The episode “The Screaming of the Tyrannosaurus” in season four of Love, Death & Robots offers another chapter of a science fiction tale. It reveals a character-driven narrative of existential horror packed tightly into a 12-minute runtime. While other installments leaned towards visual spectacles or themes of satire, this one is intense and disturbing, exploring the nature of consciousness and trauma in a dystopian future. 

This episode follows the character Kael, a soldier trapped in a sensory loop within a military chamber. Within this chamber, Kael enters a battle with a simulated Tyrannosaurus, although this begins a psychological breakdown. Reality and sim blur as the T-Rex becomes a symbol of Kael’s own repressed trauma. 

It’s revealed that Kael has been in this simulation long past this mission’s scheduled duration. The scream of the dinosaur is not just this, but a parallel to his own untreated PTSD. As this reality turns to collapse, Kael must escape or succumb to it, leaving the ending to this instalment ambiguous for viewers. 

This tale seems to take inspiration from other territories, similar to The Matrix, and episodes in the series Black Mirror. This simulation is not just a clean digital world, but primal and brutal. The idea that technology can preserve, and even trap a human consciousness, is the center of this, and it pushes the idea to the extreme.

The installment “The Screaming of the Tyrannosaur” is not just about monsters or simulations, but rather suffering, and the danger of not facing your inner demons. It doesn’t try to be pretentiously clever or take power using huge plot twists, but delivers an emotional performance using raw intensity and symbolism. This episode is one of the most ambitious stories in this series’ latest season. 

Rating: 9.5/10