Season 6, Episode 24
A puzzling episode that may or may not be good
Given my luck, it makes sense that Futurama would finally start producing some good episodes while I took two weeks off. (I was working, which required waking up early, and I couldn’t stand the late hours, especially considering FX has been doubling up on episodes lately, which through my whole Thursday night TV schedule out of whack.) “Fry Am The Egg Man” was a good example of the show’s general mad-cappery, and “Tip of the Zoidberg” was a great example of the pathos that has been sorely missing from this season.
Funnily enough, “Cold Warriors” continues the flashback format of “Zoidberg”, though this pairing comes about not because of the writers but rather Comedy Central’s sudden impulse to reorder the episodes. (By comparison, they aired Season 6A in production order.) Also coincidently, but perhaps not quite as funny, is that fact that the week I decided to return to reviewing Futurama, the episode quality went down – but only a tick.
Now, for the standards set by this season, this was still a pretty good episode; heck, it was still a good episode by the shows overall standards. The premise – that Fry inadvertently brings the common cold back to the 31st century, causing widespread disease and mass panic – was a good one, especially as it meant we spent 2/3 of the episode just watching the crew bounce off of one another while under quarantine. However, the episode lost some of the focus when it switched to the national outbreak angle. It was still funny, thank goodness, but it did require a slightly awkward tonal shift.
The other major aspect of tonight’s episode was of course the flashback, back to 1988 and Fry’s attempts to win the science fair. The problem with following this episode after “Tip of the Zoidberg” is that while that episode made it known upfront why we were experiencing these flashbacks, tonight’s flashback was playing more of a long game. Intrigue is fine as these things go, but there wasn’t any immediacy to the action taking place, nothing that really grabbed me and made me wonder how Fry’s science experiment turned out.
Now I give the show credit for where these two plotlines intersected – it was a neat way out of the common cold epidemic – and I respected the show even more for giving us a fake-out wherein it was Fry’s rival’s experiment that ended up saving humanity, as it was both in character for Fry to lose in an competition based on intelligence, yet I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of sadness for when he did so.
What I wasn’t ready for was the last-minute reveal that this flashback was also meant to expound on Fry’s relationship with his father. On the one hand, it was such an out of left-field reveal, and to a character relationship problem that really wasn’t, that it’s a bit hard for me to get behind it. Yet on the other, I now recognize that the episode did a good job of setting it up – there were many instances of Fry’s dad acting emotionally distant, yet they were never commented on by the episode – and the end results was so powerful that I can’t thinking of knocking the episode for ending on the strong moment.
For now, I don’t feel comfortable giving this episode any sort of official pass or fail. I imagine that I will have to give the episode a couple of more looks (as I’ve sometimes done with others), and it’s quite possible that my appreciation for the episode will go up for here, especially considering that I now know how all of these strong elements end up coming together.
Quotes, Etc:
This week in Opening Captions: We’re Following You, But Not On Twitter
“To this day I can’t stand the taste of early hominid.”
“Don’t worry son, you’ll freeze before you drown.”
“I’m not even legally a mammal.”
“If you’re sober, it isn’t ice fishing.”
“Ow! My underbite!”
“I could make a space experiment! I just got a new thing of glitter.”
“I don’t think science is your thing, considering that monkey at the zoo tricked you out of your allowance money.”
“Let’s not all panic at once…We’ll have to do it in shifts.”
The future’s containment procedure: A broom
“Everyone just calm down and make yourself a tissue walrus.”
“Mr. Jenkins dissects anything smaller than a fifth grader.”
“All citizens has been advised to wash their hand thoroughly after beating up Phillip J. Fry.”
“Rosemary, release the Surgeon General.”
“..this is a Verizon coverage map…”
“They’re flying Manhattan into the sun! They must have been out of piranahas.”
“No doctor like hurtling his patients into the sun…”
“If this will help you, then please, turn me into a virus milkshake.” “He consented, you all heard it!”
“Our weapons aren’t strong enough to break a thin plastic sheet that thick!”
“But seriously, there are moon men.”
“Beside, Buzz Aldrin ran over my guinea pig in the parking lot.”
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