Love, Death & Robots Season 3 is here with more weirdly satisfying episodes

Netflix released the third season of Love, Death & Robots last week. Most of us have probably watched it already, but for those who still haven’t, you better start now.

The series tackled the same genres (science fiction, fantasy, horror, and comedy), but the animated short stories just got more magical and more twisted yet weirdly fixating. Unfortunately, the number of episodes for this new season doesn’t match the quantity we’ve enjoyed during the first (18 episodes). But here is the good news: every story has a distinctive concept that will leave you with an open jaw and a boggled mind.

One of the best episodes is Alberto Mielgo’s “Jibaro,” which features a deaf soldier and a siren with a body coated with gems and gold. The siren performed the most alluring, enchanting moves with some shrieks, sending the soldier’s comrade to their death in the lake. The deaf soldier, luckily, was all unaffected by it. Not a single word was spoken in the episode, but that makes the beauty of it. All viewers will get what the story is about with just the pure actions of the characters. Interestingly, the story mixes war and dance (and love?), and we got to say that this combination made this episode’s ending quite unexpected.

Meanwhile, “Swarm,” directed by Tim Miller, features another pair of possible lovers. The story is set in an alien star system with two human doctors studying an insect-like alien race called Swarm. Seeing the complexity of race, which is made of different caste and even some other alien species absorbed by the Swarm, the two planned to use their study to benefit humanity. Its animation is one of the best in the entire season, making the appearance of the aliens incredibly surreal, especially when blood and flesh start to pour.

Also set outside the Earth is the episode “The Very Pulse of the Machine,” directed by Emily Dean. It is about the voyage of a surviving astronaut Martha Kivelson who needs to drag the body of her dead partner in order to continue the supply of her oxygen on the surface of Io. With a broken arm, Kivelson decides to take morphine to ease the pain, only to experience hallucinations. The story goes with the lone astronaut facing problems separating reality from fantasy. The same goes for its viewers, as this episode will make you scratch your head and ask yourself if the things you’ll witness are actually real. 

The season offers another alien-like episode called “Bad Travelling,” only the story itself is set on Earth with a giant man-eating crustacean. It boarded a shark-hunting ship, making the life of the sailors a living hell for them and forcing them to decide who lives and who dies. The scenes are incredibly gory, so expect buckets of uncensored flesh and blood splattered everywhere.

The second to the last episode, called “In Vaulted Halls Entombed,” almost has the same vibe, wherein a US Special Forces assault team enters a mountain cave to save hostages. Along the way, the group will get face to face with some spider-like, alien-like creatures. From the initial look at how the story runs, you would expect that it could be another extraterrestrial scene. Instead, the team is facing a bigger enemy more than that – an ancient god that will steal their sanity from them.

You’ll also see another beast in the “Kill Team Kill,” directed by Jennifer Yuh Nelson. However, far from the previous monsters faced by the characters, this episode has a cybernetically-enhanced grizzly bear that can tolerate bullets.

Speaking of bullets, a farmer in the episode “Mason’s Rats” will tackle his rat problems with guns and robots. But here’s the twist: the rats gained the ability to think and use weapons to rebel and stand for themselves.

The season also features an episode full of zombies called “Night of the Mini Dead.” The interesting part? It isn’t just like any other zombie story filled with a depressing storyline. Instead, it is quite comical as the entire episode runs in a fast-phased manner with everything viewed in bird’s eye view.

On the other hand, and as you’ll expect from the title “Love, Death & Robots,” most parts of the series center the stories on tech and the future. One is the “Three Robots: Exit Strategies,” which is a continuation of an episode from Volume 1. It shows the same three comedic robots making fun of the human extinction after an apocalypse. The trio visited the Earth one more time to investigate the places where the last of the humans struggled to survive. The beauty of the episode is really in the conversation of the robots, giving us insights into how we could possibly act in case the biggest apocalypse hit the world – selfishly and stupidly. 

The new season is now available on Netflix and spans no more than two hours.