“Mason’s Rats” Reviewed: gloriously subversive twist on an old story
Over-the-top heroism; subtle subversion from Netflix’s “Love Death + Robots”…is it really a parable about World War 1?
Netflix’s “Love, Death + Robots” is an anthology series of short animation catering to sci-fi geeks abundant with horrifying, delightful, shocking, and quirky twists.
Some segments are obviously powerful. Others, like ‘Mason’s Rats’ in Season 3, may be subtler than meets the eye. Constructed for a ‘binge’ audience likely to see the entire series in a single sitting, this particular piece amassed ‘mixed’ reviews. Of the 9 episodes for the season, Forbes ranked ‘Mason’s Rats’ #5, Collider #2, Screenrant #6, and other rankings elsewhere abound.
Robots run amuck? We’ve seen this story before. A hundred times. More.
‘Mason’s Rats’ deserves a second glance though, as the design of this simple little story may go a bit further than meets the eye on a quick stream.
***Spoilers ahead for ‘Mason’s Rats’ on Netflix’s “Love, Death + Robots.”***
Simple plot: Farmer Mason wants to eradicate a rat infestation in his grain silos involving crossbow-wielding super rats. The exterminator he hires brings in an arsenal of robots. Apocalypse ensues.
Still, there’s sly barbs here and there in the setup. Mason spots rat tracks by an open “GMO grain” barrel, and hunts for the culprits. Spotting a rat on a barrel, Mason blasts it with his shotgun. Because obviously, that’s the way to handle a rat…?
Inspecting the rat’s corpse, Mason discovers the rat wore a utility belt. Shocked, he looks up, and notices rat shadows surrounding him, and then one fires a crossbow bolt at him, narrowly missing his head.
Mason calls in the slickest ‘merchant of death’ all year — and the war is on.
Mason opts for the “TT-6” (budget edition): a massive set of pulse laser turrets, cameras, auto-firing systems — a “Fire & Forget” solution, which immediately blasts Mason’s cat, Susan…prompting Mason to demand a discount.
The rats are slaughtered, and Mason chuckles at the flashing laser blasts. But then badass commando rat (“Rat Leader?”) strikes back, wrecking the cameras and knocking out the system with his knife. (Rat Leader would probably do quite well in any number of other “Love, Death + Robots” entries involving killer robots — ‘Kill Team Kill,” ‘Secret Wars,’ ‘Suits,’ etc.).
Mason buys upgrade model — Ratpocalypse — a scorpion-terminator so lethal it nearly blows Mason himself away before calibrating and commencing a gleeful, gratuitously gory extermination.
The rats build their own ‘tank’ from farm equipment but are hopelessly outgunned. Their last ditch attack damages Ratpocalypse, but as the damaged robot comes to finish the job, Mason blows it away with his shotgun.
Grateful rats show him what they’ve been up to with all that stolen grain — their whiskey distillery. They share a shot with Mason…and they all live happily ever after…?
‘Mason’s Rats’ subverts apocalyptic tropes. Perhaps it’s helpful to think of it as a 1920s explanation for 2020s technology.
The war started with little thought: a simple response to a rat infestation. But why, and how did it end? What prompted Mason to change his mind?
Was Mason impressed by Rat Leader wearing that cute Scottish tam and tartan? Did Mason admire Rat Leader’s bravery, resourcefulness, ruthless bravado?
Was it the sheer quantity of gore, as heaps of bloody corpses piled up? Mason referred that his granary looked like “World War 4…” — implying World War 3 had already happened...perhaps that aroused some empathy.
Or perhaps a stray bullet from the robot blew up his favorite whiskey mug, pissing him off to that finally, capriciously, he opted to destroy Ratpocalypse.
Or maybe he just wanted to cancel that check? Fairly cheeky old Scottish stereotype...
Did Mason show his cat, ‘Susan,’ affection? He brushed the rat carcass off his table onto the floor, and she pounced — as if starving — over a dead rat. A well-fed cat probably doesn’t pounce so fiercely at long dead meat…perhaps the expression of sadness was merely to justify the discount he asked for before mourning her.
Some historians claim World War 1 began because Germany issued a ‘blank check’ to Austria, promising to back them if they invaded Serbia, and Russia responded by pledging to protect Serbia from Austria, which set into play rounds of escalation and mobilization. Perhaps a ‘blank check’ really was the problem. Perhaps such checks can even start an apocalypse in a granary…
“Ratpocalypse” machines already fly in the skies of 2020, raining death from above on targets often regarded as…rats.
Misanthropes snicker when they read a headline about ’30 people die’ in some drone strike, some mass shooting somewhere. “Good start.”
Photos of cute children caught in the carnage? Maybe slightly longer pause at the image. But “those people” are distant…merely ‘flickering lights’ in someone else’s granary: nobody really cares. Not for very long anyway.
The TT-15 — “carrying the same targeting tech that navy drones carry!” — adapted as a tool to kill super evolved rats…but what if we are the ‘rats’ that someone else wanted to exterminate? Could we sit down and share a whiskey with someone who slaughtered most of our friends and family, simply because they decided to stop butchering us?
Apocalypse recurs frequently in literature and in visual media. In a literary telling, audiences might miss certain parts of the story (e.g., in the Genesis story of the Great Flood, after Noah survives the ordeal on the ark, he celebrates, gets drunk and collapses into a naked stupor…imagine “Rat Leader” doing the same after drinking that whiskey with Mason).
Many “Love, Death + Robots” segments toy with apocalypses. In the format of a short segment, one must work with concepts audiences already know, so it makes perfect sense. Here’s another good one. Here’s an even better one (which also subverts the tropes).
Visual media — paintings, drawings, and animation — can capture distinct horrors of an apocalypse about as easily as they could capture any other subject matter, whereas other art forms might struggle to present such stories.
But other forms of art — performance art, dance, song, and drama — routinely strive to show characters who are larger than life. The Greeks built ropes and pulleys to lift a masked ‘god’ into the air, a useful tool to let the audience know which masked actor was a ‘god’ and which were merely mortals. And after building that elaborate setup, the Greeks might recycle the same gimmick again and again.
Romans probably sneered at the Greek public performances — ‘deus ex machina’ — ‘God in the Machine.’ They had their own form of ‘reality entertainment’ (aka their colosseums). “Survivor: Rome, CE 50” looked rather different from its modern counterpart. It may have looked much more like the goriest portions of ‘Mason’s Rats’ — as though the animators got paid a bonus for each gory animated rat-death.
For Mason to stand in for the Greek gods and rescue the rats in the end is a slight ironic twist on the old formula . Perhaps, “as man is to rats, so are the gods to us.”
But perhaps there’s a problem with that. Perhaps humans treat one another like ‘rats’ — sending in the drones to slaughter the evil little brutes — and instead of skimming at statistics or shrugging that they deserve it, perhaps something from ‘Mason’s Rat’s will pop into their heads as we consider what we are doing, what we have done.
Perhaps we might cancel a blank check to support someone in their brutality — stopping the ‘Ratpocalypse’ or other sorts of excruciating destruction…did World War I actually start as a result of such a blank check issued by Germany to Austria?
Perhaps, before commencing to slaughter the threat, we might look more closely — consider whether we actually brought on the threat (Mason did shoot first). Maybe, if we can stop sleepwalking toward the next escalation, we can avert trans-species aggression.
What if, instead of meeting Mason with crossbow bolts, the rats squeaked, “Fancy a wee dram?”
