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.
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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