Pictures: Netflix
Humor, guns, violence, aliens, death, and most importantly of all, chaos. Those are the central themes of episode 2 of Love, Death and Robots, which serves as a follow-up to an episode from Volume 3. Here’s a breakdown of the locations you visit in the rapid episode depicting an alien invasion, some of the references we spotted, and how the ending is a callback to that aforementioned episode.
Directed by Robert Bisi and Andy Lyon, this is their second foray into the world of Love, Death and Robots, following Night of the Mini Dead in volume 3 episode 4. In interviews, the pair said Close Encounters of the Mini Kind is a “spiritual sequel” to that particular episode, with the Earth similarly going through some troubles during that episode, leading to a rather destructive end, aka nuclear holocaust. Like that episode, Close Encounters of the Mini Kind is done in an isometric 3D animation style with everything sped up so that the humans have high-pitch voices.
The duo chuckled in most interviews about what message they wanted fans to take away. They said the lessons are similar to the first: “It’s about unity, about everyone coming together to fight against something even though it might be all our fault. ” The duo added in another interview that there’s “a lot of stupidity that is bringing us all down.”
If you’ve now finished the episode and are wondering what the aliens were even saying throughout it, you probably should turn on subtitles and rewind to the beginning, “Humans, we come in peace,” the alien in his purple robe begins with although it does become garbled before eventually saying, “… together” opening his arms up with loving embrace and revealing that he’s… ahem… well endowed. Believing he has gone, the US police officers precisely shoot at the alien’s “weapon”… before leading a wild goose chase that sees nobody left standing.
From there, a message is transported to the other alien vessels in orbit, lying in wait. That message is not good, thus leading to an invasion across the world, beginning with a farmer who has something probed into him before further abductions and plenty of killing. He arguably deserved it, given that he himself was looking to go probing on an unsuspecting cow.
Much of the episode sees the humans mounting a resistance against the aliens, using humanity’s available weapons (and even a crane at one point) and adapting the aliens’ guns for their own use. The resistance works for the most part, driving some of the smaller ships back up to the mothership, but humans want to rid them once and for all, so they use a baseball stadium to construct a mega weapon.
Another quick point I wanted to make is that the episode implies that humanity has united against this threat, with Air Force One being labeled “United States of Earth”. In this future war, the President of the United States is very much at the center of this new global alliance. No comments there.
They fire that big weapon, and it backfires after a human misfires their weapon, causing a Rube Goldberg chain of events which causes the super weapon to point inwards on the Earth and fire. That, in turn, creates an exponentially growing rift that eventually becomes a massive blackhole that kills all the aliens with the caveat that everyone else dies too. As we zoom out, we ultimately see the solar system disappear from the milky way and thus comes a momentary fart sound effect which is a definite callback to Night of the Mini Dead given that ended similarly…
Cut to credits.
Picture: Netflix
Locations in Close Encounters of the Mini Kind
The episode features some iconic (and less known) landmarks such as the Hollywood sign Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles, California, the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, Picacadilly Circus in London, Veterans of Foreign Wars “VFW” Post 9236 in Hernando Beach Florida, Greyfriars Bobby’s Bar in Edinburgh Scotland, the Status of Liberty in New York City, Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, and Tokyo, among other locations.
What references were there in Close Encounters of the Mini Kind?
There were a bunch of pop-culture references found throughout the episode. Here are a few I spotted:
- Outside the Veterans club, the alien can be found “teabagging” the humans—a popular term that came from video games in which you crouch and stand repeatedly over your fallen enemy. It’s perhaps most popularized by Halo.
- At the airport, the President of the United States is giving a speech akin to the one seen in Independence Day.
- They’re immediately crushed by an alien walker that has a very strong resemblance to War of the Worlds.
- The race across the desert gave me some Mad Max vibes.
- ET gets a mention in one of the signs in the baseball stadium, with one sign saying, “ET GO HOME.”
Animation for this episode was handled by BUCK with additional animation by Little Zoo Studio.
