Netflix’s animated series Bass x Machina puts Bass Reeves back at the center of the frame, but not as a museum figure. In the new review, the show is described as a steampunk Western that turns the escaped slave-turned-lawman into the engine of a high-concept adventure, with Brian Tyree Henry voicing Reeves and serving as an executive producer.
That is why Bass X Machina Rotten Tomatoes searches are spiking now: viewers want to know what Netflix has actually put on the screen. LeSean Thomas created the series, Studio Mir produced it, and the setup moves fast from history into invention. Bass has a robot arm, bull-shaped mechanical suits loom across the frontier, goop-shooting guns crack the air, and women control lightning. Janelle Monáe sings the theme song and voices Glory, Bass’s wife, while the story gives him a third child on the way.
The most unusual part is how firmly the show holds on to racial reality even while it leans into fantasy. The world is full of sci-fi machinery, but Black bounties still pay half the rate of white ones, and the frontier remains shaped by the prejudice Bass has spent his life moving through. He is also still haunted by the war, and the arm he now carries came from a grisly experiment by General Rivenbark, a Confederate commander who remains at large. That keeps the series from floating away on style alone; the spectacle is built on injury, memory and unfinished violence.
There is a plain historical core under all that invention. The series borrows from Bass Reeves’ existence and the recent Civil War, then pushes far beyond both. Bass signs on for one last bounty job and heads into the Badlands with Dana Starr, an aspiring engineer searching for her missing uncle, while Ahni, who wields lightning, carries a mysterious connection to Bass and his past. Etta sums up the show’s rule for its strange technology with a line that fits the whole project: “It’s not magic; it’s our science.”
What matters next is less about a sequel than about whether Netflix has found a way to make a myth feel immediate. The series joins a growing lane of animated genre shows that rethink race and representation in a mythologized past, and the comparison to Blue Eye Samurai fits for that reason. If Bass x Machina lands, it will be because it gives viewers action and invention without letting them forget what kind of country Bass Reeves had to survive first.
