Love, Death & Robots episodes ranked: six of IMDb's top 10 come from volume 1 — and not one from the newest volume

Pull up IMDb's episode ratings for Love, Death & Robots and the shape of the problem is immediate. Of the ten highest-rated shorts across all 45 episodes, six come from volume 1 — the 2019 debut batch. Volumes 2 and 3 split the remaining four. Volume 4, released May 15, 2025, places zero.

The volume 1 six, in rating order:

1. "Beyond the Aquila Rift" (8.5) — the hyperspace-gone-wrong story, from an Alastair Reynolds short.
2. "Zima Blue" (8.3) — the artist-robot parable, also Reynolds, still the series' most quoted ten minutes.
3. "Sonnie's Edge" (8.2) — the beastie-fight opener, from Peter F. Hamilton.
4. "The Secret War" (8.1) — Red Army vs. demons in Siberia, from David W. Amendola.
5. "Good Hunting" (8.0) — Ken Liu's steampunk huli jing story.
6. "Three Robots" (7.9) — John Scalzi's tourist robots, the closest thing the show has to a mascot.

Notice what that list has in common beyond the year: every one of them is adapted from published, pre-vetted prose by genre authors. Volume 1 was the harvest of material Tim Miller and David Fincher had been hoarding since their dead Heavy Metal reboot — two decades of curation, spent in one season. The sequels have been working without that stockpile, and the ratings gap is the receipt.

Volume 4 made the decline explicit. The split on Rotten Tomatoes, per Startefacts, was critics at 100% against an audience score of 42%, with fans calling it the franchise's biggest disappointment yet.

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A show built on 45 fresh starts has one real problem: its audience keeps rewinding to the first ten.

As for whether there's a volume 5 to fix any of this — seventeen months after volume 4, Netflix has neither renewed nor canceled the series. What's on Netflix filed it mid-2026 under "On Ice But Will Return Eventually," noting these multi-studio volumes take years to assemble; the three-year gap between volumes 3 and 4 says silence here isn't a death certificate. And Miller, for his part, has vowed he "could do this show until I f—ing die." The question his audience keeps answering with its ratings is gentler and crueler at once: they'd just like him to make 2019 again.

Previously we wrote: Better Call Saul episode rankings: critics' No. 1 is from season 1, fans' is from season 6 — and they don't even star the same man