Hi everybody, and welcome back to my ongoing series on the new season of my once-favorite TV show, Futurama. Let’s brace ourselves for yet another depressing letdown, just to be on the safe side.
So this week’s new episode was titled “Ghost in the Machines”, and as tempted as I am to spend this post making a bunch of pointless references to Ghost in the Shell, I will do my best to resist. My initial feelings about this episode were to say that it was stupid and pointless, like last week’s episodes. But after thinking about it for a while I decided that it wasn’t quite as bad as that. It’s a dull and nonsensical episode, but it’s still a step up from last week’s episodes. I’ve ended up ranking this episode as “vaguely bad”.
The episode starts out with the “Parade Day Parade”, a parade that combines a year’s worth of parades into one event. The fact that this has to be explained to Fry bothers me, since by this point he’s been living in the 31st Century for over a decade. That was a convenient form of exposition for the first two or three seasons, but now it’s just a plot hole. Anyway, in the middle of the parade, part of a float falls toward a human and a robot, and Fry pushes the human out of the way while the robot is crushed. Outraged that Fry chose to save a human life over a robot life, Bender commits suicide.
Wow. That’s… dark.
This series hasn’t shied away from black humor in the past. The very existence of suicide booths is a testament to how far the writers have been willing to push things. But to actually have a character successfully commit suicide in a supposed comedy is a bit too much. It’s just not funny, and using it as a premise is more disturbing than entertaining. And this isn’t helped at all by the fact that Bender is still able to hang around as a ghost. That’s just a grim reminder of how the episode began. There’s a reason that Night of the Living Dead isn’t a comedy.
I was tempted to rant about the very idea of robot ghosts, until I remembered we’ve seen them before, back in the season two episode “The Honking”. So, again, we’re back to the rant about the writers reusing their own ideas, and this time it’s a silly one, to boot. At least “The Honking” had the excuse of being a Halloween episode. Come to think of it, why was “Ghost in the Machines” not a Halloween episode? It has all the makings of one. It seems like a total waste. But yeah, OK, “The Honking” was a decent episode, so I can’t wholly dismiss the robot ghost concept. I’ll let that one slide.
Bender’s ghost encounters the Robot Devil, once again voiced by the incomparable Dan Castellenetta, who tells him that he’ll give Bender a way to get his body back if in return he will frighten Fry to death. Question: why? I mean, he says it’s revenge for Fry switching hands with him back in the original series finale, but that doesn’t make a lot of sense. Trading hands was the Robot Devil’s idea in the first place, and it was only his own damn fault that he got stuck with that bargain. Plus, he already got back at Fry by forcing him to trade hands again. What more does he have to gain? And why wouldn’t he have just killed him back then if that’s what he wanted? What, did the Robot Devil not have the resources to pull that off? I also hate that he acts like he’s just learning that Fry and Bender are friends, even though his interactions with Bender have usually involved Fry in some way. Why bring up continuity if you’re not going to be faithful to it? That just shows the audience how much you suck at your job.
After Bender scares Fry nearly to death by possessing various electronic devices, the rest of the crew decides that Fry needs to get away from technology and sends him to the Amish home world. Fry blends into society there astonishingly well, and goes so far as to say that he doesn’t miss the technology he’s left behind, except for Bender. Bender’s ghost hears this and realizes that he’s been wrong to haunt Fry. But the Robot Devil is nearby… for some reason… and he doesn’t let Bender’s repentance get in his way. He manipulates events to cause a barn to fall on top of Fry, but Bender possesses his body and uses it to push Fry out of the way. This is supposed to mirror the start of the episode in some kind of ironic way, but the point of it all kind of eludes me. I guess Bender has learned that human life is more important than robot life… but how and why he comes to this conclusion is something that can only be guessed at.
And really, let’s take a look at the message that is apparently the moral of this story. In this series we’ve seen that robots have personalities, free will, and even – from a certain perspective – souls. Robots are basically people, a culture living alongside various human and alien cultures with general equality. If not for the fact that the episode “Lethal Inspection” declared that robots can be resurrected in new bodies if their old ones are destroyed, Bender would actually have a pretty understandable reason for being upset with Fry’s choice of saving a human over a robot. And on that note, let’s recall “Lethal Inspection” for a minute. That episode, which is the best episode since the reboot in my opinion, is all about Bender discovering a flaw in his construction that makes him impossible to resurrect and confronting his own mortality. It was a very well-told story that really delivered the message that we’re supposed to care about these robot characters. Sure, there have been some jokes here and there throughout the series about robots being expendable, but for the sake of a quick gag they can get away with it. To actually make an episode declaring robot life to be less valuable than human life seems somewhat heartless, and it makes me lose some respect for the writers.
Anyhow, even though the Robot Devil was crushed, he has spare bodies in reserve so he’s good to go. Question: if he was so pissed off about being stuck with Fry’s hands, why didn’t he just take the hands off one of his duplicates? I guess that was a more complicated solution than arranging an intricate, multi-stage process of manipulation, blackmail, and an improvised opera, followed by a vendetta involving a robot ghost scaring Fry into a heart attack. Somehow. At this point, Bender is pulled away into… Robot Heaven… which strikes me as horribly out of touch with the series’ tone in some indefinable way. Robot God, who is apparently an entirely different entity than the God that Bender encountered in “Godfellas” and looks strangely like Robot 1-X from “Obsoletely Fabulous”, tells him that because he selflessly saved Fry’s life he’s been accepted into Paradise, but Bender instead opts to return to Earth. At this point Bender’s physical body reassembles itself and he returns to life. What strikes me about this scene is that nobody really makes a big deal out of this turn of events, even though it’s massively weird even by their standards. I mean, I know these guys have seen crazy aliens, robot hobos, parallel universes inhabited by bobble-heads, and even a man who accidentally became his own grandfather, but a dead robot just reassembled itself before their eyes and came back to life. That’s something to make a fuss over.
So what’s the verdict on this episode? Well… it wasn’t all bad. The Amish planet was surprisingly nice sequence with some neat visuals, and some of the jokes hit their marks pretty well. And even if the moral of the story isn’t a well-thought-out one, at least it’s presented clearly, unlike the ones in “Neutopia” and “Benderama”. But, compared to the classic series, or even some of the better reboot episodes, “Ghost in the Machines” is weak. The character motivations are nonsensical, and its attempts to work in continuity fall embarrassingly on their face. While this is a step above the two season premiere episodes, if I were to ask myself, assuming I wasn’t already a fan of Futurama, “Would this episode make me a fan?” the answer would be a solid “no”.
But let’s not fret. There are plenty of episodes left in the season, and I’m sure some of them will be awesome enough to make this effort worth it. And if I’ve got the willpower to go this entire post without making a single Ghost in the Shell joke, I’ve got the willpower to sit through a few crappy episodes. So save your tears for the day when the pain is far behind. On your feet, come with me! We are soldiers! Stand or die!
… Ah, crap.
I’m Karl, and I’m fighting tedium one out-of-season haunting at a time.
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