Love, Death & Robots says: give us two minutes, and we’ll give you an animated invitation to the end of the world. Or more than one invitation! Humanity bites the big one in various ways – again – in Volume 4 of the anthology series from executive producers Tim Miller and David Fincher, but if there’s anything LDR loves more than creatively illustrating human folly, besides being darkly funny, it’s doing mad destruction with brevity. In this series, the story arc of an entire comic book, graphic novel, movie, or season of television – or in the case of Fincher’s V4 entry, an entire Red Hot Chili Peppers concert – compressed into the space of an eventful and highly visual few minutes.
And like Black Mirror, another Netflix anthology taking soundings in the uncharted region between science fiction and science fact, with a few seasons under its belt, Love, Death & Robots has built a library of ideas it can revisit. Episodes in Volume 4 of the series include prequels, sequels, and new wrinkles on formats established in previous installments.
So. Love, Death & Robots…and you? What are the best episodes of Love, Death & Robots Volume 4? Decider has created this list of LDR V4’s episodes ranked from least interesting to most unforgettable to save you valuable time. Time you can use to ensure your modern conveniences aren’t planning your demise via the Internet of Things, or that a giant baby isn’t stomping on the ruins of your city. Read on!
Photo: NETFLIX
“‘It says ‘When used as directed’…Chad.” In “Smart Appliances, Stupid Owners,” Ronnie Chieng is the voice of a disgruntled electric toothbrush, Kevin Hart is a home ionizer fed-up with human farts – “I just take dust and particles out of the air, bro, I don’t do methane” – and a smart pulsating showerhead hates to see its owner coming, because she hasn’t had a date in four years. Episode 9 of Love, Death & Robots Volume 4, directed by Patrick Osborne, creates a kind of foul-mouthed tribute to the claymation whimsy of Wallace & Gromit creator Nick Park. “Smart Appliances, Stupid Owners” asks a valid question of our modern world – does anyone really need a toilet that can access the internet? – then gets out of the way so the appliances, also featuring the voices of Amy Sedaris, Niecy Nash-Betts, and Melissa Villaseñor, can have their say. “Oh, God!” Brett Goldstein says as that networked commode. “The refrigerator just told me it’s taco night, and Brenda’s making them extra spicy!”
Here’s where the strings come in. In “Can’t Stop,” filmmaker David Fincher channels his past as a music video helmer with a revisit of a 2003 performance by Red Hot Chili Peppers at Ireland’s Slane Castle. But in this LDR version, everybody, from the band onstage to the fans in the massive crowd, are transformed into computer-generated marionettes. Anthony Kiedis’s mustache, Chad Smith’s drumsticks, John Frusciante’s guitar strings: they all have strings attached, which climb like silver filaments into a dark sky. (Did the fan whose strings light on fire get too careless with his jazz cigarette?) Because you’re watching Love, Death & Robots, you gotta wonder: Who or what is controlling these Red Hot Chili Puppets, manipulating their movements as they yowl and cavort and fly away on their zephyr? Not clear. That unknown lends mystery to an ep that otherwise answers a question that burns for some. If a bobblehead of RHCP’s Flea came to life, would it still play the bass with its face before a crowd?
Directors Robert Bisi and Andy Lyon return to the format of their Love, Death & RobotsVolume 3 episode “Night of the Mini Dead,” but this time around, it’s aliens instead of zombies that trigger world-destroying human folly. And when the decision-making on the ground is this stupid, you don’t need the dialogue to be intelligible. In “Close Encounters of the Mini Kind,” when tiny aliens arrive on earth, they’re greeted violently by tiny, trigger-happy cops. (ATCAB, apparently.) The aliens warn their tiny buddies, amassing in tiny ships in orbit. And soon, tiny bouts of havoc break out worldwide, lit by the light of a million little lazer beams. The voices are sped-up, the action is life-size but at like 1:12 scale, and the perspective is middle-distance. But it’s easy to see how humankind could go from first contact to final countdown in the space of seven minutes.
During times of suffering, when there was only one set of footprints in the sand, that was when cephalopod priests from space decided to deliver a divine reckoning for all the environmental destruction humanity caused. In “Golgotha,” a live-action entry in Love, Death & Robots directed by Tim Miller, a Catholic priest who saw a dolphin resurrected from an oil spill returns to the beach where he witnessed the miracle. The Lupo, tentacled aliens who’ve taken up residence over Earth, have demanded an audience with Father Maguire (Rhys Darby). And as they walk along the beach, the alien representative – rendered in CG from Luma Pictures – looks very, very sleek and appropriately otherworldly. But there is only one problem. In titters, the Lupo also speak with Blackfin, the dolphin who pulled a Lazarus. And when Father Maguire sees tentacled extra terrestrial gunships gather above the beach, he figures there’s only one thing left to say. “We fucked up.”
“How Zeke Got Religion,” episode 8 of LDR V4, features the voices of video game world notables Bruce Thomas (Master Chief in Halo 4) and Roger Craig Smith (Chris Redfield in Resident Evil). But honestly, they can be hard to hear over all of the blood curdling screams and automatic weapons fire. In World War II, imagined as the pages of a graphic novel come to life, the Liberty Belle is a B-17 flying the Masters of the Air route across the English Channel to bomb targets in Nazi Germany. But this solo run is special, with a special passenger onboard in possession of a very special, apparently supernatural bombsight, and the Liberty Belle’s mission is to knock loose the Nazis from their special incantation over a gaping pit in a church on the border with France. What are Hitler’s minions calling to, down in the depths of Hell? “Zeke wasn’t afraid of nothin’,” the crew’s voiceover tells us. But as they hit their target and turn toward home – and the fuselage of the aircraft becomes a bloody house of horrors – Zeke and his mates learn there are some things that machine guns and bombs can’t kill.
“The Other Large Thing” is a prequel episode to “Three Robots,” which we saw way back in Volume 1 of Love, Death & Robots. Written by science-fiction author John Scalzi, and featuring the voices Chris Parnell and John Oliver, “Large Thing” introduces an orange Persian cat called Sanchez. But the name on his bowl is not what he’s known by when he’s plotting world domination. No, the world will know its cat king’s true name once he rules through the power of networked AI devices. When a couple of human gallumps – the other large things of the title, who Sanchez calls “beef-witted fart generators” – purchase a robotic Danyo Housebuddy, sort of a servant/pet/amusement device, cat language is wired to internet language and the next stop is a new age of human subjugation by cats with control of computers. It’s a classic outcome of our technological age: what we built for convenience becomes the killer of our existence. In LDR’s world, we are all the gallumps.
St. Luke’s Asylum was a real place in 18th century London, and in this episode, adapted from an award-winning short story by Siobhan Carroll, it becomes the site of a showdown between the devil and a bunch of cats. Yes, more cats. But in “For He Can Creep,” Jeoffry (JB Blanc) doesn’t share Sanchez’s delusions of grandeur. He and his alleycat friends are warriors, descendants of the “Angel Tiger” who killed the “Ichneumon-rat of Egypt.” And when Satan appears, voiced by the incomparable Dan Stevens and looking like Salieri in Amadeus, it’s up to Jeoffry to protect a poet whose divine adoration – and the walls of St. Luke’s – have transformed into a desperate man. If you ever looked at a housecat, low-slung and on the prowl, and thought in that moment how much he resembled generations of his feline forebears, then “For He Can Creep” has a theory about how cats have been clapping back at evil for eons via wormholes, “creeping in the spaces between worlds.”
Take the imperious tone of Lee Pace’s galactic emperor in Foundation, but cross that with the “Hey guys!” intonation of a content creator. In “The Screaming of the Tyrannosaur,” a wild LDR installment directed by Tim Miller, YouTube challenge king MrBeast voices the interplanetary carnival barker who presides over a space station hamster wheel high above the moons of Jupiter. There, the universe’s most wealthy assholes gather to watch a battle to the death with Fall of Rome overtones. “In the darkness above Europa, they take everything from us,” a gladiator voiced by Bai Ling tells us in Mandarin. And she decides to teach this crew of smug sci-fi oligarchs a lesson. Cue a churning herd of triceratops, each of them stories tall, and the nearly naked gladiators using their elegantly-designed grappling weapons to mount the creatures like Chani riding a worm in Dune 2. Imagine what might occur when the idle observers of a blood feast they designed realize they didn’t build in any safety protocols. When the triceratops are replaced by a tyrannosaur, the biggest dino of them all – even in space! – won’t be the only one screaming.
For “Spider Rose,” Love, Death & Robots returns to the galactic landscapes of sci-fi author Bruce Sterling, which first appeared in its Volume 3 episode “Swarm.” Once a human woman, Lydia Martinez is now Spider Rose (Emily O’Brien), a half-cyborg administrator of interstellar salvage, who lives in service to her vendetta. Whatever it takes, she will exterminate the Bossk-esque being who killed her husband and crew. Featuring the alien race from Sterling lore known as the Shapers, and beautifully crystalline animation from Blur Studio, “Spider Rose” also throws Little Nose For Profits at its titular character, a cooing space pet with the personality of a slobbering puppy and the peculiar ability to assimilate the genetic material of other living creatures. We love this episode of LDR because it balances its reachy sci-fi ideas – and large amounts of sci-fi destruction – against a compacted storyline that feels like it could spin out for light years on a thread we’ll never see. When Spider Rose gets to know Little Nose, the sequence is as poignant as it is probing, and pays off with an ending that feels both tragic and correct.
Together, we can win. But it’s gonna take a lot of determination and bloodshed to find that victory. In “400 Boys,” directed by Robert Valley, animated with gorgeous form and shadow by Passion Pictures, and featuring the voices of John Boyega and Ed Skrein, a tight knit crew of warriors in a cracked and crushed dystopian landscape find hope in parlay with their longtime rivals. Gods, or at least “god-things,” are stalking across the bombed and raided surface of this broken world. And it’s up to the gangs who are left to unite behind the words of a wise old matriarch. “Nothing ever ends.” While the warriors stand in a skirmish line – ““You killed our friends! Smashed our hive! Fuck YOU, 400 Boys!” – and a searching jazz soundtrack morphs into a percussive Massive Attack vibe, the chief god-thing manifests as a baby with a bad attitude and 500-foot wingspan. If this is their end, so be it. Their spirits will continue. But the memorable, inspiring “400 Boys” is one episode of Love, Death & Robots where the anthology series allows for human victory. Because after all, rebellions are built on hope.
Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.
