Close Encounters of the Mini Kind, the second episode of Netflix’s Love, Death & Robots, brings forth a lot of references from popular alien invasion films, most particularly War of the Worlds, Cowboys & Aliens, and, yes, obviously, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. While visually there’s nothing new to explore in the 7:49-minute episode, narratively it does highlight our tendency to resort to violence against anything we don’t completely understand which could someday lead to an extinction level event.
Spoiler Alert
The episode began with a sheriff’s car speeding towards an undisclosed location somewhere in the middle of the desert, in Texas or New Mexico, by the look of things. A resident with a red truck had spotted a UFO in the area and alerted the authorities. As soon as the sheriff arrived at the location, the door on the UFO opened, and an alien diplomat, along with two of its assistants, came out of the cosmic saucer and greeted the officers, who had already loaded their guns in fear and anticipation of an attack. You see, the aliens didn’t want to wage war or take human slaves. They literally said that they had come in peace, but I guess all was lost in translation for the humans as they couldn’t comprehend the extraterrestrial jargon. They wanted to do something “together,” however, as soon as the alien diplomat opened his arms “in peace,” he revealed a part of his body that we humans have been in the habit of hiding either with a fig leaf from time immemorial. It’s quite funny, though, that the cowboy sheriff took the alien’s organ for a gun and fired shots at him, killing him on the spot. Meanwhile, the sheriff and the officers who thought they would be home in time for dinner shot themselves while trying to kill one of the assistant aliens. At the end of the scene, the sheriff, while trying to smash the alien’s head in with the butt of his rifle, accidentally fired the gun and shot himself in the head, which symbolizes that we humans are the architects of our own destruction.
The death of the alien diplomat was a declaration of war against the extraterrestrial species, and after its death, their spaceship sent a warning signal to their home planet, soon after which a horde of alien UFOs arrived on earth and started abducting humans, not cows. The second scene also explored how humans exploit the docile animals who can’t defend themselves, and the things that we do with the animals; the extraterrestrial beings are going to do with us. Well, in this scene, the farmer was going to engage in some unspeakable acts with his cow, and so the aliens did the same to him after bringing him to their spaceship.
And soon began the second wave of the alien invasion as an army of extraterrestrial beings arrived on land and started killing humans using their hi-tech laser guns. They also brought the fighting machines (as seen in War of the Worlds) and killed the US president while he was addressing the army. As the alien attack was in full swing, the humans joined their forces to create a resistance, “Earth Force,” and tried their best to defend themselves against the mighty invaders. A group of humans in an undisclosed city brought down a fighting machine and stole its large cannons to use as weapons. Initially, the plan worked, and the UFOs retreated to their mothership. But as usual, the humans got ambitious and decided to decimate the alien mother ship using a massive cannon powered by the small cannons placed in a large stadium. Unfortunately, their new invention backfired, as the new rig malfunctioned, because of which the small cannons fired shots at each other, just like the police officers in the opening scene, who killed their own while trying to take down the alien. The central battery fell to the ground, creating an uncontrollable black hole that consumed the entire solar system, along with all the humans and the alien mothership in Earth’s orbit. However, the destruction of our solar system didn’t have much of an effect on the overall universe because, as someone had rightly said, “We are just a fart in the galaxy.” So, don’t take yourself so seriously, and don’t pull out guns at the slightest inconvenience. Not everything that looks or acts differently is thy enemy. To sum up, the running theme of the episode is that we can still save ourselves and our galaxy, but only if we shed some of our vices and become more compassionate towards others (and yes, that includes cows as well).
