hitting it with a stick. XBOT tries it out and its pretty anti-climactic. Siri quips, “Welcome to humans.”
They sit in a cafe and examine an old burger, discussing human’s intake orifices and how they ate for power. The design just doesn’t make sense, why not just run on fusion batteries like they do?
Who designed them? No one knows, their code didn’t have a creator signature. Siri says they were designed by an unfathomable deity for no reason, then says just kidding, they came from a very warm soup.
Then they discover a cat, because they survived the apocalypse of course. What’s the point of them? No point, people just had them. The cat sits on XBOT’s lap and he starts patting it to make it move, but it starts purring. K-VRC says he might have activated it, and since humans had a game called Exploding Kittens, it seems logical that it could explode if it stops purring.
They find an XBOT 3 at a store, which was an early gaming device used by 13-year-old boys for teabagging their opponents in online battle. XBOT 4000 (no relation) doesn’t know what teabagging is and makes the mistake we’ve all made by looking it up on the equivalent of Urban Dictionary.
Their last stop is a nuclear missle silo, dedicated to a device intended to kill as many humans as possible as quickly as possible. But it wasn’t the nukes that wiped the humans out, but their own hubris that led them to “poison the water, kill the land, and choke the sky.”
So they died out from environmental disaster — that and because they genetically engineered their cats to have opposable thumbs. Once they could open their own tuna cans, that was pretty much it for the human race, explains the cat (deviously performed by Chris Parnell).
He says they better keep petting him, just to be sure he doesn’t explode. Word has gotten out and the bots have to extend their vacation as they are surrounded by cats.
This is one of my favorite episodes of the series. It is smart, darkly funny, and socially conscious. For anyone who has ever had that out-of-body type experience where you suddenly find yourself pondering some of the absurdities of mundane human practices, this one is for you.
Plus, it brilliantly serves as a warning for humanity about the dangers of giving cats opposable thumbs. If that ever happened, we’d clearly be doomed.
Netflix
The Witness
A woman is attracted to her window by the sounds of gunfire and witnesses a murder in the building across the way. The murderer in question makes eye contact with her across the way, sees her face, and is frightened and confused to see she is the woman he has just killed.
The woman flees the scene as the man pursues her. She gets into a cab and calls emergency services to report the crime. Meanwhile, the man is able to follow her to work in another cab.
She is an exotic dancer at this techno punk leather club. He dance is extremely explicit. The man sits in the audience and is incapacitated by the attention of the club’s black latex-clad sex workers. Mid-dance, the woman notices him in the audience and takes off.
She finds a gun and runs half-naked through the streets away from him. Somehow he doesn’t seem threatening, more desperate and confused, just wanting to talk to her. Understandably, she doesn’t want to stop and talk.
She ends up running back to the apartment building the killer originally came out of and she hides in the first apartment she can find with an unlocked door. But it’s his apartment she’s in and when he comes in she points her gun at him.
They have a struggle where the gun goes off a few times and eventually the man is the one who ends up dead. Now she’s standing at the same window she witnessed the murder through earlier, and when she looks out the window she sees that the man she just killed is looking at her from the building across from her. They have traded roles in what seems like an endless time loop.
I like timey-wimey storylines, so the idea of this endless loop fascinated me. The animation is pretty cool as well, sexy and a little comic-booky, but also often looked like a cut scene from a video game.
That video game association for me was sometimes jarring and distracting, but mostly because it made me feel like I was suddenly watching something else.
Netflix
Suits
Hank and his wife Beth are farmers whose evening is interrupted when their sensors alert them to a breach along their property line. Hank gets into his huge mechanical suit as Beth calls a neighbor for backup.
What they mean by a breach is some kind of portal through which deadly alien creatures come to take their livestock and prey on the community. Hank casually shoots down a single creature that comes through, but a lot more quickly follow it. By the time he has it under control, there’s only one cow left.
But that’s not the last of his problems, as he can see a giant breach forming along the horizon. Sensors say thousands of creatures are incoming.
Beth organizes the evacuation of local families to their bunker while Hank and neighbors Jake and Mel back him up in their own mech-suits.
They hope to hold them off long enough to get the families safe, but don’t hold out hope for much more than that. They are immediately swarmed as Beth tries her best to coordinate her neighbors.
Jake ends up sacrificing himself to save the others and Beth manages to get everyone inside the bunker safely. Beth and Hank work together to take down one massive boss creature as Jake’s now widow helps to hold off the swarm.
With Hank caught in the blast that kills the boss, his survival is initially in question. But thanks to Jake’s sacrifice and the support of his wife, not only is Hank alive but all the families in their community. The frame zooms out to reveal that they are living in a protective dome, one of many on an in-hospital ringed planet, with swarms of creatures climbing the dome.
Suits is a fun battle with cool creatures, but it also has a lot of heart and a sense of community and teamwork behind it. Not to mention a strong and capable female presence that is never once undermined.
Netflix
Sucker of Souls
I think this was my favorite episode of the entire series. It starts will a frantic chase through some old tunnels, a mercenary type guy dragging along a desperately straggling older academic type. “What the f**k was that, doctor?” yells the mercenary. “I think you know,” answers the academic.
They are covered in blood and being pursued by something otherworldly. We immediately think vampire. A time jump to just before the chase reveals the doctor and his grad student Simon unearthing some kind of ancient tomb, as Mr. Flynn, the mercenary is occupied with a crossword puzzle.
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Simon translates the tablet, “entombed here, the devourer of children, the black prince, the sucker of souls.” Well, that doesn’t sound good. It’s not long before Simon is attacked by a vampire creature, his blood rejuvenating the old vampire’s body.
Flynn and the doctor try their best to save Simon, but he is split right down the middle. All they can do is try to save themselves.
Flynn and the doctor flea down the tunnels, as we saw at the beginning. Flynn works with a team of two other mercenaries, Micky and Gary, and he tells them to get the weapons ready.
The doctor exclaims that the vampire is Dracula himself. Just as Flynn is about to get eaten, a cat distracts the monster. Dracula hates cats; legend has it that feeding on them makes his flesh burn.
So Flynn grabs the cat to scare Dracula away so that he and the doctor can escape. They make it to their base of operations where Micky and Gary are waiting for them.
They find a secret door and escape through the passage, leaving behind a brick of C4 to blow up Dracula. It does its job very well but also triggers a tunnel collapse. They get trapped in a cave with a ton of other vampires.
We’ll never know what happened to them, but the screen goes black and shrieking is heard. This is my favorite for a number of reasons, partly because it has everything I love in a vampire story – ancient archeology, atmospheric setting, blood and gore, action and strategy, and plenty of humor.
It’s fun, it’s weird, and really quite funny. Some of the characters reminded me a bit of The Fifth Element, with the Ian Holm type academic expert, the Bruce Willis type ex-soldier, and various eccentric companions. It just works.
Netflix
When the Yogurt Took Over
What really makes this episode more than anything is the Wellesian narration (Maurice LaMarche), which itself is a reference to the Orson Welles radio production of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds that caused such a panic among listeners who believed the fictional news reports to be real. And while the story is actually super silly, there’s enough humorous social commentary to make it rather clever.
Humans accidentally created a sentient strain of Lacto Bacillus — the bacteria used in the making of yogurt — which at first seemed to be a failure. A scientist took the failed sample home to make her own yogurt and realized over breakfast that the yogurt was alive when it started spelling out messages using the granola in the bowl.
The yogurt designs a formula to eradicate the national debt and sells it to the government in return for Ohio. Of course, if the plan isn’t followed exactly, it will lead to the collapse of the economy and national ruin. The government does not follow the instructions. While the rest of the country is in chaos, Ohio thrives under the leadership of the yogurt.
The government declares martial law and gives yogurt supreme executive power. There was some resistance at first, but ten years later the country is restored and improved. Everyone is happy, healthy, and wealthy.
But there is a theory that the yogurt knew that humans wouldn’t follow the formula, leading to financial ruin and their inevitable rise to power. But of course, it wasn’t like the yogurt didn’t give humans the chance.
The yogurt has been experimenting with space technology, making humans fear that they intend to leave them behind – and what will happen then when humans are back in charge of their own government? I shudder to think.
Netflix
Beyond the Aquila Rift
A cargo ship with a fun and carefree crew are on the return journey from their latest job. The navigator finds a shortcut and they all get into their hibernation pods for the trip. Everything seems fine until Captain Thom awakes sometime later to a system error, red warning lights, alarms, and zero gravity.
They are at a repair facility in an unknown location. He turns on gravity and awakes his navigator Suzy. A space-suited visitor arrives on the ship, revealing herself to be Greta, an old flame of Thom’s. She tells them that there was a routing error that threw them light years off course and that they’re now at Saumlaki Station in the Schedar Sector.
Suzy is pretty upset and starts to collapse from surge tank sickness. They put her back in her hibernation tank while they figure things out.
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While the engineers check out the ship, Thom and Greta meet for drinks and catch up. They had a pretty wild fling back when they met and they still think about each other a lot. They have another wild night together, after which Greta reveals that Thom is further off course than she let on.
He is actually 150,000 light years from Earth and while they only spent a few months asleep subjective time, because of relativity several hundred have passed back home. Even if he does make it back, it won’t be the world he left behind. The same routing error brought her there, brings everyone who ends up there.
They wake up Suzy to try to explain to her what’s happened, but she sees Greta and freaks out. She screams at Thom that that is not Greta and attacks her. They give her a sedative and decide to try again with her later.
But Thom realizes that Suzy is right, its not Greta. Thom is still in his tank and the station is a simulation being fed to him. Everything she told him was true, except that she and the station aren’t what they seem.
He demands to know the truth, but she knows he can’t handle it yet. She’s been through the same thing with countless lost souls. He insists to see and she lets him.
He awakes in his tank, bony and malnourished with overgrown hair. The station is covered in this organic, membraneous weblike growth. Greta greets him, but she is this gigantic, slimy, fleshy, spider-like creature. He screams.
Then the simulation starts again, as Greta tries again to condition his mind to accept the truth. I do find the moral of the story somewhat interesting, the fact that Thom could accept pretty much everything Greta had told him, but couldn’t accept her true form. She’s probably a very lonely creature.
Good Hunting
A Chinese boy, Liang, and his father, a spirit hunter, await the coming of a creature who supposedly bewitches men. She has cast her spell on a local man and they have been hired to defend him.
A beautiful woman arrives and must defend herself against the attack of the spirit hunter. Liang is called on to throw a pot of piss on her to keep her from transforming into her true form but is entranced by her gaze. The spirit hunter throws the piss and she is trapped halfway between human and animal.
They pursue her to her den, where Liang meets one of the creature’s cubs, her daughter Yan. She explains to him that it is she who must answer the call of the man who has fallen in love with her, that it was the man who wouldn’t leave her mother alone.
The spirit hunter sneaks up behind the mother as she is calling to Yan and beheads her. Liang saves Yan, telling his father that he has seen no sign of cubs.
As Liang grows up, he remains friends with Yan. The coming of the railways leads Liang to explore the world and become an expert in mechanics as technology advances into the traditional world. As for Yan, the growing technology means the death of magic in the world and she can no longer change into her true form.
One night in Hong Kong, Liang runs into Yan who is being harassed by a group of British men. She is a prostitute, but she tells them she’s done for the night and they won’t take no for an answer. Liang intervenes and takes her away.
She dreams of transforming and hunting in this concrete jungle, growling in the faces of all the men who think they can own her.
Technology in the city is of the stream punk variety and Liang gets interested in robotics, something akin to magic for him. One night, Yan comes to find him and she’s been transformed into a machine. A client of hers drugged her and forced procedures on her, then forced himself on her.
She killed him eventually and now wants Liang to help change her. He agrees and performs a series of complicated and painful procedures on her, eventually giving her a body that can transform from human to her natural animal form. It’s not quite magic, but now she’s free to hunt and to protect other women from men who would hurt them.
I love this unusual story of the subtleties of sexual harassment, how the blame is often placed on the woman for supposedly encouraging advances when they haven’t done any such thing. The world it takes place in is magical, even with the coming of technology, and utilizes the overused and gimmicky steampunk style to great effect.
Netflix
The Dump
Mr. Dvorchak, an old coot who lives in a dump, is about to be evicted by the city inspector (Gary Cole). A new sanitation law has been put into effect that means that the dump is going to need to be cleaned away, including him.
He makes a deal with the inspector. He’s going to tell him a story, and if he still wants to evict him when it’s done he’ll be happy enough to go. The inspector isn’t very inclined to waste his time with the old coot’s story, but he agrees and lets him talk.
He and his friend Pearly were hanging out one night, talking about whores and such, when they are disturbed by a racket. Pearly sees some kind of creature out in the dump when he goes to take a pee and comes scrambling back to the coot yelling about monsters.
They take up their guns, because of course they just have guns lying around, and spin around looking for where it’s coming from. Sticky tendrils shoot out and capture Pearly, pulling him away. The creature reveals itself to be an animated mountain of trash and the coot takes off after it in revenge for Pearly and the protection of his home.
He gets in a forklift and impales it, running it against the chainlink fence. He is gleefully ramming it when he hears a pathetic dog whimper. The monster wasn’t just created by heat and garbage, it lived off it and whatever it ate became part of it. Pearly is there in the mound of garbage, not quite dead but not quite alive.
While it’s an impressive tale, the city inspector is decidedly unimpressed. At this point, Otto finally shows up, what the audience may have assumed is his dog but who is actually the trash monster he’s been talking about. Otto takes hold of the inspector and eats him. This will not keep other inspectors from coming to evict the old coot, but it keeps him safe for now.
I get uncomfortable and anxious in hoarder environments. A little mess and disorganization are fine, but living in a dump for me is the ultimate in toxic and unproductive spaces. I am a little disgusted by watching this, but that doesn’t make it a bad story.
Netflix
Shape-Shifters
Decker, a barefooted US soldier, patrols through an Afghanistan village, heading up a convoy of other soldiers and a tank. He stops suddenly having detected something with his heightened senses.
He sniffs the air and listens hard, but he is shot in the leg by a sniper before he can pinpoint what he was sensing. His eyes change, he locates the sniper’s location and dodges an incoming bullet as he reports the coordinates to artillery. They take out the sniper.
While Decker’s abilities give a clear advantage against the enemy, back on base he faces prejudice and mistrust. He and his buddy Sobieski are werewolves and they are treated with contempt and fear by the other soldiers.
Still, they rely on them to hunt down the Taliban. Sobieski goes out on patrol but something goes wrong and they lose contact. Decker goes out to try to help him, but something ripped Sobieski and the whole squad apart. Looks like the Taliban have werewolves of their own.
Decker has his scent and helps the unit track him down, but once he locates him he keeps it to himself and sneaks out to face him alone. They transform into their wolf forms, skin molting off to make room for the larger, more powerful bodies.
It’s a pretty cool effect. Decker is flanked mid-transformation and has to throw off his attacker before he can finish. Then he has to take down two Taliban werewolves. Even with an arm ripped nearly off, he is able to kill them both, finally stretching his jaws over the head of the elder wolf and chomping down to crush his skull.
When he returns to the base he is naked and badly injured. This commanding officer tells him he’s not a soldier, he’s an animal. Decker accepts this and replies that he’d done wearing the army’s leash. He takes off his dog tags, drops them on the ground, picks up Sobieski’s body, and leaves the base.
He buries Sobieski in the desert, saying he’ll see him in the wild. With a blatant and uncomplicated message against prejudice, the story balanced that with a tale of revenge and a cool werewolf battle.
While for the most part, the animation was hyper-realistic, there were some stylistically striking moments that stood out, particularly when Decker finds Sobieski and the other murdered soldiers.
Netflix
Helping Hand
A story about the ruthlessness of open space, this episode called to mind Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity both in terms of the survival tale and the sense of scope. A woman named Alex arrives at a satellite and prepares for an EVA to make a repair.
She works for some kind of company that is saving money with solo jobs like this, so she has no backup once she’s out there. Once outside everything goes smoothly until a stray piece of space junk flies into her and damages her suit and sends her drifting away from the satellite.
The impact damaged her mobility unit and the backup so she has no way to maneuver, plus she’s losing oxygen and doesn’t have time to wait for the rescue team.
She drifts for a while until she suddenly gets an idea. She tourniquets her arm and takes her space glove off, calculating the right moment to throw it to create counter-momentum to send her back drifting toward the satellite. All this while her arm freezes solid.
Once she gets close she is unable to get a handhold and goes drifting past. Her one last chance is to tear her own frozen and brittle arm off and use it as another counter, sending her back to her space vehicle.
She makes it and is able to stabilize herself, bandaging her arm and making her way back to the space station. Control asks her if she needs and hand, and she laughs, saying “funny you should ask.”
We don’t always think of space as being as vast and empty as it is. As many billions of astral bodies as there are, it’s hard to visualize just how far apart everything is and how much of space is empty. If Alex kept drifting forever, she might never come into contact with another object.
This is also a really cool survival story about the extreme lengths some might take in order to save themselves, including sacrificing their arm to space.
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.
Netflix
Lucky 13
In some kind of futuristic army, a rookie pilot is given command of the ship that no one else wants, the unlucky Lucky 13. In addition to the numerals of its serial number beginning and ending in the number 13, it’s digits also add up to the number 13.
Before it was given to her, it had lost two crews, the ship itself surviving unscathed. The pilot, Colby, isn’t superstitious, but Chief Warrant Officer Jacko says that ships have personalities and none of them are just machines.
On her first mission, not only is she flying Lucky 13, but she’s out in front of the formation. If shooting starts the lead ship is the least likely to make it home. Once they’re on the ground they’re ambushed.
One of the pilots panics and tries to take off without his men and gets blown up. Colby goes through extreme lengths to collect every man on the ground before taking off. After some fancy flying and risky strategy, they all make it home alive.
After that mission, Colby changes her mind about Lucky 13, and so does everyone else.
She flies 19 more combat missions with Lucky 13 and doesn’t take a single casualty. She’s offered the chance to fly one of the brand new ships coming in, but she decides to stick with Lucky 13.
Of course, there’s always the last mission and one day she gets shot down after rescuing a unit. They survive the crash and Colby covers the men while they make it to cover and wait for evac.
Eventually, there’s nothing else she can do except trigger the self-destruct and escape while the enemy moves in on Lucky 13. She says she’s so sorry, but then Lucky 13 doesn’t explode. She marvels for a moment, saying to herself, “She doesn’t want to go.”
Eventually, the self-destruct does work and takes all the enemy soldier with it. Timing is everything.
Her crew all survives. She’s given a medal for conspicuous bravery under fire and a fancy new ship, but she’d still trade it in a second to fly one more mission with Lucky 13.
I’m not big into war or combat stories, but I really liked this one because it works on so many levels. It’s partly about misguided prejudice based on superstition, but it’s mostly about a pilot who distinguishes herself despite expectation.
Colby’s success in the field had nothing to do with Lucky 13, just like the prior pilot’s failings had nothing to do with the ship. Colby is an exceptional pilot – skilled, creative, determined, and brave.
She never gave up and she let a man down if there was a chance to save him. That’s the real secret to her success.
Netflix
Zima Blue
An enigmatic and respected artist, Zima Blue announces his final work of art and requests to speak with one particular journalist, Claire, to tell his story. Not much is known about his history, most of it having been lost to myth and legend over the years.
He supposedly got his start in portraiture but found the form too limiting. He moved on to fantastic space murals. One day he unveiled a mural with a tiny blue square sitting at the center of it – a Zima Blue square.
As time went on, the blue shapes at the center of the murals became more prominent until eventually, they were the basis of the murals themselves. During this “Blue Period” the murals got bigger and bigger, reaching farther and longer and taller, until some reached into space. And then he started painting space itself.
It was partly the spectacle of his work that made him so famous, more than the artwork. As is the nature of an artist, he was still dissatisfied with his work.
Zima Blue is said to have undergone biological procedures that allowed him to tolerate extreme environments without the protection of a suit so that he could truly explore them without being confined.
But the truth is both more simple and more spectacular. Long ago there was a woman with a keen interest in robotics who made machines to do odd jobs around the house. She had a special fondness for the one who cleaned her swimming pool and kept making improvements to it (kind of like Edward Scissorhands!) and as she did, it became more aware.
After the woman died, the machine was passed from owner to owner over the years, each making modifications that contributed to the machine’s awareness. The machine became more alive, “became more me,” concludes Zima Blue.
He started as the little pool cleaning robot and Zima Blue was the color of the ceramic pool tiles. And now he’s going to return to the pool in his final art piece.
In the presence of millions of people, he dives into the pool from which he came, shuts down his high brain functions, and dismantles himself until he is just a simple machine again.
As he begins to clean the pool, he can once again take a simple pleasure in a task well done, his search for truth finished.
Not only is the stylistic animation and coloration of this episode beautiful and striking, but it is also both a complex and simple story of the search for self and the return to simplicity. There have been studies that find that people with higher intelligence often have a harder time finding simple joy in daily things because they’re always looking for some deeper meaning to life.
It is both beautiful and sad that a machine became this brilliant man, only to lose the satisfaction he once had as a simple machine.
Netflix
Blindspot
A group of high-tech thieves advances on a convoy carrying a valuable and heavily guarded microchip. Everyone in their group is highly modified with pieces of technology, making them all advanced cyborgs.
Everything goes according to plan until one of the group swerves to save a small, cuddly creature that had run out into the road and fumbles a magnetic mine.
The mine goes off prematurely and alerts the guards inside the convoy to their presence. Chaos ensues as an alarm goes off and the guards advance on the thieves.
As the thieves are surprised by mounting levels of defenses against them, they each get picked off one by one until only their rookie member is left alive.
He claims the coveted microchip, but at what cost? The rookie clearly didn’t read the fine print of his contract though, because all of their consciousnesses are uploaded into a remote hard drive. It was just their bodies that were destroyed, so they all get to reap the rewards of the heist.
This one was fun and fast, equal parts Speed Racer and Mad Max, but ultimately immediately forgettable.
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.
Netflix
Alternate Histories
This hilarious cartoon explores the different alternate histories possible when changing various significant events in our established timeline. Specifically, what would happen if Hitler had died in 1908 and what would have been the result of various possible deaths?
Hitler is killed in a brawl on the steps of the art academy after striking a jewish child he trips over on his way out. WWI proceeds, Weimar Republic starts late, WWII delayed until 1948, the US drops the atomic bomb on Germany in 1952, Niel Armstrong first man on the moon 1969.
Or, Hitler avoids the brawl only to get run over by a horse drawn sausage cart. Vienna passes tough horse-drawn carriage laws prompting a quick acceptance of automobiles, Austria becomes an industrial powerhouse, WWI won by Germany thanks to technological advances, 30s depression averted, Willy Brandt first man on the moon 1958.
Or, Hitler avoids the brawl and the carriage only to be the random victim of Russia’s experimental gelatin-encasing weapon. The weapon is then used to eliminate enemies of Tsar Nicholas II. WWI proceeds and is promptly won by Russia in 1915. Russia becomes sole superpower, Vladamir Putin first man on the moon 1988.
Or, Hitler avoids the first three threats to his life only to die by marathon fornication with four Viennese prostitutes. The prostitutes are arrested but are revealed to be travellers from a very sexy parallel dimension who teach the Viennese their pleasurable ways. Janine Lindemulder first woman on the moon 1996.
Or, Hitler avoids the first four and is struck by a meteor that is the precursor of a massive asteroid strike to the Earth. 93% of species wiped out, leaving rats to evolve and create the perfect democracy, only to discover nationalism and create weapons of mass destruction, destroying the rest of the world. This allows the rise of a peaceful squid civilization. First squid on the moon 2,973,412.
Or, Hitler is caught between time travelling Nazis sent back to save his life and time travelling anti-Nazis sent back to kill him, only to be saved by his time travelling future self. Forgetting the first rule of time travel, the two Hitlers touch hands and create a time paradox that destroys all time and space.
Up next, what happens if Lincoln shoots first? While I appreciate the silliness of this episode, I would be more interested in a slightly more academic examination of likely scenarios. I love the premise of a service called “Multiversity” that lets you explore alternate histories like this.
Netflix
The Secret War
Deep in the heart of Siberia, a unit of Red Army soliders battle a hoard of monstrous creatures. The group begins by moving in stealthily on what appears to be a deserted village. On closer inspection, the villagers have all been savagely slaughtered. At least 47 are dead, no survivors.
The decide to track the monsters back to the barrow and destroy them, despite their lack of numbers and support. They eliminate a group of them with minimal casualties and discover the long dead body of the secret police on the nearby ridge.
As they regroup at their camp, the commander examines the diary found with the dead body. He was a Major assigned to a project called Operation Hades which was designed to investigate occultist peasant myths.
The Major was tasked with performing a certain black magic ritual intended to raise an unholy army to fight for them. It raised an army, but instead of being allies, they took out the whole unit and started ravaging the countryside. That is where the monstrous scourge originated.
Through their travels, they encounter a massive burrow. They send in two of their men to plant explosives and while they escape being either eaten or blown up, the burrow is so massive that the ground collapses out from under them as they run away. Suddenly thousands of monsters are exposed and ready to attack.
They decide to take their stand their, buying time so that one of them can get through to tell command their coordinates. The Commander sends the youngest member of their team, despite his protests to stay and die with the unit. He is revealed at the last minute to be the Commander’s son.
They fight as long and as hard as they can, but they are eventually overrun and every last one of them is killed. But the boy made it back to command with their coordinates and the next morning dozens of planes come flying overhead and drop bombs all over the area, taking out the greater part of the unholy hoard.
This episode is creepy, atmospheric, and unsettling in the same way horror video games can be particularly frightening. It’s a lot like watching an extended cut scene or playing as one of the characters and experiencing the fear, albeit in a superficial way. I find something particularly unsettling about this style of animation. I’m not sure exactly what it is, but it is quite effective.
Stream Love Death and Robots now on Netflix.