2013’s Gravity was quite a hit, starring Sandra Bullock as Dr. Ryan Stone, an astronaut drifting through space after the Hubble got decimated by debris. It won the Oscars for Best Director (Alfonso Cuaron) and Best Cinematography, as it painted a harrowing, suffocating picture of her jumping to the Tiangong space station to pilot a capsule back to Earth against the odds. Netflix’s Love, Death + Robots offers its own take on this story in Season 1, but it’s scarier and way more brutal.
Admittedly, Ryan’s journey is tough. She loses her comrade, Kowalski, who detaches himself from her tether and drifts off so he won’t weigh her down. She almost commits suicide in the pod and hallucinates Kowalski before being inspired to retrofit her rockets to blast home. But while much of her journey’s mental, Love, Death + Robots‘ CGI-animated short, “Helping Hand,” is more physical when the same problem happens to Alex (Elly Condron).
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Debris strikes Alex as she’s fixing a satellite. She falls off, tumbling through space. Unlike Gravity, Alex has no cord. She’s got about 14 minutes of oxygen due to a rip in her suit, but she’s hoping to make it back to the satellite, which acts as the Hubble here. She pulls off a Hail Mary by sealing the upper-left arm of her suit using the strap on her watch. She then makes a gutsy choice to take off the left glove, exposing her arm to the vacuum of space as it freezes.
She’s using physics and the laws of forces, throwing the glove forward with her right hand. An equal, opposite reaction is thereby exerted on her, with her momentum pushing her back toward the satellite. Sadly, she can’t grab hold of the rung, drifting past her damaged maintenance vessel, the Anthem.
Alex goes darker with her next plan. She breaks off her frozen arm and chucks it away. It’s a last-ditch attempt to propel backward, with the episode cutting to black as her hand seems to miss the rung again. Luckily, the next shot has her onboard, tending to the wound as mission control radios in. The man, Bill, who lost contact with her, is relieved she’s alive, ironically asking if she needs a hand. She laughs, telling him to chill beers as she’s got quite an adventure to tell. It ends on a happy note, much like Ryan, who dropped back to Earth into a lake and emerged victoriously.
But while Gravity involved the capsule spinning out of control and claustrophobic shots, it doesn’t compare to Love, Death + Robots‘ chilling scene when Alex painfully crushes her own limb to get to salvation. The episode is about what one would sacrifice out of desperation. Alex didn’t give up, which is a theme fans hope is recurring in Season 2’s anthology.
Love Death + Robots Vol. 2 releases on Netflix May 14. Vol. 3 will be released in 2022.
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