While not quite the unwatchable drivel that was S2; with the exception of only 3 outliers, Love, Death, and Robots: Season 3 gets caught in the same boring loop of high-visual-acuity-digital-violence that plagued the worst parts of S1 and almost all of S2. It’s strange to me that with the freedom of the vignette format, gratuitous violence is almost all we can seem to manage.

In this review, however, I want to talk about the season’s strengths instead of harping on its weaknesses. Just know that the animation across the board is staggering despite the episodes I don’t mention here. Those not mentioned are ignored because their narratives and are either uninventive, idiotic, slogging and pointless, or hinge entirely on characters we already like without doing anything new with them.

Moving on…

Ep3: “The Very Pulse of the Machine”
This episode is stunningly animated with a style wholly unique to anything else this season. A beautifully bold palette accentuates the weird and ephemeral tale told by an astronaut fighting for her life on the lonely surface of Jupiter’s moon, Io.

I love this episode for its interesting and beautiful storytelling and use of strange and metaphysical themes. While I wish that it had a slightly more interesting ending, this is one that I will remember long after watching and would like to see expanded in the future.

Ep4: “Night of the Mini-Dead”
Excellent. Just… excellent. Inventive use of both miniatures and animation collide to form a fun and punchy retelling of a story we’ve seen a thousand times in film and read a thousand times in print. Yet, Mini-Dead stands out amongst them as one to remember.

Ep9: “Jibaro”
I… don’t know what to say about this one exactly. It almost isn’t fair to compare it to the two above, and it certainly isn’t fair to lump it in with the rest of the narrative delinquents that plague this season; or the show in general. It’s clear why they saved this episode for last, because it shows the true glory of what LD+R can be. Similar to both “Sonnie’s Edge” and “The Secret War” from S1 [which are the show’s other two strongest episodes], “Jibaro” creates a full world with context, intrigue, rewards, and consequences; all in just 17-minutes. The animation is absolutely staggering to behold and the episode’s use of motion, cinematography, framing, lighting, and sound should be shown in fine art museums across the globe. While I wanted a slightly neater ending from the short, “Jibaro” is an incredible feat of animated engineering and I hope it gets rewarded independently of everything that surrounds it and not lost in the flotsam that is the rest of the season.

All in all, watch those three episodes if you’re on the fence after S2, or just watch “Jibaro” if you have no interest in the show at all. That one episode is what will bring me back for a fourth season in the hopes that something else can reach that height of artistic mastery.