Season two of the Netflix's animated SF short story anthology. Comes in much shorter than season 1, with eight episodes as opposed to 18 in the first batch, and many of the ideas feel similarly truncated, all setup and no payoff. Noticeably less bloodthirsty and boobthirsty than the initial outing, perhaps as a result of viewers asking them to tone it down a bit?
1. Automated Customer Service: Robots + Death. Cleaning robot goes bad and attempts to murder its exceptionally ugly owner and her irritating dog. The customer service line she attempts to call is mildly amusing.
2. Ice: Brotherly love + Death. Oddly-proportioned people go ice-whale watching. Not a lot happens, but I liked the understatedness of the ending, the way they just tell it with a look and a smile rather than spelling it out.
3. Pop Squad: Death. A middle-aged Anakin Skywalker does a 50's art deco Blade Runner. Easily the darkest of the stories here, and one of maybe two that are even remotely thought-provoking.
4. Snow in the Desert: Love + Robots + Death. Old Man Logan, er, Kenobi. Immortal desert hermit gets attacked by bounty hunters. Impressive cg but not a lot else going on here. Twist ending was entirely predictable, despite coming at the end of an almost comical series of reverses.
5. The Tall Grass: Death. Polar Express, but evil.
6. All Through the House: Death (Potentially). Santa Claus, but alien.
7. Life Hutch: Robots + Death. Michael B Jordan defeats a robot evidently implanted with the brain of a cat by using a laser pointer.
8. The Drowned Giant: Death. A dead whale washes ashore but our David Attenborough narrator reimagines it as a gigantic human corpse in order to underline our blasé attitude to death in nature and the indignities to which we subject dead animal bodies.
So you have have love and death without the robots, or robots and death without the love, or all three together, but there's always death. Death is mandatory.
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