Love, Death & Robots

The title 'Love, Death & Robots' is quite fitting for this animated anthology series by Netflix. Each episode contains a little bit of love, death and obviously robots. When this show was first announced, I had very high expectations. This is because Netflix has managed to acquire or produce a lot of solid animated content. A lot of these productions were well received by a lot of critics, such as: Death Note, One-Punch Man and Rick and Morty. Has Love, Death & Robots managed to meet my expectations? I can say rather easily that it hasn't managed to do so for me.

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The idea of Love, Death & Robots had a lot of potential. Eighteen episodes, each developed by a different team, all of them animated in a different style. There are some episodes with an animation style that is quite similar to, for example, Avatar - The Last Airbender. Other episodes have a completely different and more realistic style, which actually makes it quite difficult to distinguish them from reality.

In this first season there are actually several episodes that are ambitious and interesting. Unfortunately there are not enough episodes which reach that level. Because of that I am of the opinion that Love, Death & Robots is actually a bit of a let-down. The show starts off quite strong with an episode called 'Sonnie's Edge'. I've written a review about that first episode and at the time I was full of praise. I was looking forward to the remainder of the season with that episode still on my mind. It was mysterious, there was a nice vibe throughout the episode and it was packed with amazing action scenes. After this first episode, none of the following managed to reach that same level. There are, however, a couple of episodes which are decent. For example, episode seven (Beyond the Aquila Rift), episode eight (Good Hunting) and episode eleven (Helping Hand).

Unfortunately, there are also, in my opinion, quite a few bad episodes. The stories weren't thought-out well, had a predictable ending or were pretty much childish. There were multiple moments where I was wondering about what kind of ridiculous things I was watching. Especially episode seventeen (Alternate Histories) was an all-time low, although I must admit that the idea of the episode is interesting. This particular episode displays a couple of scenarios where Adolf Hitler dies at a different moment in his life and how this could've affected the future.

I will wrap things up on a positive note. I'm happy that Netflix has renewed the show for a second season. The premise of the series is still ambitious and there is still a lot of potential. Hopefully they'll manage to balance the quality of the various episodes in season two. If it'll have more episodes like the ones I previously mentioned, I'll definitely watch it.

The quality of the first season isn't balanced enough, in my opinion. There are some ambitious and interesting, but mostly mediocre or even bad, episodes. Nonetheless, the quality of the animation is impressive and is often a sight to behold. Taking into account all of the previously mentioned I give the first season of Love, Death & Robots a 5.