Spider Rose

A traumatized cyborg seeks revenge against the people who killed her lover. Along the way, she finds possible healing, though.

This was an interesting episode, and certainly more in line with what I was hoping for. After a music video and a sophomoric comedy short, we finally get a science fiction story. The science fiction elements were pretty cool, but the short runtime meant that you didn't really get a lot of detail.

The art is amazing, which perhaps explains why it's so short. It's in a pretty realistic style and has a solid emotional base. You get to know the cyborg's suffering fairly well during your brief time with her, and her emotions come through well in the artwork. The voice acting captured the characters well, too.

I would have liked to have seen something a bit more exciting during the climax, but the action sequences were done well. It definitely gave off vibes of Heavy Metal, especially the climactic fight, which was gory and intense.

The most essentially science fiction part of the episode is not really the cyborg. It was her payment for a salvage job -- an alien pet that gives her a reason to live besides vengeance. It was interesting and kept the episode from being something as straight-up "here's some badasses in a gunfight" like Kill Team Kill.

Overall, definitely an episode for people like me. If we had an entire season of episodes like this, I would be satisfied, but I hope we get some more crazy stuff like ZIma Blue, The Witness, and Jibaro.

A bio-mechanical femme in a vast orbiting web-like space station controls a strange alien artifact, barters with extraterrestrials, seeks revenge for a dead mate, and acquires a strange pet. All of which is interesting but given the 15 minute running time, the disparate storylines just don't gel - too bad as they generally start off interestingly. The designs of Rose (the cybertrix) and the aliens are imaginative as is the rendering of Rose's vast mechano-environment. With a bit more focus, this could have been one of the top L,D+R episodes but even as is, it has so far been my favourite from the anthology's unfortunately weak fourth season.

This story feels like a retread of a previous seasons.

The one with a human going in to space to investigate a hive mind entity and then decides they would make a better queen and ruler of the hive and then finds out the old hive / queen isn't happy about that idea.

The agenda of the aliens is kind of unclear did they send the cute pet on purpose to harvest the spider rose / human / augmented dna ? Or where they merely trying to maintain their ' arrangement' ?

The timing of the villain attack is also somewhat circumspect and coincidental.

Animation and voice acting off the charts with amazing sound stage to sell it.

The first two episodes of this season were disappointing. I was pleasantly surprised that "Spider Rose" gives us a small glimpse of the show's former glory.

Now, the episode isn't a masterpiece, not by any means. In fact, in my ranking of Love, Death & Robots episodes, it would probably fall around the middle. This is the show at its core: a visual feast for the eyes coupled with an interesting sci-fi concept. As far as the story for this one goes, I didn't necessarily love it, but it was more than passable. "Spider Rose" manages to capture the grief of a woman who has lost what she loves, but the runtime is too short for me to truly get attached or emotionally resonate with her. Nonetheless, it does an effective job of establishing context. The villain is fine. Nothing extraordinary, but he fulfills his purpose. My one question would be why he sends the real copy of himself to attack Rose when he could've just sent more copies and safely hid himself.

Animation is great as always, pacing was decent, the ending was predictable, but it fit the vibe of the episode. Solid episode all around, one of the standouts of Season 4.

There are some interesting themes in this one, and it evokes similarities with what must have been done by the same studio, the sci-fi episode in the previous season, the one about hive-mind extra-terrestrials. I must admit I _loved_ that one -- the one in season 3, it actually had a novel story, certainly one that's worth pursuing which it tried to do.

Anyway, this may just be done by the same studio, it bears some visual style similarities for me to think so.

But unlike the other one, this one doesn't really explore a particularly interesting theme. It's visually striking, but the show already set the standard for 3-D animation, and I, for one, expect no less.

The theme that I liked -- which the episode didn't manage (or bother) to fully explore -- is loneliness, despair, desire for revenge and last but not least, _pets_! :) It ended too soon for me to have a lasting impression, which I think is its chief shortcomings, perhaps even the only shortcoming -- there is an interesting theme there somewhere, vaguely painted and lazily left unexplored.

Twice the story and half the animation quality (even at the same run length) would have improved this one by a margin, I'd say. Alas.