Futurama: "Reincarnation"

Season 6, Episode 26

A high note to send the season off – and it didn’t even have a real plot

Though the “Treehouse of Horror” episodes quickly became a mainstay of The Simpsons, Futurama never ended up developing any similarly styled annual vignette-filled episode. Now this could either be because the producers didn’t want the show to be too much like The Simpsons – something they’ve more or less insisted throughout the show’s run – or it could be that the show was attempting to develop the “Anthology of Interest” episodes – of which there were two, and the end of season two and the beginning of season four – into a recurring thing, but they never got the chance to before cancellation. (Remember, “ToH” wasn’t a recurring element until a few season into the Simpsons’ run.)

So what’s surprising to me isn’t that the Futurama team has decided to bring back the vignette-styled episode for the show, but that they’ve decided to go in a different direction with it. I found the two “AoI” episodes fun because, much like with “ToH” episodes, it was a way for the show to tell whacked-out stories that wouldn’t normally exist in each show’s universe. And while “ToH” was a way for Simpsons to riff extensively on pop-culture, I have always found “AoI” to be much more enjoyable as they tend to be character based stories – even if the stories themselves involve reorienting a character’s general perspective.

What I don’t know now is what exactly the vignettes of Futurama’s new run are supposed to be. There has yet ot develop a pattern for how these new vignette episode will work – though I think I kind of like it that way. Though last year’s Christmas special was about telling three darkly comedic holiday themed tales, “Reincarnation” was a series of spoofs more in line with “ToH”, though these spoofs still let the characters remain roughly themselves. I say “roughly” because tonight’s spoofs were on three distinct types of animation styles – “Colorama” was old-timey black and white, “Future Challenge 3000” was of 16-bit video games, and “Action Delivery Force” was anime – that required the characters to adopt slightly different attitudes in order to sell the spoof.

And for the most part, those spoofs were fantastic, and it’s a testament to how well the show was able to send-up each type of animation that the best jokes were always A) visual and B) directly related to the genre at hand. Of the three, I found enjoyed “Action Delivery Squad” the most, though “Future Challenge 3000” was also really fucking funny and “Colorama” gets points for somehow managing to fit a nice sweet moment into that section’s seven-or-so minute running time. (“Future Challenge 3000” actually started to go to a dark place at the end, and while I understand why that sections end on a happy note – how many 16-bit games do you know that ended up being really somber? – I think I kind of would have liked to see the show see that sentiment through to the end.)

If I have one complaint – and admittedly it’s a small one – it’s that I’m not quite sure what compelled the writers to weave a simple plot line through the three vignettes. Sure, having Fry blow up the diamondium meteor in the first part leads to the Professor’s scientific discovery in the second and causes aliens to attack in the third, and that’s the sort of plot set-up that affords the episode more time for genre riffing, but I’m not really sure it adds much to the proceedings. Also, if this episode is supposed to be non-canon, but there is a sort of plotline through it all, how exactly are we supposed to interpret how/why there was a genre change for these characters/this world? There was a short intro from “God”, but that was so vague that I don’t think it did the best job of setting up what was to come.

And this is the style change that I was talking about above for these kinds of episodes that sort of worries me . Much like with the Christmas special, I don’t mind if there is some sort of unifying theme of plot to connect each vignette (and I can see the upside as it helps hold onto viewer interest), but I would hate to see the writers box themselves in or have a vignette show not hold together as a whole for the sake of trying to weave a whole theme throughout.

But those are just quibbles, these musings of a mind that probably thinks too much anyways. “Reincarnation” was an incredibly fun episode that didn’t make me question what was going on (mostly), and that already puts it ahead of just about every other episode in 6B. Admittedly, that’s a pretty sad statement to make, but I guess all we can do it hope the writers have pulled themselves together by the time season 7A rolls around next summer.

Quotes, Etc:

Another small critique: Why did the old-timey “Colorama” have to use computer animation to show the diamondium surface? That decision really took me out of the genre-spoof there for a minute.

“Have you tried to get her pregnant?” “God yes, I’ve tried and I’ve tried!”

“Mmmm-hmmm fish on Friday. And human flesh every other day of the week.”

“Nothing in the universe can fracture diamondium. Not ever God I and God II put together.”

“All right, diamond. You may have won those rounds, but I still have an ace up my hole.”

“I thought you sneaked off to take a dump.” “I man can sneak off to do two things.”

“Good news, multiplayers!”

“That’s ‘byte’ with a ‘y’.”

“Hey Fry, I know something you could lay bare.” “Leela! Shhhh! I’m trying to listen to a physics lecture!”

“Things only rhyme beyond 10^^-5 angstroms, you dope!”

“I like physics, but I love cartoons.”

“I watch TV. It’s the next best thing to being alive.”

“Probably magnets!” “Shut up, Hawking!”

“The dector can tell you’re impressed…you should be!”

“Flying bananas?…Hahaha…I will slice them on my morning fish porridge.”

“Perhaps they speak perfect English, as do we.”

“Custard time?! Hooray!”

“I fear our only option is thrilling space battle.”

“Another one of you ill-time jokes, Fry?” “You and I are enemies now.”

“Zoidberg, stop! We are too scared right now to enjoy the ceremony of your death.”