Futurama - "Silence of the Clamps"

Actual silence would be more enjoyable.

Welcome back to my ongoing series of reviews of the newest season of Futurama. I started out with the intention of reviewing each episode immediately after it first aired. And so, I now bring you my review of an episode that aired three weeks ago, “Silence of the Clamps”

This episode begins with a delivery of a new set of clamps to the robot mafia. As I’m sure you all recall, the robot mafia is made up of exactly three robots: the Donbot, Joey Mousepad, and Clamps. No points for guessing which one the package is for. The robot mafia has appeared a few times throughout the series, most notably in their debut episode “Bender Gets Made” and a later episode titled “Bendless Love”, as well as in a subplot in “Into the Wild Green Yonder”. It’s a little hard to judge continuity with regards to the robot mafia, since in “Bendless Love” they seemed to have no recollection that Bender had once briefly joined their ranks, so I don’t really know if I should expect them to remember him now. Anyway, when the crew makes the delivery, it happens to be the wedding day of the Donbot’s daughter. Ah yes, the unavoidable Godfather references one must make when one writes a script about a robot mafia.

Strangely, the wedding is being conducted by the Space Pope himself, which makes me wonder just what the writers are trying to insinuate about the Catholic Church and their relationship with organized crime, but then again the Space Pope is a mysterious figure in the Futurama world, and I can’t really tell if he has anything to do with the actual Pope. I’ve always kind of liked the idea that he’s just some space lizard with a funny hat who somehow talked people into calling him “the Space Pope”. That would make a bit more sense than trying to justify how the actual leader of the entire Catholic Church for the entire universe got talked into performing a wedding. I’m sure the Donbot’s got some influence, but c’mon… the Pope’s a busy man. I also want to comment on the fact that Calculon is at the wedding and performs a song. Why is that worth commenting on? Because Calculon is played by Maurice LaMarche, who has mentioned numerous times that he has no confidence in his ability to sing. I get a sadistic delight out of watching writers torment the actors who perform their work. Actually, Maurice is better than he gives himself credit for. It may be hard for him to hit the notes, but when he does his voice actually sounds pretty good.

Anyway, I’m not here to gush about Maurice LaMarche (even though he was The Brain…). Bender crashes the wedding party and ends up having sex with one of the Donbot’s daughters, named Bella. Thankfully, no Twilight references ensue. Instead, Bender witnesses Clamps assaulting Calculon as punishment for not repaying a debt he owed the Donbot. Swayed by the promise of a fifty dollar reward, Bender agrees to testify against the Donbot in court. However, Calculon appears and claims that his injuries were self-inflicted, getting the Donbot set free. This puts Bender in danger of an imminent reprisal from the robot mafia.

And here’s the thing: the Donbot seems to recognize Bender now. That’s what I mean about the continuity. He evidently remembers their encounter from “Into the Wild Green Yonder”, since his wife mentioned her and Bender’s affair earlier in the episode, but what about “Bendless Love”? What about “Bender Gets Made”, when Bender was in the robot mafia? Give me some kind of indication what’s canon, guys!

Bender gets put in the Witness Relocation Program and is forced to say goodbye to everyone. I again like that the writers use this opportunity to remind us that he and Fry are quite close. His goodbye to Leela also hints that he has a little bit of respect for her, whereas his comments to Zoidberg and the Professor show just how little he thinks of them. I do like that the characters in Futurama don’t all like each other. It creates a bit of subtlety in their interactions that leads to some solid humor. What I do feel was a missed opportunity was that Bender didn’t say goodbye to Hermes, the one other person he has expressed respect for, due to the events of “Lethal Inspection”. It would be interesting to see how things stand between the two of them now. Oh well.

PlanEx puts out a job notice for Bender’s vacant job… whatever it was. Are we talking about his supposed position as ship’s cook, or just his being the robot on the team? I mean, not twenty seconds ago he admitted to the Professor that he didn’t feel like he had ever done any work whatsoever. Why does he need to be replaced at all? Well, I guess they just need to fill the robot quota after all, because the Donbot sends Clamps to apply for the position in an attempt to get close to Bender’s friends in case he contacts them, and all of the other applicants are robots as well. Clamps gets the job by eliminating his competition. Wow, he really is psycho, isn’t he? We’ve never actually seen him do this kind of stuff before, and it’s mildly unsettling to see a harmless comic relief villain suddenly get violent and dangerous. But hey, maybe I'm overthinking it.

We then see what I think was the idea that launched this entire episode. Now that Clamps has joined the crew, Zoidberg and his claws start to feel threatened by the utility of Clamps’ clamps. He admits that the only reason people tolerate him at all is that his claws occasionally come in handy… though to the best of my knowledge, that only happened once, in “Mother’s Day”, when all the machines rebelled and he opened a can of soup for Fry because they no longer had a can opener. It seems that the writers are attempting to turn that one unmemorable gag into a recurring part of his character, which I think is misguided. Zoidberg is a penniless, quasi-Jewish, space-lobster doctor who knows nothing about medicine and gets treated like a dog in more ways than one. Nobody cares why he’s around. There’s no need to answer questions nobody’s asking. Zoidberg tries to make peace with Clamps over this issue, but of course Clamps will have none of that. He very nearly clamps Zoidberg’s head off, which again I find a little bit unsettling. This isn’t the climax of the story, and having a major character coming just shy of being murdered at this point seems unnecessarily dark. 

But let’s carry on. Clamps is sent to his first delivery, to the moon. Man, that’s a blast from the past. We haven’t seen the moon since way back in the second episode of the series, “The Series Has Landed”. And hey, in my opinion that was one of the most underrated episodes of the entire series, establishing characters, exploring themes, really delving into what a sitcom set in the future could do. Revisiting this setting might be a good chance to get back into that kind of tone. Let’s see what happens.

While on the delivery, Fry sees what seems to be Bender dressed as a hillbilly, and follows him back to the hydroponic farm they all visited way back when, where the Crushinator lives. The robot refuses to admit that he is Bender, and instead insists that he’s a farmer named… Billy West? Uh… OK… that’s just a weird joke. It’s not a bad set-up, I guess, but there’s not really much of a punch line, other than Fry commenting that it’s a “stupid, made-up name”. That hardly even qualifies as self-deprecating humor. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. I don’t know if Billy West is a pseudonym, but even if it is it’s still a pretty ordinary one. If you’re going to make fun of Billy West, don’t make fun of his name, make fun of Billy West. There are a lot jokes you could make about Billy West, a man whose voice has been in practically everything that’s ever had voices in it, but his name just isn’t that funny. Dig a little deeper, guys.

The Professor examines Billy’s brain and discovers that none of Bender’s memories are still on his hard drive. How he determines this by looking at it is a mystery to me. That’s like reading a comic book by smell. But okay, he can do that I guess. Hey, what do I know? I just have an engineering degree. Anyway, they all realize that Bender is gone for good, and reluctantly leave Billy behind. Aha! This is where the emotional subtext of the episode comes to the surface and leaves us with a memorably touching scene of – Oh… no, they just leave and get over it. *Sigh*… Ok, not every episode has to be an emotional rollercoaster, but you guys are really wasting this glorious return to settings past. It’s like bringing Romeo and Juliet back to the balcony and having them talk about whether or not it’s about to rain for a little while before they leave and go to dinner. Not. Particularly. Interesting.

The crew eventually notices that Clamps isn’t with them, and return to look for him. Clamps, of course, is busy trying to murder Billy, and… yeah, murder still isn’t funny. See, that’s the problem here. Clamps was funny in previous episodes because even though he constantly acted psychotic he was never given a chance to actually do anything. Impotent rage is funny… Actual killing sprees, not so much. But it’s OK because Zoidberg steps in and saves the day in a Wild West style contest of hand-to-hand combat. You know, just like in all those Westerns that didn’t end in gunfights, like… um… wait a minute, they all ended in gunfights! This parody doesn’t hold up to scrutiny at all!

Zoidberg snips off Clamps’ clamps, saving Billy. Hip hip hoor...wha? Bella just came in and shot him for no adequately set up reason? Well, that was pointless, then. The tragedy is, I really liked seeing Zoidberg step up and be the hero for once. Putting the series chew toy in the role of hero every now and then keeps the joke from getting stale. This would be a good way to rejuvenate interest in taking Zoidberg somewhat seriously again, which hasn’t really happened since about season two. But since his heroic moment amounted to absolutely nothing, it really didn’t take.

And so, Billy is dead. I suppose there is a danger for robots in being shot, after all, although that doesn’t change the fact that we’ve seen robots shrug off being riddled with bullets in previous episodes. Maybe ray guns do more damage than bullets. I could kind of see that. Anyway, his job done, Clamps leaves the PlanEx crew and returns to his robot mafia life. The crew heads back home and goes to Family Bros. Pizza. This is the Cygnoid pizza place with disgusting food that we saw in season three’s “A Leela of Her Own”, making this the most pointless callback in series history. There we find that, wonder of wonders, Bender’s been here the whole time! That guy on the moon was just a guy who somehow looked exactly like Bender, which would be almost impossible if he weren’t a bending robot and therefore identical to countless numbers of other bending robots including one named Flexo who’s appeared in multiple episodes. See, it’s that kind of thing that makes this episode thoroughly un-enjoyable for me. It was simply too obvious to me that Billy really wasn’t Bender, and the crew’s continued belief otherwise made no sense to me.

Aside from that, the episode was just… disturbing. This whole plot feels like the writers thought of an idea that sounded funny in theory, then got in over their heads and couldn’t keep it from becoming overly dark and violent. As I mentioned in my review of “Ghost in the Machines”, Futurama has always had a dark side to its comedy, but that doesn’t mean that just being dark is funny. There’s a certain cruelty in Clamps’ behavior that makes his violence less light-hearted than, say, watching Lrrr eat Free Waterfall, Jr. See, Lrrr is just oblivious to the wrongness of his actions, and that’s why it’s a joke. Clamps, on the other hand, knows exactly what he’s doing. Again, he’s funny when he’s stuck at the end of a leash and can’t act on his violent impulses, but when the writers gave him free rein they eliminated all of his comedic qualities and just made him someone to be genuinely wary of. That’s not what the fans of Futurama are tuning in to see.

I think this might be the lowest point so far in the new season. The plot is admittedly less convoluted than “Neutopia”, and it had more of a point to it than “Benderama”, but at least those episodes meant well. “Silence of the Clamps” is still poorly written, and it adds a whole heap of unpleasantness to the mix. It just isn’t fun to watch, and it leaves a sour taste in your mouth. After so much unpleasantness, it’s going to be hard to get excited about the next episode unless it’s got talking cupcakes in it.

...Well... alright then. 

Until then, I’m Karl, and I’m fighting tedium one clamped lobster at a time.