The Love, Death & Robots episode "The Tall Grass" tells the story of a mysterious encounter along the side of a railroad, and its ending leaves viewers with more questions than answers. The short animation, part of Love, Death & Robots' shortened season 2 never provides a definitive explanation of what the humanoid creatures that attack the passenger Lairo are — or where they came from. But examining the episode, and the short story it's based on, closely helps to provide a better sense of just how much danger Lairo was in, and the larger implications of the story.
The story starts in the middle of the night, as a train stops in an unsettled area dominated by tall grass. Lairo wanders off into the grass, fascinated by a strange glow, and is attacked by a group of faceless monsters. The horrifying creatures seem to want to bite or eat Lairo, but the attendant saves him by waving his torch.
This Love, Death & Robots episode is an adaptation of Joe R. Lansdale's short story of the same name. Lansdale is a veteran writer in horror, crime, Western and other genres, and is best known as the author of the Hap and Leonard books. The original story is narrated by the passenger, unnamed in Lansdale's version, and provides more of an idea of his motivations. Lansdale's narrator is on the train traveling to New York to visit a girlfriend. The original story also sets the events in 1901, with the narrator retelling the experience as a much older man.
The ending of the Love, Death & Robots episode helps to shed some light on the creatures' origins and motives. The attendant suggests that the tall grass is a kind of door between worlds that allows the monsters to cross over from another, darker dimension. They may be humans who, like Lairo, wandered into the tall grass and never comes back. The original story furthers this suggestion, with the traveler thinking "I somehow knew that if I was bitten, I would not be chewed and eaten, but that the bite would make me like them." These suggestions make the creatures in the tall grass similar to zombies, able to convert normal people to their kind with a bite but scared off by fire.
In the final shot of the episode, the train begins its journey again, surrounded by tall grass lighting up with a blue glow. This glow suggests that whatever phenomenon brought the creature to our world is spreading, and that unknown horrors could be entering the long grass. The original story is narrated from well in the future, with the incident being a troubling brush with the supernatural in an otherwise normal life. But in the Love, Death & Robots version, whatever kind of anomaly is causing the leak between worlds seems to be spreading, and it's uncertain whether the train will even make it out of the tall grass tonight. This is the kind of unsettling ending that Love, Death & Robots does best.