Love, Death + Robots contains its premise in its title, and while not every episode features any one of those, most of them have either death, love, or robots in some shape or form. Form is important here. This anthology contains 35 animated episodes spread over three seasons, but fear not time-starved sci-fi lover, each one tells a separate story and none last more than 22 minutes. What you get are unique and original tales, but many are adapted from heavyweight sci-fi writers, big names such as Harlan Ellison, Neal Asher, Ken Liu, and J.G. Ballard, among others. As you would expect, the episodes can vary a lot in their execution of their subject matter.
The stories roam around the world, across time periods, and different sci-fi subgenres, even fantasy. What is coherent, however, is a sense of style. It is not for the faint of heart, with violence and gore, sex and spookiness, cursed language, and adult themes, handled by various production companies. Animation studios from the likes of France, Japan, Russia, Scotland, Poland, Hungary, and the U.S., to mention just a few, means cutting-edge animation work, from traditional 2D to the most lifelike CGI.
With a fourth season in the works, and expected to drop in the not too distant future, this is as good a time as any to catch up on Love, Death + Robots. FYI: episode numbers reflect Netflix’s original ordering, which may have changed since.
If you're longing to indulge in more sci-fi goodness, then check out our lists of the best sci-fi TV shows based on books, best spaces movies, and the best space horror movies too.
10. Helping Hand
- Season 1, Episode 11
- Original airdate: March 15, 2019
Astronaut Alexandria Stephens faces a nightmare situation. On a spacewalk as she repairs a faulty satellite her spacesuit is hit by a screw from orbital debris, tearing its safe confinement. Air escapes. Floating out there alone she has only 14 minutes of oxygen left – will she survive or not? This propulsive narrative contains a bonus lesson on zero-g physics.
9. Beyond the Aquila Drift
- Season 1, Episode 7
- Original airdate: March 15, 2019
You wake from a deep, dreamless slumber from your spaceship’s pod, after a long journey. You and your crew wake, but something feels amiss. But here’s a pretty face, an old flame who you didn’t expect to see. She reassures you. You have sex. Still, something doesn’t feel right. There’s a sharp sense of unease, uncanniness, and a horrifying turn of events in this beautifully spooky tale (something in which Love, Death + Robots excels).
8. Sonnie’s Edge
- Season 1, Episode 1
- Original airdate: March 15, 2019
Love, Death + Robots started strongly with series premiere Sonnie’s Edge, although viewer beware. Grisly, violent, and searingly brutal, episode one finds the titular Sonnie as a champion of beastie fights. These underground death matches have people assuming control of deadly engineered creatures battling it out for supremacy. But Sonnie keeps winning and winning – what, exactly, is giving her the edge?
7. Pop Squad
- Season 2, Episode 3
- Original airdate: May 14, 2021
For centuries humans have dreamed of immortality. While alchemists worked on elixirs in times past, modern scientists study aging. In the future there may well be drugs or a procedure that could grant us something close to immortality. However, this raises questions. Would all humanity have access? What would happen to population growth if no one dies? Would the rich and powerful try to keep the life-lengthening goods to themselves? And what happens to meaning when people live forever? Pop Squad explores these questions in 18 minutes.
6. Snow in the Desert
- Season 2, Episode 4
- Original airdate: May 14, 2021
This episode is a great example of what Love, Death + Robots does well: shimmering environments and memorable protagonists with a thrilling narrative that lets viewers join the dots. Snow in the Desert pairs well with a more Earthbound story, season one’s ‘Shape-Shifters,’ which is about werewolves in Afghanistan. Bounty hunters are after the titular Snow, someone with a special ability, but he meets a woman named Hirald, who’s not all she appears, in a surprisingly tender romance.
5. The Very Pulse of the Machine
- Season 3, Episode 3
- Original airdate: Mon 20, 2022
In an episode thick with atmosphere we meet two astronauts – Kivelson and Burton – cruising across the surface of Io, one of Jupiter’s largest moons, when their cruiser gets knocked up by an eruption. This leaves Kivelson in a sticky situation as she’s left alone dragging a body. Injured, with little oxygen remaining, and miles from shelter, Kivelson goes on a trip. And what a trip it is! Hallucinatory, poetic, dazzling, and verging on the spiritual, The Very Pulse of the Machine, based on a Hugo-winning short story by Michael Swanwick, evokes the strange mysterious beauty of the universe.
4. Ice
- Season 2, Episode 2
- Original airdate: May 14, 2021
Two brothers live on an icy planet populated by people who have been “modded.” Sedgwick, the elder, is feeling isolated and angsty since he’s different (read: unmodded) when his parents ask his younger brother – who is modded – to look out for him. One night, the pair sneak out to hang with the local youths. Cue a dramatic and beautiful race on the ice that has Sedgwick leaping out of his loneliness.
3. Good Hunting
- Season 1, Episode 8
- Original airdate: March 15, 2019
A boy follows his spirit hunter father in turn of the 20th century China, chasing a huli jing, a shapeshifting fox-spirit. But the boy makes a brief connection with one of the shapeshifter’s daughters, who’s called Yan. Years later, the boy has moved to Hong Kong and is now working as a train engineer and encounters Yan again, now stuck in human form as the world has lost its magic. Steampunk collides with Chinese mythology in a tale adapted from a short story by celebrated sci-fi writer Ken Liu in this pungent episode.
2. The Drowned Giant
- Season 2, Episode 8
- Original airdate: May 14, 2021
By turns uncanny, overblown, pretentious, moving, weird, yet strangely affecting and profound – ah yes, it’s a J.G. Ballard story. Closely adapted from a short story of the same name by the late British author, this season two closer recounts the effect a giant corpse has on a community, told via a gloriously verbose narration. The overall effect might seem underwhelming initially, but the effect will linger in the memory and grow like a seed, as many of Ballard’s tales have done.
1. Zima Blue
- Season 1, Episode 14
- Original airdate: March 15, 2019
Zima Blue is the name of a world-famous artist living in the future. The elusive Zima grants a reporter an interview, after years of requests. The artist’s origins are shrouded in mystery, but we learn of his rise to renown as the reporter narrates his career ascendancy. Creating artwork of ever greater ambition, Zima Blue got his name from the specific shade of blue used in his celestial-sized murals. However, for his last piece of art, Zima Blue has a surprise up his sleeve in this poignant and memorable story.
Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com.
