Main cast: MrBeast (Master of Ceremonies) and Bai Ling (Mei)
Director: Tim Miller
You know, there was a time — a beautiful, debauched time — when Love, Death & Robots was a show about weird little sci-fi stories told by animation studios given just enough rope to hang themselves with their own grotesque ideas. It was messy. It was occasionally offensive. It was glorious.
And now… well, now we have The Screaming of the Tyrannosaur, an episode that feels like the ghost of that show possessed by the spirit of a tax write-off.
Let’s start with the elephant in the room… or rather, the MrBeast in the amphitheater.
Yes, MrBeast. The YouTube charity-gladiator himself, inexplicably plonked down in what’s supposed to be a Conan-meets-Frank-Frazetta-meets-bad-Mandarin dystopian bloodsport arena as the Master of Ceremonies. Now, I don’t know what deranged marketing demon conjured this crossover, but it reeks of some backroom deal where someone said, “Wouldn’t it be hilarious if we got MrBeast to announce a gladiator fight to the death?” and then forgot to ask, “Wait… would it though?”
Worse yet, he speaks English while literally every other character is speaking Mandarin. It’s like someone took a wire transfer from Tencent and then realized too late that their celebrity cameo hadn’t cleared Duolingo Level 2. The immersion-breaking is so catastrophic it could be classified as a cultural extinction-level event.
Speaking of Mandarin, oh boy. Props to Bai Ling for doing her best to channel the world’s most exhausted revolutionary leader while spitting out overwrought, florid lines through gritted teeth. Unfortunately, most of the rest of the cast deliver their lines with all the natural grace of Siri reading the I Ching. The Mandarin is so stilted you can practically hear the Google Translate app buffering in the background.
And here’s where it gets really weird: the use of Mandarin gives one the impression that it is supposedly Chinese-inspired, yet nothing about it feels remotely like Chinese sci-fi, fantasy, folklore, or culture. Dinosaurs? Not a thing in Chinese mythology. Wolves? No. Floating rich-people boxes? Not unless you count somebody’s first-year art school metaphor for capitalism. It’s as if someone skimmed Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, got distracted by a documentary on velociraptors, and said “Let’s mash these together. And make it in Mandarin! That’ll give it some exotic authenticity, right?”
It’s the streaming equivalent of ordering Peking duck and getting a Jurassic Park Happy Meal.
Now, to its credit, the episode does channel a kind of retro pulp violence with naked gladiators and cartoonishly evil elites watching from their skyboxes. The kill-the-rich sentiment is always good, wholesome fun, especially when it’s delivered via a tyrannosaur mauling smug aristocrats. But by the time the episode’s awkward cultural cosplay and blatant corporate shoehorning come together, what should be cathartic ends up feeling vaguely icky.
In the end, The Screaming of the Tyrannosaur could have been a gleefully sleazy, blood-splattered throwback to the show’s glory days of unapologetic genre weirdness. Instead, it feels like an awkward, tone-deaf Frankenstein’s monster stitched together from corporate sponsorships, bad Mandarin crash courses, and the last shreds of the rebellious soul of Love, Death & Robots. It’s fun in a “this is so wrong it loops back to being kind of entertaining” way, but it’s also a dire omen for where the series is headed.
