Love, Death + Robots

Black Mirror

Phillip K. Dick's Electric Dreams

Love, Death + Robots is a 5-time Emmy winning animation anthology series produced by Blur Studio. Launched in March of 2019 on Netflix, Love, Death + Robots delivers a variety of style and story unlike anything else, spanning the genres of science fiction, fantasy, comedy, horror, and more. Created by Tim Miller with David Fincher as executive producer, the series brings together a global team of directors and animation studios to push and expand the medium. Eighteen shorts in all, Love, Death + Robots has something for everyone. The first season is almost perfection. Most of its individual episodes have great stories and meaning behind them, they have originality. Even the worst episodes in season one are watchable and have some level of entertainment. The first season has lots of re-watchability to it. But then they released the second season. It's got plenty of episodes with cool concepts but they drag on. I, and many other people, felt let-down by the subsequent season. So far it only has eight episodes, and those eight episodes feel like they were episodes cut from the first season. It isn't horrible, but once you see it all, you don't want to watch it again. Its worst episodes are unbearable and its best are inferior compared to the first season. It contains episodes where the characters make dumb decisions, and its got plenty of episodes that are hard to understand. Absolute gems from Season 1 include Three Robots, Beyond the Aquila Rift, and Good Hunting.

An anthology series exploring a twisted, high-tech multiverse where humanity's greatest innovations and darkest instincts collide. Set in a world only minutes from our own, "Black Mirror" unveils how modern technologies can backfire and be used against their makers, every episode set in a slightly different reality with different characters combating different types of technologies. Over the last ten years, technology has transformed almost every aspect of our lives before we've had time to stop and question it. In every home; on every desk; in every palm - a plasma screen; a monitor; a smartphone--a black mirror of our 21st Century existence. Black Mirror is a contemporary British anthology series with stories that tap into the collective unease about our modern world.
The show looks inwards, at the darker aspects of humanity and society. This is done through the theme of technology, hence the second meaning. The black mirror is the screen that rules our lives. Taking contemporary phenomena (ranging from the wild popularity of talent shows on TV to the impact of social media and smartphones on our lives) as a starting point and speculate how such phenomena could/would evolve in the future. Each episode tells a different story with different protagonists and focuses on a different theme. Black Mirror is delightfully dark and often set in a cyberpunk dystopia. Two espically poignant episodes are San Junipero and Nosedive, the latter starring Bryce Dallas Howard.
He may have died 35 years ago, but Philip K. Dick’s influence is everywhere in 2018. It’s not just the rippling success of “Blade Runner 2049,” the growing fan base of Amazon’s “The Man in the High Castle,” or the Dick-influenced “Black Mirror”—he now literally has a show with his name on it, a star-studded anthology series that adapts (sometimes loyally, more often very loosely) ten of his short stories. “Electric Dreams” is hit-and-miss, but the hits far outweigh the misses. A large majority of “Electric Dreams” is worth your time, especially if you’re a fan of Dick’s work, with only one episode that really misfires, offset by one that’s a mini-masterpiece. And the eight in between are what could safely be called “pretty good.” Given the wild peaks and valleys of “Black Mirror,” to which this show is sure to be compared, the consistency here makes for arguably a better series overall. The ten episodes feel less reliant on “Twilight Zone”-esque twists and more concerned with philosophical issues about what it means to be human. They’re less likely to serve as cautionary tales of tech addiction (as Charlie Brooker’s show does) than they are to question the complexity of the human race. Even though the series can seem uneven, most everybody else will be able to find something to satisfy them in Electric Dreams as it winds its way through varied storytelling styles, littered with intriguing actors and exploding with creative visual flourishes.