Futurama: Law and Oracle

Finally, an episode starring Url. That's what we all wanted, right?

Hello and welcome once again to my ongoing and ever-delayed Futurama review series. Writing a review a week is a bit of a strain on my time and energy, but I’m doing it for you, o worthy and thus far nonexistent readers.

This week’s review is on the episode “Law and Oracle”, and I’ll start off by saying that this episode was a huge step up from the previous episodes this season. It isn’t at the level of the series classic, or even quite at the level of last season’s gems, like “Lethal Inspection”, but this was the first time this season I genuinely enjoyed watching an episode.

The episode begins with a recycling of the opening sequence from the series premiere (“Fry! Pizza goin’ out! C’mooooooon!”) I know I’ve been giving the writers crap for reusing their old ideas, but doing it on purpose is a little different. I found this bit a fun flight of nostalgia and enjoyed it, even though the idea of using an interstellar delivery company’s resources to send a pizza a few blocks down the road makes my engineer’s sense of efficiency cringe… but hey, it’s comedy. The problem is that this sequence leads Fry to reflect on his life as a delivery boy and grieve that nobody considers him important. And that is the kind of idea recycling that’s been bugging me all season. This is exactly the same way that season four’s “The Why of Fry” began. What’s really baffling is that that episode established that Fry is so monumentally important that he was frozen on purpose so that he could save the entire universe in the 31^st century. True, Nibbler erased his memory of the incident, but let’s recap some of his other accomplishments throughout the series: 

• Saved the Earth from a giant ball of space garbage by coming up with the idea to bounce it away with a second ball of garbage (Season One, “A Big Piece of Garbage”)
• Saved the Earth from the Omicronians by writing and directing an impromptu episode of Single Female Lawyer to appease them (Season One, “When Aliens Attack”)
• Saved the Earth from the Brainspawn by being the only life form immune to their mental attacks (Season Three, “The Day the Earth Stood Stupid”)
• Briefly protected New New York as the superhero Captain Yesterday (Season Four, “Less Than Hero”)
• Acted as direct liaison between the universe and Yivo (“The Beast with a Billion Backs”)
• Defeated the "Dark One" to save every species in the Universe from extinction (“Into the Wild Green Yonder”)

So what makes Fry suddenly feel so inadequate? I think saving the entire Earth once should be enough of an accomplishment to coast on for life, but he’s done it no less than four times. Even discounting the Brainspawn incidents when either he or everyone else lost their memories of what happened, he’s still more important than most Presidents.

But Fry soon sees an avenue to getting the respect that he craves, in the form of resident cops Smitty and Url. The respect that is showered on them (which we’ve never seen happen before, but whatever) appeals to Fry and he decides to quit his job and join the police force. Now, one thing that irks me about this scene is that Leela comments that she likes men in uniform, which leads me to wonder if she and Fry are still and item or not. It’s getting really hard to tell… they were together for the first few episodes of the reboot, and then it sorta just stopped being mentioned. It’s like the writers just lost interest in the two of them, which feels a little strange to me, since I can think of a number of ways to get comedy out of their relationship. Even more confusing is that Amy kisses Smitty during the same scene… so what does that imply about her relationship with Kif? Continuity seems only to apply when convenient, which is anything but convenient to the audience, since we have to make sense out of what we’re seeing.

The next segment of the episode chronicles Fry’s experience in Police Academy, and of course the writers couldn’t resist making plenty of references to the Police Academy movies. Unfortunately, this led them to include a handful of scenes featuring a sound effects robot in reference to Michael Winslow’s iconic character from the movies, which ultimately didn’t add anything to the episode. I know I’m being nitpicky on this one (and if there were more glaring flaws in the episode, I wouldn’t have bothered discussing it) but this wasn’t one of the dozens of robots thrown into the show for a one-shot joke; this was a character introduced as if he would have some impact on the course of the episode and then dropped by the time the next commercial break came around. It’s like if there were a couple of guys in Hamlet who got introduced as Hamlet’s friends and had their own subplot, and then they died in between acts and were never mentioned again.

…Wait, I don’t think that metaphor works for this one.

Anyway, Fry has no trouble with his training, surprisingly enough, and successfully becomes a cop. He’s partnered with Url – Smitty having evidently retired, but probably only for the duration of this particular episode – and is sent out on the beat. It’s a little surreal, since Fry and Smitty don’t look terribly different and they’re both voiced by Billy West, so Fry fits in to his new role eerily well. Soon they get into a high speed pursuit. Interestingly, they clock their perp at 15 miles per hour above the speed of light… by which I assume they mean the old speed of light (the episode “A Clone of My Own” established that the speed of light has been increased somehow, but it is still impossible to go faster than light). After an honestly really cool, Tron-esque light-cycle chase they catch their baddy and it turns out to be… Erwin Schrodinger? What the…? Shouldn’t he be a head in a jar, like every other historical figure who’s ever appeared on the show? And why was he speeding and acting so shifty-eyed? I’m just going out on a limb and saying this was actually some budding super villain who happens to have an unhealthy obsession with the famous scientist after whom he was named.

Meanwhile, Leela and Bender make a delivery to Pandora… boy, Police Academy, Tron, Avatar… we’re a little heavy on the pop culture references this week, and there are still more coming up later. Pop culture references are fun, but you can’t make an entire show out of them or you’ll end up like Family Guy. Do you really want to be like Family Guy, Futurama? I didn’t think so. Anyway, Leela and Bender realize that without Fry around their deliveries are extremely tedious and dull… much like Family Guy.

Fry and Url are promoted to the Future Crimes Division, meaning yes, the rest of the episode is a reference to Minority Report. Sadly I haven’t seen or read Minority Report, so I can’t really comment on the quality of the parody, so I’ll just continue to judge the episode by its own merits. So Fry’s new job is to prevent crimes predicted by a robotic oracle named Pickles. When working late one night, he sees a prediction of Bender stealing the “Maltese Liquor” from Hedonismbot’s mansion. He keeps the information to himself and tries to warn Bender not to commit the crime, but it backfires and puts the idea in his head.

Fry continues to look for a way to stop the crime, and discovers that part of the oracle’s prediction is that he will shoot Bender. Since Bender is a robot, I fail to see why this is a big deal (I think he’s been shot before, actually) but Fry is horrified. He resolves not to shoot Bender no matter what, which changes the future and creates a new prediction. This one shows Bender sharing the Maltese Liquor with everyone a Planet Express, which kills them all because the Maltese Liquor is poison to anyone but robots “and Billy D. Williams”. At this point, I say to myself, “just warn everyone about the liquor’s toxicity and everything will be fine” but apparently that won’t work for some reason. In fairness, that is a somewhat shortsighted plan, but it still makes a certain amount of sense, and I’m not sure why Fry doesn’t even consider it.

The episode then cuts to Bender pulling off his heist. Once he gets his hands on the liquor, Fry appears and convinces him to call off the theft. But then the oracle appears and reveals that his predictions were a convoluted scheme to get the liquor for himself and use it to kill his human brain cells, ridding himself of his powers of prediction. How he and Fry got into the mansion without passing each other on the stairway is a question for the ages, but let’s not dwell. Fry then reveals that Url and Chief Manahan had heard Pickles’ entire confession from behind a pane of “prediction-proof glass”, a twist that smacks of laziness so hard that I really don’t know what to say about it. Fry explains that he realized the predictions were faked because Bender would never share his liquor with anyone… and I have to call “lazy” on that bit of exposition as well, since I think Bender’s motivations are a little more complex than that. Though he acts like he hates everyone, he does consider these people his friends, and giving them all a sip of his booze in the process of proposing a toast to himself, as the prediction showed, does seem more or less like something he would do. Still, I do like the idea of Fry and Bender banding together and pulling a fast one on the oracle, since it does show that the two of them are friends and are capable of working together to achieve a common goal. I like those moments for Bender, because they make him less of a one-note character and much more sympathetic. If he was always a jerk, he would just be annoying, but in the end I enjoy his jerkiness because I know he’s not all bad, and he’ll do something to redeem himself eventually.

That is another thing that the writers of Family Guy should pay attention to.

Ultimately, Fry gets fired from the police department for tipping off Bender, and Planet Express welcomes him back with open arms, having realized that things are much more interesting with him around. Fry still asks for a promotion, and the Professor agrees to make him an executive delivery boy, which Hermes describes as a meaningless title meant to help insecure people feel better about themselves. And on that note, the episode ends with this shot:

You know, there are slight plot holes and some outright weirdness in this episode, but as I said in the beginning, I actually enjoyed it. The premise was fairly solid, the jokes connected, and the central theme didn’t get lost or distorted as happened in the last few episodes. The pop culture references were a bit too numerous, but they were all well-delivered. I really did get engrossed in the Tron segment, because it was beautifully done, and those awesome visual effects are part of what made Futurama what it was back in its original run. Chief Manahan was an interesting one-shot character, though I doubt she has the staying power to become a regular. I didn’t talk much about her in the summary because I’m really not sure what to make of her, but her bizarre feminine manliness worked pretty well in defining the episode’s tone. The science-based humor of the episode was perhaps a little on the nose, but it still made me smile (“The cat – is it alive or dead? Alive or dead?”) and the self-referential jokes at the beginning and end had a similar “easy-yet-satisfying” feel to them. Overall, I’m happy with this one.

So there you have it, fans – the first highlight of the season. Hopefully things are looking up. We’ll find out next time. Until then, I’m Karl, and I’m fighting tedium one unappreciated savior of the Earth at a time.