‘Love, Death + Robots’ Season 3 review: A little bit of something for everyone 

It is hard to put a finger on  Love, Death + Robots, the third season of the animated anthology, helmed by executive producers David Fincher and Tim Miller, streaming on Netflix. Sure, the title may have a philosophical and futuristic ring to it. But the shorts are so eclectic that the first one, about three robots out on a future earth, couldn’t be any further removed from the last one set during historical times and featuring a deaf knight. 

Titled  Jibaro, this last short is distinct for its animation that is strikingly close to the real world. Revolving around a deaf knight’s intrigue for a singing woman, it is admittedly about toxic relationships and is an aberration in a series where ‘Love’ as an emotion is otherwise scarce.  Love, Death + Robots, is then mostly about humanity, its actions and effects, but told through various genres such as science fiction, gore and fantasy. 

The first shot,  Three Robots: Exit Strategies by Patrick Osborne, is particularly fascinating because the story, despite being set in the future, is essentially a recap of how humans would’ve started out in this world. Like men, who make it a point to learn history, three robots show up on earth to learn about the species that came before them: humans. 

With one end of the story arc now firmly rooted in the past, it stretches to the future to foresee humanity’s doom as the robots try and piece together what went wrong with the human civilisation. As they go about doing this, they even serve up a telling commentary about the current state of affairs of the world — greed, class division, tech race, AI — and how all these eventually spelt the doom for humans. 

Like love, humour is another commodity that is in scant supply, save for David Shatraw’s  Night of the Mini Dead. If satire was the tool employed in  Three Robots, visual comedy supplants it in  Night of the Mini Dead. The short brings to life a hyper-lapse montage of a miniature zombie apocalypse. In the beginning, these frenetic miniature figurines may be simply amusing, but the climax justifies this treatment by showcasing the inconsequentiality of things from a larger perspective. Expectedly, these two shorts are the most accessible and entertaining of the lot. 

The first flashes of grimness appear with the Fincher-directed  Bad Travelling. Here, a group of voyagers are caught on a ship with a giant beast lurking in its hull. Decisions have to be made overriding the conventional terms of morality. Linger on the story for some time and it’s not hard to see that the humans walking the deck are not entirely different from the animal underneath. By the end, the protagonist has had to make a few difficult choices, and the viewer is left to mull about the relative nature of right and wrong. 

Things take a philosophical turn with Emily Dean’s  The Very Pulse of the Machine in which two women astronauts’ journey through one of Jupiter’s moons goes awry. Set in a science-fiction landscape, the story’s attempt is to make inroads into the human mind and bridge it with AI. How much it succeeds at that will strictly depend upon the viewer’s capacity for the abstract and resolve to digest jargon. Nevertheless, the animation, realising its moment of reckoning by now, goes into overdrive mode and compensates by sketching the moon’s land and skies, and lending life to the bright hallucinations of one of the protagonists. 

Set in space once again, yet thematically different from  The Very Pulse of the Machine, is  Swarm, helmed by the series’ creator and  Deadpool-director Tim Miller. A human doctor is tasked with a mission to study the swarm race which has the potential to be bred and made subservient. The story serves as a reminder that humans may not be the only thinking and sentient beings sharing space in this universe. 

Jennifer Yuh Nelson’s  Kill Team Kill and Carlos Stevens’  Mason’s Rats are the segments where the series’ gore quotient is cooped up. Apart from the fun concomitant to the genre, there is not much to delve deeper into. 

Ultimately,  Love Death + Robots is a wild concoction. Its ingredients include everything from the stimulating to the mild to the bland. In other words, it has in store a little bit of something for everyone.

Love Death + Robots Season 3 is currently streaming on Netflix