Summary
Love, Death & Robots is back with a killer take on how technology rules the world.
This recap of Netflix’s Love, Death & Robots season 2, episode 1, “Automated Customer Service”, contains spoilers.
Love, Death & Robots continues its homicidal “Pixar-sequel” ways in season 2, episode 1, “Automated Customer Service.” This edition opens up with a rap song, showing the incongruent contrast between the song and its surroundings. They begin with pan shots of an all-inclusive retirement community. Think “The Villages,” filled with older white people with huge noggins, broken bodies, and their pets that love them.
Oh, they must be rich as hell, too. These senior citizens live in a high-tech, assisted-living community filled with the greatest purveyors of the United States’ finest automated vacuum cleaners: The Vacuubot. Unfortunately, the protagonist in this story is an old lady trying to get a hold of a human being through the company’s automated line. While waiting, she accidentally activates Purge Mode. This is a function designed to rid all of the house’s pests, including some of the larger ones. Even house pets and humans could be targeted! All of this is communicated to our wicked little Betty White, who looks horrified.
The Vacuum turns into a murderous Wall-E in “Automated Customer Service”. It shoots lasers that kill her fish. This sends her running with her boodle in hand. The automated line, though, is still talking her through her issue and has the helpful suggestion of sacrificing her pet so she can get free. Admirably, she refuses. Instead, she quotes a line I’m guessing she heard from Henry Truman on the back of the train, ‘Fluff and fold, motherfucker!” She tosses laundry over the HAL 9000’s next of kin and runs for the door.
Not so fast, the robot has locked every door and window down. As she struggles to pry the sliding glass doors free, the linen is folded, and Vacuubot is ready to kill. That’s until our Golden Girl hears a noise outside, turns, and spots who I can only assume is Richard Mulligan with a shotgun, locked and loaded. As they lock eyes, the psychotic bot shoots tasers through the window and into the poor man’s forehead. As he falls, he tosses the gun to Bea Arthur, who turns to do a split on the ground and makes Vacuubot’s day by shooting straight through his cold little robot heart. I only wish she stood up and said, “I call that a Mulligan.”
She grabs her poodle, drags along the neighbor in the golf cart that saved her, and the automated man on the message tells her that robot she just wasted sent a message to all robots to hunt her down and kill her.
