Netflix’s experimental sci-fi masterpiece is a perfect cross between Terminator and Neuromancer. Cyberpunk has been a popular sci-fi sub-genre since the New Wave science fiction movement of the 1960s and 1970s. During that era, authors such as Philip K. Dick and Harlan Ellison broke away from the previous mainstay of sci-fi utopias to delve into darker worlds shaped by technology and its impact on society. Then came the 1980s, and with them William Gibson and his novel Neuromancer, which became one of the most influential cyberpunk stories of all time and helped cement the genre’s status.
Over the decades, cyberpunk has brought us a range of delights, especially in movies and television. The Terminator franchise gave audiences a story of war between humans and machines — along with time-traveling cyborg assassins — throughout six films (and one TV show), with a potential seventh film on the way. Meanwhile, Gibson’s Neuromancer is finally getting a long-awaited adaptation from Apple TV.
But even though these two properties are cornerstones of science fiction media, they aren’t the only amazing cyberpunk stories out there. The animated anthology series Love, Death + Robots, created by Tim Miller and executive produced by David Fincher, ran for four seasons on Netflix and featured the best of those iconic stories while drawing on other established cyberpunk tales, too. The result was a smorgasbord of dystopian worlds, transhumanism, robots, and confrontations with forces far bigger than any human could comprehend.
Love, Death + Robots Incorporates Robotic Themes All The Way From Terminator To Neuromancer
Love, Death & Robots pre-production image
Image via MovieStillsDB
Every tale in the Love, Death + Robots universe incorporates an aspect of one of the title’s three themes. This allowed room for experimentation. While not every episode included robotic themes, many of them did. Those episodes became among Love, Death + Robots‘ best and most thought-provoking, running the gamut from vulgar and nihilistic to downright charming, blended with a hint of bleakness.
For instance, season 2, episode 1, “Automated Customer Service,” follows a woman in a retirement community staffed by robots as she battles her Vacuubot after it gains sentience and grows increasingly aggressive, eventually ending up on the Vacuubot’s kill list. While the story may be a bit more light-hearted than The Terminator, it still explores what happens when technology becomes more intelligent than the people who created it and decides humans may not be needed at all. It also captures humanity’s fierce spirit in the face of impossible obstacles.
Then there are episodes like season 3, episode 1, “Three Robots: Exist Strategies,” which features three adorable androids (the second episode to include these characters) venturing around the Earth to view what remains after late-stage capitalism. Mostly, cats have remained, but on this journey, the robots also see how different economic classes tried to escape the world’s downfall, which was caused by human greed. At one point, they come across a luxury resort designed for the rich, which failed because the humans there relied too much on artificial intelligence, which finally had enough and started a robot uprising.
While vastly different from Neuromancer’s more action-packed take on anxieties around societal change and globalization, this episode similarly examined how socio-economics could affect who might survive in a world ravaged by global climate change.
The Upcoming Neuromancer TV Show Can Learn From Love, Death + Robots
Love, Death & Robots episode “Good Hunting”Netflix
Though Love, Death + Robots is an anthology that covers many genres and sub-genres, several episodes were based on existing stories. One example is the season 1 episode “Good Hunting,” based on a story by Ken Liu, which crossed technology with old folklore. While Liu coined the term “silkpunk” to describe his work, the episode took on a cyberpunk tone, placing a mythical huli jing (a fox spirit) in a robotic body after industrialization overtook magic, exploring themes of bodily autonomy.
Other episodes came from stories by Peter F. Hamilton and Bruce Sterling. Though the show benefited from being animated, which let it more easily capture the cyberpunk genre’s grittiness, futuristic landscapes, and cybernetics, the skillful way it incorporated these elements is something the upcoming live-action version of Neuromancer can still take notes on.
Signal Received · Deep Space Broadcast The Ultimate Sci-Fi TV Trivia Quiz “The truth is out there.”
🚀Deep SpaceFinal frontiers
⌛Time TravelWibbly wobbly
👽AliensWe are not alone
👁DystopiaThe black mirror
💡Upside DownHawkins, 1983
01
The most famous opening monologue in TV sci-fi begins: “Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the ___.” Complete the line from the original 1966 Star Trek series.
✓ Engage! William Shatner’s iconic opening — “Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before” — has become one of the most quoted passages in all television. Later Trek series would adapt it, but the Enterprise is the one that started it all.
✗ Subspace interference! The answer is Starship Enterprise. USS Voyager belongs to the 1995–2001 series, the Defiant to Deep Space Nine, and the Discovery to the modern 2017 series. It’s the original Enterprise, captained by James T. Kirk, that William Shatner immortalized in that final-frontier monologue.
02
The Doctor’s time machine is disguised as a 1960s British police box and is famously bigger on the inside than the outside. What is the acronym it’s known by?
✓ Allons-y! TARDIS stands for Time And Relative Dimension In Space. The name was coined by the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan in the very first 1963 episode. The police-box shape is the result of its chameleon circuit getting stuck while parked in 1963 London — and it’s stayed that way for sixty-plus years.
✗ Chronal distortion! The answer is TARDIS — Time And Relative Dimension In Space. The other options are invented distractors. The TARDIS first appeared in 1963 and has followed every regeneration of the Doctor since, though its interior famously redesigns itself whenever the showrunners want a fresh look.
03
The acclaimed 2004 Battlestar Galactica reboot — considered one of the greatest sci-fi TV shows ever made — was developed by which writer-producer, a veteran of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine?
✓ So say we all! Ronald D. Moore developed the modern Battlestar Galactica, reimagining Glen A. Larson’s 1978 original as a gritty, post-9/11 political allegory. Moore had cut his teeth writing many of TNG and DS9’s best episodes. His BSG aired 2004–2009 and tackled terrorism, torture, faith, and what it means to be human.
✗ Frak! The answer is Ronald D. Moore. J. Michael Straczynski created Babylon 5, David Eick was Moore’s co-executive-producer on BSG, and Glen A. Larson created the original 1978 Battlestar Galactica. Moore took Larson’s cheesy space opera and rebuilt it into a Peabody Award-winning meditation on war and morality.
04
Netflix’s ’80s-drenched sci-fi hit Stranger Things is set in a small American town sitting above a secret government lab that tore a hole into the “Upside Down.” What is the town called?
✓ Friends don’t lie! Hawkins, Indiana is the fictional town the Duffer Brothers invented for Stranger Things — home to Hawkins National Laboratory, where Dr. Brenner’s MKUltra-style experiments opened a rift into the Upside Down. The show is actually filmed in Jackson, Georgia, but the Hawkins sign is now an iconic TV landmark.
✗ The Upside Down! The answer is Hawkins, Indiana. Derry is Stephen King’s fictional town from IT, Castle Rock is another King town (and an anthology series), and Springwood is from A Nightmare on Elm Street. The Duffer Brothers deliberately evoked King’s small-town horror tradition when creating Hawkins.
05
In The X-Files, Fox Mulder has a famous poster hanging in his FBI basement office — a UFO photograph with a three-word tagline beneath it. What does the tagline say?
✓ The truth is out there! “I Want To Believe” sits below a blurry UFO photo on the poster that hangs in Mulder’s basement office throughout the series. The line became so associated with the show that it was used as the title of the 2008 feature film, The X-Files: I Want to Believe.
✗ File that one away! The answer is “I Want To Believe.” “Trust No One,” “Deny Everything,” and “The Truth Is Out There” are all iconic X-Files taglines — but it’s “I Want To Believe” that’s literally printed on the UFO poster in Mulder’s office, and which became the title of the franchise’s 2008 movie.
06
Apple TV+’s Severance — about office workers whose memories are surgically divided between their work and personal lives — was created by a first-time showrunner who used to be a customer service rep. Who is he?
✓ Praise Kier! Dan Erickson wrote the Severance pilot while working soul-crushing office jobs — literally daydreaming about splitting his mind so the “work-him” would suffer instead. Ben Stiller came on as executive producer and directed most episodes, but Erickson is the creator whose personal ennui gave us Lumon Industries.
✗ Outie interference! The answer is Dan Erickson. Damon Lindelof created Lost, The Leftovers, and Watchmen; Ben Stiller is Severance’s executive producer and primary director (but not its creator); Jonathan Nolan created Westworld and Person of Interest. Erickson’s script sat on the Black List for years before Stiller championed it.
07
In 2018, Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror released a groundbreaking feature-length episode that let viewers make choose-your-own-adventure style decisions for the protagonist. What was it called?
✓ Interactive transmission received! Bandersnatch followed young programmer Stefan as he adapted a choose-your-own-adventure novel in 1984. Viewers could make choices at key moments, branching the story into multiple endings. It was Netflix’s most ambitious interactive experiment — and the meta commentary on viewer control remains quintessential Black Mirror.
✗ Null pointer! The answer is Bandersnatch. USS Callister is the Emmy-winning Star Trek riff, San Junipero is the beloved ’80s romance episode, and Metalhead is the black-and-white robot-dog thriller. All are Black Mirror, but only Bandersnatch was the interactive choose-your-own-adventure special that launched in December 2018.
08
Joss Whedon’s space-western Firefly became a legendary cult classic after Fox infamously cancelled it — airing episodes out of order, burying the pilot, and pulling the plug. How many episodes aired on Fox before cancellation?
✓ Shiny! Only 11 of the 14 produced Firefly episodes aired on Fox in late 2002 before the network pulled the plug. The remaining three (including the two-hour pilot “Serenity”) first aired in proper order on the Sci-Fi Channel and eventually on DVD. Fan outcry led to the 2005 film Serenity — a rare cinematic rescue for a cancelled series.
✗ Fox strikes again! The answer is 11. Fourteen episodes were actually filmed, but Fox only aired 11 before cancellation, and they aired them out of order with the pilot held until last. The complete set finally aired on Sci-Fi Channel and DVD, and the fan-driven “Browncoats” campaign eventually convinced Universal to greenlight Serenity.
Transmission Complete · Signal Decoded Your Sci-Fi Rating
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Trekkie-level canon — or still buffering?
Translating an existing story like a novel into another medium doesn’t necessarily mean that everything needs to stay the same from book to screen (though some Neuromancer fans may certainly appreciate that). What matters more, as Love, Death + Robots has shown, is capturing the novel’s ideas in a way that keeps the TV show thematically true to the original and makes a real impact on viewers. Since Gibson is involved as an executive producer, the show will hopefully fulfill its promise, even if certain storylines or characters need to be cut.
Love, Death + Robotsis a masterclass in sci-fi storytelling and one of those rare shows that both thrills and terrifies its audience by fully embracing cyberpunk’s essence in its best episodes. Its success shows Neuromancer that it can be done, making it a terrific touchstone for the upcoming series.
Release Date
March 15, 2019
Network
Netflix
Directors
Víctor Maldonado, Patrick Osborne, Robert Valley, Alfredo Torres Martínez, Jerome Chen, Emily Dean, Rémi Kozyra, Léon Bérelle, Dominique Boidin, Alberto Mielgo, Maxime Luère, Andy Lyon, Robert Bisi, Dave Wilson, David Nicolas, Simon Otto, Damian Nenow, Laurent Nicolas, Kevin Van Der Meiren, Vitaliy Shushko, Owen Sullivan, István Zorkóczy, Javier Recio Gracia, Oliver Thomas
