Main cast: Dan Stevens (Satan), JB Blanc (Jeoffry), Jim Broadbent (Christopher the Poet), Nika Futterman (Nighthunter Moppet), Jane Leeves (Polly), and Dave B Mitchell (Tom)
Director: Emily Dean
Well, folks, we did it. We reached the end of the fourth season of Love, Death & Robots, a season so aggressively mediocre it could be prescribed as a sleep aid.
And what better way to cap off this lukewarm stew of mid-ness than with For He Can Creep, a tale of demonic contracts, literary trivia no one asked for, and more cats than a Tumblr dashboard circa 2014.
So, here’s the setup. Satan — yes, that Satan, Prince of Darkness, Lord of the Pit, CEO of Eternal Damnation Inc — decides to commission Christopher Smart (the poet best known for being a historical footnote and writing a weirdly passionate poem about his cat) to scribble a poem so powerful it will consume his soul.
Why? Who knows! Maybe Hell’s book club ran out of Fifty Shades fanfic to roast, or perhaps Beelzebub’s been nagging about adding more poets to the eternal torment rotation.
In any case, Satan’s plan hinges on convincing a man institutionalized for excessive piety to pen his own spiritual death warrant. Evil truly has a flair for the needlessly complicated.
Wait, it gets better. Right when this episode dropped, like clockwork, two glowing reviews magically appeared on IMDb, and would you believe it, both just happened to explain the literary origin of the episode.
Turns out it’s based on a short story by Siobhán Carroll, which in turn was inspired by Christopher Smart’s famous ailurophilic poem For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
Naturally, both reviewers made sure to name-drop that exact poem title, no doubt typed out while a PR intern held a pitchfork to their back. Because when something this niche and obscure gets name-checked twice in suspiciously reverent tones, you know the astroturfing gods are hard at work. Bless their little anonymous usernames.
Enter the cats. Yes, the cats, a squadron of glowy-eyed feline avengers out to thwart Satan’s literary ambitions. While they’re admittedly adorable — think Warrior Cats fanart meets AI-generated Lisa Frank fever dream — the animation looks like someone fed MidJourney the prompts “gothic cat art”, “16th-century asylum”, and “bored Lucifer”. It’s a slideshow of stitched-together AI stills masquerading as narrative, a kind of digital catnip that leaves you blinking and asking, “Wait, was there a plot?”
And speaking of vibe, you know what For He Can Creep desperately needs? Some Hellfire. No, not literal fire — although at this point, an inferno might’ve livened things up — but Judge Claude Frollo belting his internal moral collapse in the Disney adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. That’s how you do dark religious drama with flair: soaring vocals, a villain with actual menace, and a sense of gothic dread that doesn’t feel like a mildly cursed pet adoption ad.
In short, this episode is what happens when Love, Death & Robots wants to be The Sandman but trips over a litter box on the way. It’s not the worst thing this season coughed up — that honor remains hotly contested — but it’s aggressively meh. Cute cats, pointless Satan, some suspiciously helpful IMDb reviews, an obscure literary reference, and a lingering sense you could be watching literally anything else.
