Love, Death & Robots Season Three (2022) — I: A Power High and Mysterious

6 min readJul 19, 2022

*SPOILERS*

This season saw LDR return to the visual, narrative, and conceptual greatness of Season One. In addition, if you’re a fan of cosmic horror, it was a thematically strong season. I’ll be focusing on my four favorite episodes this week that share a theme of interacting with a higher power:

Swarm
In Vaulted Halls Entombed
Jibaro
Mason’s Rats

Swarm

Top 3 LDR episode with Zima Blue and Aquila Rift. Swarm follows our protagonist, Afriel, a human trekking long distances to come to The Hive, a biodiverse community of aliens that’s like a zillion years old. There he rendezvous with a scientist who’s been studying it, Dr. Mirny.

Similar to but not the same as a hive of conspecific insects. There are >1,000 different species of alien that occupy this hive representing more than just arthropod physiologies. The thing that makes them a hive is that any individual has low intelligence, low individuality, and is specialized in its function. There’s no Hive Mind so they are controlled by biochemical signals in an autoregulated system (more like a kidney than a brain).

A Choice

Afriel wants to harness the efficiency of the hive’s perfect coordination for human industry. Imagine the utility. He convinces Mirny and testing begins. They begin applying Mirny’s signaling research to manipulate individual hive elements. This continues until a few security-types intercept Afriel one day and bring him to a hive atrium.

Death Metal

Afriel finds Mirny’s body hoisted in the air, eyes rolled back in her head, brain exposed where her hair used to be, stuck with tentacles originating in a Hive Mind. Through her, the HM speaks, “Your experiments set off certain hormonal triggers.” If the hive is a finely tuned microchip then instances of atypical behavior would stand out. The more you experiment the more indicators of atypical activity accumulate. And what did these biochemical pathways trigger? The birth of the HM.

“Everyone here has a specialty. [Mirny’s] specialty is intelligence.” The HM doesn’t even have the ability for advanced reasoning. It has to hijack the neurological machinery of an intelligent being as a substrate on which to think, asserting that intelligence (individuality) is not conducive to collective efficiency.

A New Choice

In hawkish fashion, the HM will proactively neutralize the newly discovered human threat. However intelligent beings can combat other intelligent beings “with an inventiveness and ferocity” that the hive can not match. So HM tells Afriel he can either bang zombie Mirny to make an army of hive-loyal humans or the hive will kill and clone him to do all of that anyway. Afriel chooses to help destroy human sapience. HM closes the episode by repeating a line spoken to Afriel earlier by a seemingly non-hive species, showing that this has already become the fate of another intelligent species.

Implications

Firstly, the raw body-horror of seeing Mirny’s brain invaded by tentacles. Also the existential horror of both appreciating whatever state of conscious experience she must occupy as well as seeing the extinguished sapience in a hive-adapted species. Probably what a wolf might feel if it could appreciate its relationship with a pug. Finally the cosmic horror of pondering whether this is why it’s difficult to find intelligent life in space.

Swarm also raises a fascinating question regarding the evolutionary disadvantages of intelligence. Although it’s not obvious to me that a non-intelligent system would have the ability to appreciate the notion of evolutionary selective pressures in order to artificially select against intelligence well enough to articulate but whatever, it’s a tv show and it works. I mean the hive is a well-oiled machine — something much more efficient than humanity. If surviving the harshness of life in a void drives the evolution of a biological system that can coordinate with precision, and individualism cannot confer precision, then individualism will not be selected for. Likewise if individualism arises inevitably from intelligence (which I’ll interpret as sapience), then a selective pressure will be placed against sapience itself. Sentience would be so highly valued that a sapient hive state would represent an acute response to a specific sapient threat, which I imagine would be extinguished once the threat is as well. The sustained presence of a sapient HM after all, would likely not be very different than having a human controlling the hive.

In Vaulted Halls Entombed

You can see it right in front of you but it’s more than the hellish titan chained in this chamber. This entity is also a feeling inside of you. Dread. Defeat. Enslavement. A malevolence incomprehensible in its fury. The more you try to understand it the more your mind buckles around its ravenous gravity. At first it comes to you in words. Phrases in an ancient language. A symbol not written by human hands. “Release Me.” It takes over your squad leader’s mind forcing you to kill him.

Eyes opening and closing for you to see through

Its power quickly comes to you when you lock eyes with it. Visions of torment and desolation pour into every crevice of your mind like molten lead. Sounds of agony burn through your ears from the inside, a rushing fire roaring against your ear drums. When they rupture it is release. Your mind is stronger than your squad leader’s so you resist its mind control but you are not in illusion of your smallness. You are an ant drowning in spite and DMT. It doesn’t matter what sins you’ve committed. It doesn’t matter that you deserve this.

You crawl through the noise toward the light from the outside world but this inferno still rages. A storm that knows no calm. The wind all but gone from your lungs, your screams have been reduced to the same ancient phrase now looping in the charred ash of your mind. You’ve gouged your eyes but deliverance remains distant.

It’s a good thing The Old One doesn’t answer prayers.