Thursday, June 21, 2012

Futurama - "The Bots and the Bees"/"A Farewell to Arms"


Season 7, Episodes 1-2

Once again, Comedy Central decided to go with an hour-long premiere for the latest summer run of Futurama. While it was something that made sense two years ago when the first half of season six premiered – it had been a few years since their had been new Futurama material, and those first two episodes were at least tangentially related – it didn’t makes sense last year, and it certainly didn’t makes sense this year either. In fact, the contrast of tonight’s two episodes only helped to highlight the ways that Futurama can deploy pathos, and how it can succeed and fail.

The first episode of the night started with a dynamite sequence that once again served as a shortcut reintroduction to all of characters. It was quite similar to the opening minutes of Bender’s Big Score, and you can just feel the writers excitement at getting yet another order of episodes from Comedy Central, and that glee permeates the entire episode.

And that’s a good thing, because on the surface, the conceit of “The Bots and the Bees” is sort of terrible. Between ABC’s Baby Daddy and NBC’s upcoming Guys With Kids, there has been a worrying rise as of late of misandric “men can’t take care of children” comedy in pop culture, and I was worried that Futurama would once again bow to its baser instincts and use the opportunity to trot out some tired gender humor. Thankfully the show instead decided to focus on the much more fruitful element of Bender’s personality, specifically his selfish, misanthropic nature, and how that might affect his relationship with his son. It’s a move that both respect the individuality of the character, and avoids a lot of tired stereotypes in the process. Seeing Bender revel in, and in some ways benefit from, his selfish and self-centered ways has always been one of the consistently high-caliber aspects of the show, and it worked like gangbusters here as well.

While it would have been easy for the show to turn this into another example of a father who’s bad at parenting, it instead takes the more brilliant route of having Bender actually be a fairly good father – despite teaching Ben some terrible habits – and doing so for some incredibly selfish reasons. Bender’s a narcissistic first, everything else second, so it makes sense that he would take to Ben as a imprint of himself, as a way to give the world what he considers to be the greatest gift: himself. This is not to preclude that Bender doesn’t develop actual feelings of fatherly love, but rather to state why it’s possible that such a love could be fostered in the first place.

But that’s where the ending sort of pales, I think. While I buy that Bender would come to become unselfish in regards to his son, and give up his happiness for the sake of Ben’s – indeed, that’s one of the show’s go-to tricks to develop pathos, and it’s one that usually works – the logic behind the move sort of causes the whole thing to collapse on itself. When Bender chooses to forgo Ben’s memories so that he can become a bending unit, he’s actually fulfilling a dream of Ben’s that wouldn’t have existed without Bender in the first place. Ben only wants to be a bending unit to emulate his father, and thus going without a father for the sake of bending sort of becomes a null trade. Additionally, one could argue from the onscreen evidence that Ben was happier knowing who his father was and not having the ability to bend than he was the other way around.

While “Bots” did a great job with the episode’s setup and sort of botched the ending, “A Farwell to Arms” seems to have almost the exact opposite problem. While Fry and Leela’s romance has been a long-simmering element of the show, and capable of delivering some of its finest moments, it’s also one that the writers are only ever fleetingly interested in, using it whenever it fits their fancy. I don’t want to complain about Futurama not being serialized, because that’s obviously not the type of show it wants to be, but constantly forgetting and remembering that Fry and Leela are supposed to be in love with one another makes for erratic characterization, which in turns makes it much harder to buy those random romantic outings when they get thrown our way.

So when “Arms” opened with the kind of moment that clued you into the fact that this was going to be a Fry & Leela’s Relationship Episode, I immediately rolled my eyes. While when can give the show the benefit of the doubt during it’s first four seasons for how erratically it treated this aspect (I like to think Fry’s love for Leela was always simmering just below the surface), the seemed to make a pretty hard left turn into the two of them being together at the end of Into the Wild Green Yonder and again at the start of the sixth season. Yet soon that was dropped again, hard, and given how antagonist Leela would treat Fry at some point, it seemed heavily implied that they were no longer a couple, and for no reason other than the writers didn’t want it that way.

Thus it was hard to buy a lot of the emotional strife that seemed to exist at the heart of the episode. This isn’t to say that there weren’t some good ideas within the episode – I especially liked how Fry’s “take my hand” gesture became a symbol for how much he screws up while trying to woo Leela, and why that makes here hesitant to love him back, as well as the closing image of their two arms floating together in deep space – and I buy certain actions, like Fry switching out identity cards so that he could save Leela. But the reason that I could buy these things it because I’ve seen it done enough times before that I could rely on how past knowledge for how Fry and Leela should act in this circumstance. But the fact that there has to be a circumstance – in this case, the ending of the world – sort of undercuts everything that the episode is trying to do, and I feel like if this was the first episode a newbie to the series saw, they wouldn’t believe all of the actions on screen.

It doesn’t help of course that “Arms” was also another topic episode, which tend to be among the show’s weakest. (Remember that Susan Boyle/iPhone one? Seesh.) Though Futurama often gets big laughs out of showing up a future society that’s scarily familiar and an unenlightened as our own (only with better technology), this is the kind of joke that works better on the level of sociological generalizations, not in specific instances. In the case where the events of the future directly mirror events of our time, suddenly everything feels weirdly dated, like the future is making jokes that should have been dead and tired a long time ago. (It doesn’t help that animation production schedules mean that the show is always at least a year behind current trends, and thus rarely feels relevant.)

It also doesn’t help that this apocalypse plot cut even more time into this latest iteration fo Fry and Leela’s relationship, which once again seems to be back on – for now. If next week it turns out that their not dating again, I won’t be mad. But I hope the writers learn from this episode and don’t try to shoehorn in another love story that doesn’t have the proper setup to it.

In fact, next time you want a love story, just go to Kip and Amy. Those always feel earned.

Next Week: Futurama goes topical again as it tackles the 99/1% divide. Oh boy.

Quotes and Other Thoughts:

That was an underused Wanda Sykes as the Vending Machine Unit, bringing all of her trademark sass without any real wit to back it up. That fault lies with the writer and not Sykes of course, but it’s still sad to see her underutilized on a show that could have made a better use of her talents.

I didn’t mention the subplot of Fry’s glowing body in “Bots”, mostly because it was a non-starter that ended in a fairly predictable and forced fashion.

This week in opening subtitles: The show embraces a meme with “Not Sure if New Episode, or Just Rerun of Episode I Watched Drunk”, and goes for an easy joke with “Ask Your Doctor if Futurama is Right for You.”

“Go on now, get on back to Paraguay.”

“We’re being eaten by a giant spider!” “There’s no time for that! Professor needs us!”

“Wow! You can talk? Shut up and gimme a Slurm Loco!”

“So I went to the bathroom and my pee was green. Weird, huh?” “I was wondering who Shreked in the toilet.”

“Just sitting here, turning quarters into urine.”

“Wait, gimme a chance to defend your honor! And then sully it on the couch!”

“Are you telling me the stuff we did in private and also twice on the sidewalk created a baby bot?”

“Yes, everything your body does is perfectly natural – expect masturbation! That’s just wrong!”

“Today marks Ben’s thirteenth day of being left on continuously.”

“Mom, will I ever get to see dad again?” “No, he died yesterday. Rust monsters ate his face.”

“Quit whimperin’ or you won’t get kidnapped.”

“You’re under arrest for kidnapping and burning raccoons without a permit.”

“There’s a dam.” “Damn!” “There’s a grate.” “Great!”

***************************

“Shall we go a-trousering, my lady?”

“Plus, they’re my only pants.”

“Woah, there’s writing in here. Also, this grease is flammable.”

“Wait, there’s stew on the screen.” “Sorry, I was eating breakfast and watching porn.”

“Is it just me, or is the world ending more often these days?”

“Some of us were crazy before it was cool.”

“Before we die, I’m going to destroy all copies of Tron: Legacy. It might take a couple of hours…”

“The balcony club? I have an individual membership.”

“It was worth waiting five hours to hear you complete that sentence.”

“I’m going to miss you Leela. But that’s okay, because the I’ll die.”

“I hate waiting in line to die.”

“I wish I could remember with my boobs.”

“A magician never reveals his secrets. Except the Great Revealo.” “That guy stinks.”

“I better slow down. I’m stealing stuff I don’t even need. Want a torah?” “Nah, I’m not hungry.”

“My god. One of the hundreds of contradictory prophecies is coming true!”

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