Futurama Goes Out With a Whimper

It’s a bit of a bummer that we end off the season – and celebrate Futurama’s hundredth episode – with one of the weakest entries this season. It’s also a little tough to pinpoint what didn’t quite work about this episode, as it has all the ingredients of a classic.

If anything, part of the problem is that it follows the Simpsons formula too closely. Meaning, in case you’ve never heard of The Simpsons, the first five minutes are an unrelated gag, usually hilarious – and then once you get into the main plot, everything slows down.
    
So in this episode of Futurama, there’s a great first five minutes There’s a great first five minutes where the gang delivers their hundredth package, a soufflé with a drop of nitro-glycerin on it for the aged Mrs. Astor. It sets up a brilliant bit involving Bender’s gyroscopic abilities, the only “person” able to hold the confection steady as they weave needlessly through the most convoluted asteroid field, crash land the ship and run over a rickety rope bridge, only to see the pay-off – the soufflé exploding – never happen. After that, we get into the meat of the plot, which has Leela exiled to her home under New New York with the mutants of the city and fighting for equal rights.

Everything was fine, I guess. There were some good gross-out jokes throughout, including Fry turning himself into a mutant (and the eventual resolution was brilliant). The emotional hook was there, with Fry trying to make up for accidentally banishing Leela. And you got a bunch of crazy sci-fi, of course, throughout.

I think the problem is, it felt like we’ve seen all this before. Futurama has been brilliant at pushing its world forward this season, but here, perhaps the weight of delivering a hundredth episode proved to be too much. We’ve seen the Mutants be gross before. We’ve seen episodes where people were fighting for a groups’ equal rights (Bender for robots, Amy and Bender for robosexual marriage, Hermione for house elves*). We’ve even seen a whole episode based around Titanic jokes before. And while the idea of a giant Land-Titanic, a bus that crashes and sinks into the street is funny, there’s only so many jokes we can take about the doomed ship from the same show.

So while this was a bit of a bummer of an episode, the good news (everyone) is that Futurama will be back in the Winter with more new episodes. Hopefully it’ll be back to the heights of the previous ten or so eps.

Random Notes:

• Can I say again how great a bit of physical comedy that rickety rope bridge thing was? Because it was.
• “Now that you’re here, this hell hole feels more like a regular hole.”
• “Three dollars at the drug store.” We need an entire episode where Zoidberg is Mary Poppins.
• Billy West nailed the delivery on, “Did you guys know I have a crush on Leela?”
• “Hooray! A happy ending for the rich people!”

*That was an episode of Futurama, right?