Is the future still something to look forward to? Or is it best left in the past?
I. Love. Futurama. In my opinion, the original series, i.e. the first four seasons on the Fox network, contained some of the finest material ever broadcast on American TV. It had sleek visuals, the characters were interesting, it was original, it was smart, and above all it was downright funny. I had always thought that Futurama was cut short while it still had a lot of life left in it, but I never expected it to return to the airwaves. Back in those days, uncanceling a series was something I had never seen a network do. This was slightly before Family Guy was brought back from the dead to spawn a series of spin-offs and conquer Fox's Sunday night lineup like some kind of zombie uprising of nonsensical, lowbrow, irritating, and often offensive non-comedy.
But there was good news, everyone!
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| Why yes, I do feel like a dork for making that joke. Moving on. |
So anyway, while the movies really weren't anything to write home about (wait, does blogging count as writing home?) people did apparently buy them, leading to a second revival of Futurama. This time new episodes were commissioned to air on Comedy Central (Cartoon Network's contract having since expired). The first batch of new episodes has recently finished airing, ending with the series' 100th episode. So this seems like a perfect time to do a review. And this review poses a direct question: are the new episodes as good as the old ones?
The season premiere was an episode appropriately titled "Rebirth". It picked up where Into the Wild Green Yonder left off, with the PlanEx crew diving into a wormhole to flee from Zapp Brannigan, who was trying to arrest them (if I remember right, on charges of eco-terrorism). By the power of contrived coincidence, the wormhole deposits them right back at Earth. The professor then makes a lame, thinly veiled joke about being on Comedy Central now, instead of Fox. Ha...ha...? Anyway, that's just the kind of joke the writers felt obligated to make... the kind of joke they already beat to death at the beginning of Bender's Big Score. I don't think it was funny or necessary, but I can see how the temptation might be too hard to resist. Let's just ignore it and move on.
The ships crash, apparently leaving only the professor and Fry as survivors. The professor, however, is able to revive the rest of the cast with the power of science!!
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| Not just science, science!! |
Immediately after "Rebirth" in the one-hour season premiere came "In A Gadda Da Leela". This episode opened promisingly enough with a cheesy black-and-white radio-drama-narrated segment titled "The Transcredible Exploits of Captain Zapp Brannigan", clearly portraying Zapp's overblown, egotistical view of himself in a genuinely amusing fashion. The episode's actual plot begins with Zapp being informed that an unidentified spacecraft is attacking planets and making its way toward Earth. Conventional attacks seem powerless, so the professor's new, experimental stealth fighter is selected to destroy the spacecraft. Leela and Zapp pilot it, but are unable to destroy the spacecraft and crash land on an unknown planet. Leela regains consciousness to find herself trapped under a fallen tree, and the two of them the only humans to be found. Zapp makes it his mission to take care of her, which surprises and impresses her. Meanwhile, the PlanEx crew finds that the spacecraft is the combined wreckage of a lost battleship ( The Flying Destiny) and a V-Chip censorship satellite, which collided to create the "V-Giny".
Yeah, uh, I'm just gonna go... sit in the corner and sob while I think about how this series used to make jokes about science.
Anyway, the...sigh... "V-Giny" is now flying around "censoring" planets by destroying them. Zapp continues to take care of Leela as the two shed their spacesuits to keep cool and cover up their bodies with leaves. As if the analogy wasn't obvious enough, a talking snake shows up and points out that this is starting to look a lot like the story of Adam and Eve. The snake then goes on to contribute nothing to the plot of the episode. Thanks, a Big Lipped Alligator Moment was really what this episode needed. So, to wrap this up, Zapp finally admits that he's been lying to Leela and that he could have moved the tree whenever he wanted, then it turns out they were on Earth the whole time, and the... ugh... "V-Giny" decides to let Earth survive if Leela fucks Zapp. Which she does. Huh. Now, it's not the fucking itself that bothers me; a running gag in Futurama has always been that society has relaxed its ideas of modesty by the year 30XX. What weirds me out is that this demand was made by a censorship spacecraft. It undermines the whole point of the episode. I dunno. There were good bits, like the "Transcredible Exploits" segments, but this episode was still fairly weak.
Then... grrrrrrglflbsh... "Attack of the Killer App". Just egregiously bad episode. There was no subtlety to the jokes, and the plot made no sense. Mom decides to turn people into zombies using the new "eye phone" (get it? 'cuz it sounds like iPhone... laugh, damn it!) Fry and Bender have a contest to see who can get the most YouTube hits, with the loser being forced to swim in goat vomit (say, remember when the jokes in this show were about math?). Fry is losing until he discovers that Leela has a singing boil on her butt named Susan (get it? 'cuz it sounds like Susan Boyle and... you know what? Fuck it. The whole episode hinges on this joke, and it isn't even remotely funny). Fry takes a video of the boil, puts it online, gets a ton of hits, Leela's mad, Leela forgives him, blah blah blah, bad jokes, stupid ending. Let me go into this a little bit. Leela has a singing boil on her butt. Since fucking when??? Fry's seen Leela naked before, multiple times. Christ, the entire audience has seen her naked butt a few times. Guess what wasn't there?
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| Then again, who can remember something from that many episodes ago? |
And it's not just a boil, it's a singing boil. Not only is this utterly stupid, it adds a whole new layer to why this couldn't possibly have stayed a secret for the ten years that these characters have known each other. We, the audience, are simply asked to throw out all series continuity and common sense for a joke that isn't even funny. MOVING. ON.
"Proposition Infinity" was a step forward. It was an obvious commentary on Proposition 8, but it worked a bit better, because it at least had some substance. It begins with Amy and Kif breaking up because Kif isn't enough of a "bad boy" to hold Amy's interest. Amy then begins a relationship with Bender, causing an uproar over the idea of robosexuality. That idea has been brought up before in the series, even as early as the pilot, but this episode delves into it a little bit, and I found it interesting. As a proponent of gay rights, I could definitely identify with Amy in this episode, who gets treated as some kind of dangerous deviant for wanting to be with a robot, even though Bender is clearly a terrible choice for a boyfriend. One odd moment is when Leela complains about not having a boyfriend of her own, even though we see nothing to suggest that she and Fry have broken up. Continuity is a bitch, huh? Of course, in the end, tolerance prevails, robosexual marriage is legalized, and Bender dumps Amy for some floozies, whereupon Kif shows up to win her back. I liked this episode. I've heard the ending criticized for being a cop out, and maybe that's a good point, but ask yourself if it's out of character for Bender. Answer: of course not. Bender doesn't want a serious relationship. And even if he did, he doesn't even like Amy. He never has. To him, she's just a rich girl he can steal from. There was never any chance of him developing feelings for her. And anyway, from a writing point of view, Amy and Kif work as a couple, and Amy and Bender don't. Trying to put them together would be like if Counselor Troi hooked up with Worf or something.
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| OK, see, this really just proves my point. |
And then comes "Lethal Inspection", and prepare yourself because this is the first of the new episodes that can actually be put up against the old ones and hold up. But, sadly, it also contradicts canon, namely that Bender has been shown to clearly remember his own birth yet he doesn't in this episode. I'm sure someone will retcon that soon enough, though. Anyway, this episode centers around Bender, who has discovered that he was built with a major flaw: he lacks the memory backup that would allow him to transfer his memory to a new body if his original body is destroyed (as for why he often feared for his life in the past when he believed he had such a backup, he explains, "I never said I wasn't a drama queen." Which is perfectly simple and in character, and a great line). Outraged that he was allowed to have such a flaw, he goes in search of the inspector who cleared him on the assembly line, with Hermes accompanying him. Meanwhile, Mom learns of Bender's manufacturing flaw and sends Killbots after him so that he will be deactivated before he makes her company look bad. The Killbots are actually pretty funny, opening fire anytime they hear words that sound anything like words related to guns, the best bit being, "Frankly, I don't see how it's her..." "SOMEONE SAID HOWITZER!!" At the end, Bender is unable to find the inspector and is forced to accept his mortality, but he thanks Hermes for helping and tells him that he's now on his list of humans not to kill. Which is funny, but also, consider that the only humans that Bender has shown real respect for in the past are Fry, Leela, Mom, and a handful of orphans in one episode. Bender and Hermes never had much of a relationship before, but now we see them becoming friends, which is actually kind of sweet. Especially since it's then revealed that Hermes was the inspector who let Bender off the line, because otherwise he would have been destroyed, and he quit his job immediately after that. It was kind of an obvious plot twist, but a nice one. This episode is flat-out good. It's both funny and touching, and it builds a relationship between characters who never had one before. I highly approve.
"The Late Philip J. Fry" isn't quite as good as "Lethal Inspection" but it again has its moments, and it has an interesting premise. The professor has built a time machine that only moves forwards in time, so that it won't create paradoxes. He, Fry, and Bender intend to go a few minutes ahead in time, but accidentally travel hundreds of years into the future. Since they can't go back, the professor decides to move forward until they reach a time in which backwards time travel has been invented. There's a subplot with Leela also, but while it is kind of sweet it doesn't really go anywhere so I'm skipping over it. In the end, the professor accidentally goes beyond the end of humanity's existence, and they realize there's nothing to do but travel to the end of the universe and see how it ends. But to their surprise they find that the universe actually begins again after it ends, allowing them to go forward in time to the moment they left. It's kind of funny, since there was a previous episode in which a joke was made about someone believing time to be cyclical, and Fry informing him, "Nope, straight line." But that's not a plot hole, since Fry couldn't have known that at the time.There's also a subtle gag for those viewers who can translate Alien Language 1 in this episode, where Bender burns a book titled "Backwards Time Travel Made Easy" for warmth. It was a clever episode, if not entirely memorable.
"That Darn Katz!" was another Amy episode. This one deals heavily with the fact that Amy is actually quite intelligent, in spite of her Valley Girl personality. In her first appearance way back in season one, she was introduced as an engineering student, but the writers have admitted that they forgot about that aspect of her character. So it's nice to see it brought back up and used as a plot point. To be honest, I've forgotten much of the plot of this episode, and I don't really feel like watching it again, since most of the episode can be summarized thusly:
"A Clockwork Origin" is kind of interesting, but it's hard to figure out what the point of it's supposed to be. Upon finding that science is being ignored for the sake of Creationism, the professor decides to leave Earth and settle on an uninhabited planet. He releases some nanobots to condition his chosen planet to be inhabitable, but the nanobots begin to evolve into robotic life forms, at an absurd rate. The crew encounters robot dinosaurs, get kidnapped by robot cavemen, and are found by robot anthropologists all within a couple of days. When the professor reveals that he released the original nanobots that the robots evolved from, the robot scientists dismiss it as Creationist nonsense and put him on trial for crimes against science. But before he is sentenced, the robot society evolves to the point where they no longer care about such lower lifeforms as humans, and let him go. This prompts him to rethink his actions and return to Earth. The bits with the robot dinosaurs are somewhat funny, but I'm still not sure what the message of this episode is supposed to be. Is it anti-Creationist? Pro-Creationist? Is it offering some sort of middle ground? I can't tell.
Now, "The Prisoner of Benda", this one I liked. None of this "commenting on the issues" bullshit, just straight up fun. In this one, the professor builds a device that lets two people switch minds. He tests it out by switching with Amy, then discovers that no two minds can switch more than once, in other words they can't directly switch back. While he does some math to determine whether it's possible to switch back, other characters use the device for their own purposes. Bender switches into Amy's body to rob a robot emperor, but is caught, and convinces the emperor to switch bodies to see how a commoner robot lives. This gives Bender the emperor's body and the emperor is tricked into a robotic mop bucket. Bender is happy with his situation until he learns that the emperor is the target of an assassination plot. The professor, with the help of the Harlem Globetrotters, finally derives a theorem that they can all switch back to their original bodies with the help of two extra people - a theorem actually derived by writer and mathematician Ken Keeler. There are a lot of genuine laughs in this episode, especially in seeing what each character does with other characters' bodies. Bender dancing around in Amy's underwear-clad body was simply hilarious, as was the mop bucket using it in an effort to seduce Scruffy. This episode was funny and smart, just like an episode of Futurama should be.
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| Also, this happened. |
I felt that "Lrrreconcilable Ndndifferences" was pretty good, too, though admittedly the premise is a little stale. It centers around Lrrr, ruler of Omicron Persei 8, once again having marital woes. His wife Ndnd wants him to go out and conquer something, and is nagging him incessantly about it. After a failed invasion attempt that finds him at a comic book convention being mistaken for a cosplayer, he gives up and goes through a midlife crisis. He attempts to cheat on Ndnd with an Omicronian woman he meets at a bar, but learns that she is actually a human in a costume. Yes, this episode is full of cosplay and furry jokes. Have fun with that. But at least there's no use of the word "yiffing" like there was in the season finale of 30 Rock that nearly caused me to do an honest-to-God spit take.
Fry gets the idea to stage a fake invasion to appease Ndnd, and even gets Orson Welles to narrate it, War of the Worlds style. This gives Maurice LaMarche an opportunity to do his brilliant impression of Welles, which was also his basis for the voice of the Brain in Pinky and the Brain. In fact, the joke was a little too on-the-nose, now that I think about it, but it doesn't matter because his Welles impression is just that awesome. He even stops at places to criticize the script, which might have been a reference to the real Welles' infamous frozen pea commercial recording. When Ndnd arrives and puts humanity to slave labor, Leela pesters Lrrr into telling her that the invasion was fake. Ndnd, angry that Lrrr listens to Leela but not to her, forces him to choose between them by vaporizing one of them. Lrrr obediently fires at Leela, only for Fry to take the blast for her, but Ndnd is satisfied that Lrrr was willing to do it and reconciles with him. And Fry is OK because the gun was actually a teleporter ray, the punchline to a seemingly throwaway gag from the beginning of the episode. That twist made me laugh. The subplot of Fry trying to write a comic book amused me as well, and so did the brief cameo of Matt Groening and David X. Cohen at the comic convention, pitching a new series called "Futurella" that gets canceled during the opening theme song. "Fox has really streamlined the process," Groening quips. Meta-jokes like that can be hit-or-miss, like the Comedy Central joke from "Rebirth" that didn't quite land, but this one definitely hit.
And finally came "The Mutants are Revolting", both the mid-season finale and the 100th episode of the series (counting the movies as four episodes apiece, which doesn't really make perfect sense, but I'll let it slide). In this episode, Fry accidentally lets it slip that Leela is a mutant, resulting in her being banished from the surface. Disgusted by the prospect of living in the sewers for the rest of her life, she incites her fellow mutants to rise up against the surface dwellers. As the rebellion begins, there's a cameo by Devo, which really is a pretty cool moment. They are asked to play "Whip It", which they refuse to do, and instead play "the other one", by which they mean "Beautiful World".
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| I'm going to spend the rest of the review trashing this episode, so take some time to appreciate how awesome this is. |
More awkward is the chunk of the plot devoted to the "Land Titanic", which is sadly important to the plot because one of the episode's major characters is Mrs. Astor, whose husband Mr. Astor (and his first name seems to really be "Mister" for some reason) perished on the ship. This side plot is awkward simply because they've already done this joke. Way back in season one, the episode "A Flight to Remember" was all about a spaceship named Titanic. All of the Titanic jokes they ever needed to make, including the movie references, were already done in that episode. Did they forget about that episode? After making references to it two seasons later? And this even undermines that episode because the joke in that episode was that everyone had forgotten the original Titanic, but now we have a "Land Titanic" that also disastrously crashed, so why the fuck would they name a spaceship Titanic after that? I'm getting a continuity headache.
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| Presented to you, the viewer, one retroactive plot hole. |
As for the mutant rebellion, it's all pretty much one big sewage joke. I try to find this kind of humor funny, but it just isn't. It's like putting up a sign that says, "This Sign Is Funny". It gives you the idea that you're supposed to laugh at something, but... what, exactly? So, anyway, because Leela doesn't believe that he's really on the mutants' side, Fry dives into the lake of toxic sewage, mutating himself into a horrendous blob. This is a shocking plot twist that... no, wait, the other thing. This fooled no one. The writers are not going to turn the main character of the series into a blob monster. They know it, we know it, they know we know it. So it turns out that Fry, by the power of contrived coincidence, actually landed directly in the mouth of a mutated Mr. Astor and got stuck. Sure, why not? It's also revealed that Mr. Astor gave up his seat on the last "life car" to leave the "Land Titanic" to a mutant, which happened to be Leela's grandmother (was this absurd coincidence even necessary? I say it wasn't). To honor the spirit of this noble deed, Mrs. Astor petitions the mayor to grant the mutants equal rights, which he does.
So, that's actually a mighty big piece of plot progression in this otherwise sub-par episode. I'd like to think the over-abundance of poop jokes in this episode was a result of the writers getting it out of their systems before dropping them altogether. After all, now that the mutants don't live in the sewers anymore, there's no need for them, right? Right? Hmm. This episode definitely did not feel like the hundredth episode. More of a show could have been made. Look at the series' first series finale, "The Devil's Hands are Idle Playthings". That episode was brilliant, and it was an absolute, over-the-top spectacle. It ended in an opera performed by Fry, Leela, and the Robot Devil. It felt big and momentous. This episode... it was just an episode. Aside from Devo's cameo, there was nothing special about it, and that's if you feel there's anything special about cameos. And it wasn't even all that great an episode. Recycled jokes, sewage humor, an obviously fake plot twist... nothing really to hang your hat on.
So what's my final decision about the new Futurama? Well, I really don't want to say it's bad. Even in the mediocre episodes this season, there were a few decent jokes or interesting ideas. It was fun to watch, even if the plot and the jokes were a bit weak. And a handful of these episodes were honestly very good. "Lethal Inspection" and "Prisoner of Benda" could easily stand beside the original episodes and not seem out of place. Plus, it does seem like the series still has potential to become again what it once was, even if there were a few rocky steps starting out. I can't call it unlikely that the next season or two will be better than this one, maybe even superb. So I won't call it bad, but it certainly wasn't what I consider the quality standard set by the original run. Am I still going to watch the show? Hell yes. I'm a Futurama fan, and it's going to take a hell of a lot to undo my love of the series. But the writers can do better than what they've delivered this season. And if they don't tighten it up, they may have to deal with the penguins.
Futurama is the property of Matt Groening, David X. Cohen, and 20th Century Fox. Images used are from Futurama, Young Frankenstein, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and El Goonish Shive. All images and characters are property of their respective creators.
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