Recap / Love, Death & Robots: "Three Robots"

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Three Robots

Sometime in the distant future, after humanity went extinct, a trio of snarky robot friends, XBOT 4000 (Gary Anthony Williams), K-VRC (Josh Brener), and 11-45-G (a text-to-speech program), embark on a sightseeing tour of a post-apocalyptic city. They explore numerous different settlements during their journey, including a high school, a diner, an apartment, an electronics store, and a missile silo. Each of these locations have them encountering remnants of human civilization in the form of objects and corpses, while the trio keep trying to wrap their heads around what humans used to be like, where they came from, what they used to do for fun, and why they ultimately ended their existence in the first place.

Based on the short story "Three Robots Experience Objects Left Behind from the Era of Humans for the First Time" by John Scalzi.

This episode got a sequel titled "Three Robots: Exit Strategies", also by Scalzi, in the third season.

Tropes:

• Absurdly Long Wait: Parodied when 11-45-G serves a dish of random items to a skeleton at the diner's counter, even telling it "Sorry for the wait."
• Adaptation Title Change: The original story is titled "Three Robots Experience Objects Left Behind from the Era of Humans for the First Time".
• Bait-and-Switch
  • XBOT 4000 stepping on a skull, as per The Terminator, turns out to actually be him and his fellow Robots exploring an After the End city.
  • The Robots appear to be sitting on a couch staring at a television in imitation of the ancient human custom. It turns out that they're actually staring at a cat.
  • A pissed-off XBOT 4000 advances on K-VRC after he tricked him into looking up what "teabagging" is on the Internet, saying K-VRC needs to be punished for that. XBOT pulls back his arm, seemingly to punch K-VRC... and then dumps the cat that started following the trio on the little 'Bot's head.
• Big Brother Is Watching: Implied when the Robots inspect a broken X-Bot 3 console in an abandoned store. What appears to be a power button is actually an electronic eye, suggesting that the console was always watching its owners when operational.
• Big, Thin, Short Trio: 11-45-G is the Big, XBOT 4000 is the Thin, and K-VRC is the Short.
• Bland-Name Product: XBOT 4000 is implied to be descended from a game console called the X-Bot, a pastiche of the Xbox.
• Bolivian Army Ending: Played for laughs; the short ends with the Robots completely surrounded by intelligent, sapient cats that want to be petted forever under the threat of "exploding".
• Brain Bleach: XBOT 4000 looks up "teabagging" when K-VRC describes what the X-Bot 3 console was used for. Needless to say, he immediately regrets it.
• Breather Episode: This episode is more lighthearted and comedic than the dark and violent "Sonnie's Edge" and the psychedelic and mind-bending "The Witness".
• Cats Are Mean: Cats are implied to have assisted in wiping out humanity (or at the very least, stopped actively trying to keep humanity from accidentally offing itself in various spectacularly moronic ways) after being given sentience and opposable thumbs, thus no longer needing humans to open their food cans.
  XBOT 4000: Why did humans even consort with these hairy murder-machines?
• Cute Machines: K-VRC is a short, brightly-colored, round-limbed robot with a cheerful personality and a screen that displays a smiley face for a head. He also uses less profanity than his peers, and the one time he does, it's just an expression on his screen-face that says "WTF". It's justified since he was descended from a line of baby monitors, admitting that his line was terrible at babysitting.
• Deadpan Snarker: Given that 11-45-G is voiced by a text-to-speech program, this is to be expected.
  11-45-G: Stop being a whiny pussy and fucking bounce it. Please.
• The Dog Was the Mastermind: While humanity's stupidity and dickishness certainly didn't help matters, the cats at the end of the episode imply that they alone were what kept poor, dumb humans from driving themselves to extinction. However, after humanity gave them thumbs with which they could open their own cat food and doors, cats no longer had a reason to keep humanity from causing The End of the World as We Know It.
• Driven to Suicide: At the high school gym, one of the long-dead corpses is hanging from the rafters, with XBOT 4000 poking it.
• Everyone Has Standards: K-VRC shows a Lack of Empathy towards humans, but after the cat shamelessly admits that his species was responsible for the extinction of mankind simply because they no longer needed the humans’ help, K-VRC is stunned and says that’s "pretty heartless".
• Eviler than Thou: While Humans Are Bastards in the Robots' eyes, cats are apparently worse.
• Fantastic Aesop: Immediately after the Green Aesop delivered by 11-45-G, the episode presents an alternative Spoof Aesop to be derived from humanity's extinction: don't give cats thumbs, because they, or rather, their need for humans is what is keeping humans from ending the world in a spectacular(ly moronic) fashion.
• Flipping the Bird: XBOT 4000 does this when 11-45-G takes a photo of him.
• Freud Was Right: 11-45-G points out the phallic shape of the missile she and the other Robots inspect.
• Future Imperfect: Most of the episode's humor comes from the Robots' misunderstandings toward humanity, as well as their habit of being Right for the Wrong Reasons, from thinking that cats are exploding superweapons (from the card game Exploding Kittens), to figuring out just how the kind of people who play video games are like.
• Green Aesop: When reflecting upon what exactly it was that drove humanity to extinction, the Robots come to the conclusion it was a series of environmental disasters. 11-45-G appears to look at the audience while this is being said.
  11-45-G: Indeed, it was their own hubris that ended their reign; their belief that they were the pinnacle of creation that caused them to poison the water, kill the land, and choke the sky. In the end, no nuclear winter was needed, just the long, heedless autumn of their own self-regard.
  • About five seconds later however, she tells the other two that it sounded better than humans screwing themselves over through their own stupidity. And then of course the cats show up and imply they were the reason humanity went extinct, after humans foolishly gave them thumbs and the intelligence to use them, thereby rendering the feline need for humans to open their food and doors obsolete.
• #HashtagForLaughs: One of the corpses in the high school gym wrote "#wersofucked" on the wall as the apocalypse happened.
• Here We Go Again!: Cats had a hand in wiping out humans once they were intelligent and resourceful enough to open their own tuna cans, but apparently they now miss being petted, so the one that follows the Robots to the silo calls up his friends to they can all be petted under the threat of exploding in the Robots' vicinity.
• Hubris: According to 11-45-G, the cause of humanity's downfall was their belief in their superiority, which led to the destruction of their environment.
• Humanity's Wake: The titular robot trio explores an abandoned city after humanity's extinction, trying to make sense of the things humans liked to do.
• Humans Are Bastards: This exchange:
  XBOT: Why did humans even consort with these hairy murder machines?
  K-VRC: Kindred spirits?
  11-45-G: Also checks out.
• The Internet Is for Cats: 11-45-G claims that humans had "an entire network that was devoted to the dissemination of pictures of [cats]".
• Left the Background Music On: 11-45-G delivering her Green Aesop.
• Licked by the Dog: XBOT 4000 gets "occupied" by the cat he and his fellow 'Bots discover, thinking that its purring when he pets it "activates" it and he needs to keep petting it or it'll explode.
• Mechanical Evolution: Implied; the Robots appeared to have evolved out of existing mechanical devices following Humanity's Wake. K-VRC, for example, is hinted to be descended from baby monitors, and XBOT 4000 is implied to be descended from a video game console.
• Parrot Pet Position: When the cat jumps on XBOT 4000's shoulder.
• Plug 'n' Play Technology: XBOT 4000 picks a part of the wrecked X-Bot console he finds and uses it as a replacement for his missing eye.
• Reclaimed by Nature: The abandoned city is starting to display this, with moss and mold growing over the interior of a diner, and vegetation in general being overgrown.
• Ridiculously Human Robot: The titular Robots play around with the trope. While they often have trouble grasping certain human concepts like "eating" and "sports", their general behavior is more akin to that of a group of friends bumbling around than complex machines. 11-45-G, the most inhuman looking and sounding of the three, spends much of her time goofing off, taking souvenir photographs, and playing around with whatever she finds, contrasting her appearance.
• Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: K-VRC refers to a basketball he finds in the abandoned gym as an "entertainment sphere".
  11-45-G: It's called a ball.
  K-VRC: I know it's called a ball, but I'm trying to get into the whole "we're experiencing these human things for the first time" vibe.
• Shoulder Cannon: XBOT 4000 has one, and he nearly uses it on K-VRC when he doesn't stop joking about his relatives with the broken X-Bot console.
• Shout-Out: The opening shot of XBOT 4000 stepping on a skull is taken straight from the prologue of Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
• Super-Powered Robot Meter Maids: XBOT 4000 and K-VRC are advanced, sentient robots who were originally developed from a gaming console and a baby monitor, respectively.
• Synthetic Voice Actor: 11-45-G's voice is produced with a text-to-speech program, which is why her name isn't present in the original credits. She's voiced by human actors in the foreign dubs, which reveals her name in their versions of the credits.
• Unspecified Apocalypse: There are conflicting reports as to why humanity went extinct. 11-45-G's research suggests it was an environmental catastrophe, while the intelligent cats claim they did it because humanity ceased to be of any use to them once they were given thumbs.
• Uplifted Animal: Cats were given thumbs and the ability to speak like humans.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Implied of the cats in regards to humans. As it turns out, giving thumbs and the intelligence to use them to cats just means that the aforementioned cats no longer need humans to do things like provide them with food and open things like containers and doors. As a result, cats no longer had a reason to stop humanity from destroying themselves, which humans promptly did with glee, it seems.