Futurama - "Decision 3012"

Season 7, Episode 3

“Wow, it really doesn’t matter who you vote for.”

Last week, I note my distaste for Futurama episodes that transplants topical tumor from our time to the show’s fictional future, and ended with some skepticism about how tonight’s episode would play out. That was based of the one clip that Comedy Central was using to promo the episode, which made it appear that “Decision 3012” was going to tackle the 99%/1% divide. It turns out that the episode would be based on another singular topical issue, but that wasn’t even the episode’s main problem.

But first, let’s just acknowledge that this episode deals with the birther issue that originally blew up in the spring of 2011. The show gets points for being able to tackle the issue with a relative amount of speed (animation production schedules being what they are), but that doesn’t necessarily forgive the fact that it’s turned into something of a stale issue at this point, and that most of the jokes fell flat. In fact, many of the specific jokes here – the Sarah Palin-like candidate, the jokes about building walls and illegal alien labor, the reliance on social media – were all so tired as to be DOA, and they serve as the perfect example as to why Futurama should quit trying to be so “timely”.

However, if the specific jokes didn’t work, “Decision” was able to perfectly nail what they represented, the fractured and insane nature of the political climate. The more general jokes, like those of the public’s hatred of taxes, the general conservative platform as conveyed by Richard Nixon, and the superficial hoops that we make candidates jump through worked because these are issues that (unfortunately) have a longer shelf life. Because these are issues that we have seen time and time again, repeated throughout elections, it becomes easier to buy that these would still be problems 1000 years from. Good comedy may be about specificity, but it also relies heavily on context, and taking specific references out of their context doesn’t work nearly as well as making a general joke conform to a specific set of circumstances.

Unfortunately, the episode couldn’t really keep the brilliant political satire going, as it became too distracted by a variety of ideas to just pick one idea and execute it well. The episode bounces around from idea of Leela being a political activist, before turning into a campaign manager, which somehow leads to Bender digging up dirt on new presidential candidate Travers for Nixon, before finally settling on the birther issue. Futurama has always been a show that packs a lot of plot into 20 minutes, so part of this is just the show being the show that it is. But there’s also a line, a limit to exactly how much plot it can stuff into an episode and still feel fleet-footed, and they certainly crossed it tonight. This wasn’t an episode so much as it was a series of sketches.

Since all of these plot developments listed above all had to do with politics, I don’t think I would have noticed how stuffed this episode was if it wasn’t for the final twist: the fact that Travers was a time traveler from the future. This development in and of itself is actually quite brilliant, because having Travers come from the future is a fairly creative way that the show can have it’s sci-fi cake and still deal with the issue in a meaningful way that satirizes what we will and won’t accept when it comes to elections. (It also allowed for a nice call back to Bender’s Big Score with Travers using the binary time travel code.) It also illustrated the show’s knack for time-travel logic (what with Travers negating himself from history), and allowed for the kicker of “it doesn’t matter who you vote for”.

However, time travel is such a disparate piece of plot from politics, at least genre-wise, that it sort of stretched the logic of the episode. While there certainly were some reasons for this to be included, as outlined above, I can’t shake the feeling that there would have been another way to make the same points, one that would have been more consistent with the overall tone of the episode. Add to that all of the episode-stuffing discussed above, and we ended up with an episode that overcame its biggest obstacle only to trip over a more easily cleared hurdle.

Next Week: Bender becomes a paparazzi, in perhaps the best piece of vocational alignment ever.

Quotes and Other Thoughts:

This week in Subtitles: “Made from 100% Recycled Pixels”.

“I proud to announce I’m running for reelection of President of Earth, the greatest planet in the world!”

“But Nixon is the worst president in history – and alternate history.”

“This year I’m going to get involved in the political process and have my voice heard.” “WHAT?”

“Question two. The environment, yes or no?”

“You haven’t heard the last of mm– ”

“The runner-up, who will take over for the winner gets caught with a dead woman, a live boy, or any kind of sexy ghost…”

“Hey, did you just put your tongue in my ear?” “Certainly not. I don’t have a tongue.” “Good, because I don’t have an ear.”

“Is he a draft dodger? A sex trafficker?? A sex dodger???”

“You Ruth Bader believe it!”

“With out cheap alien labor for things like harvesting crops, teaching math, and developing medicine…”

“So I become leader of Earth?” “Indeed.” “Yes! In your face, high school guidance counselor!”

“Linda, I’m down here at the pelvis, and folks around here can’t remember the last time a time-traveling senator attended his own birth.”

“Awww, he has his own eyes.”