Futurama - "The Six Million Dollar Mon"

Season 7, Episode 7

There’s an obvious character hierarchy to Futurama, even if the show can at times function ensemble piece. Fry, Leela, and Bender function as the three principal characters, and Amy, Hermes, Zoidberg, and Professor Farnsworth tend to serve in secondary roles. Sure, those four can and have taken the spotlight for certain episodes, but these tend to lead to some mixed results, and there have never been enough of them to feel as if the series is truly egalitarian with all of it’s characters. As such, the secondary four often tend to be more emotionally static that the primary three, which can lead to some unmotivated episodes. However this isn’t always the case, and sometimes this can lead to surprising little episodes that deliver a wallop of insight into previously barely-explored characters, as it did tonight.

Hermes and Zoidberg are perhaps the two most underutilized secondary characters. While we learn a lot about Amy through her relationships with her parents and Kiff, and know about Farnsworth’s relationship with Mom, Hermes and Zoidberg don’t have enough relationships (or at least not frequently appearing relationships) to really explore their emotional sides. (Not for nothing, Hermes’ son appeared in this episode, but he didn’t have any lines.) And given their especially comedic voices and gestures, it’s clear that these characters are meant to be the literal walking jokes of the cast.

Yet somehow “The Six Million Dollar Mon” managed to turn these jokes into real characters beats for the two of them. Hermes’ has long (and mostly) been defined by his bureaucratic role within Planet express, and the show has gone so far as to build multiple episodes around this joke. But this is the first time that we’ve seen the emotional toll that it takes on Hermes. It’s not just that Hermes life is defined by his job, but also that he’s got nothing else really going on, so that when he loses his job, he seems to lose his manhood as well. Getting held up by Roberto the deranged, stabby robot doesn’t help things either, and it all serves as believable character motivation for Hermes transformation into a robot. When efficiency means everything, why bother being human.

However, what’s additionally interesting is the morality tale that the show uses Hermes’ story to reflect on the growing reliance on technology. Futurama always mines some of the biggest (and okay, some of it’s weakest) laughs by using the future setting to comment on our present, and while turning Hermes into a literal machine is a bit of a heavy-handed metaphor, it’s also one that works within the context of the episode. While technology helps to improve Hermes professional life, it also builds a wall between him and his family, as his quest for higher efficiency leads him to drop them as emotional weight that holds him back.

Zoidberg meanwhile has always been the outcast of the group, the one that everybody else shits on. He is the butt of just about every joke that involves him, and it’s been hard for the show to build an entire plot, even if they’ve tried to do so at least twice in the past. What I think those past episodes got wrong – and this one got right – is that Zoidberg’s pathetic nature is ultimately sort of depressing, and if you don’t acknowledge that to some extent, it can be hard to make the jokes work exactly as they should. By embracing that depressing nature, “Mon” was able to push the Zoidberg jokes to new, semi-alienating heights, and get perhaps the biggest (and darkest) laughs from the character yet.

But it also allowed it to be emotionally affecting in it’s own weird, sort of fucked-up way. Sure, the sight of Zoidberg reassembling Hermes’ discarded body parts was disgusting and bizarre and hilarious at the same time, it also belies just how lonely Zoidberg is. He’s so desperate for human connection that he sees Hermes’ constant mockery of him as a form of friendship, and when Hermes begins to lose the emotional side of himself that’s capable of hate and ridicule, it’s up to Zoidberg to create a meat puppet to simulate that effect. So it speaks to Zoidberg’s selflessness that he would risk that assured source of mockery (which really just comes from himself) so that Hermes can live as human and be with his family.

While the marrying of the A- and B-plots was some spectacular work, what really impressed me with the plotting was how nothing here went to waste. There were two extended gags tonight – the appearance of Hermes’ spicy gumbo, and arrest and death of Roberto – that at the time of their first appearance, seemed like nothing more that sub-Family Guy level throwaways, just bits to fill in some left over time. However, that both of these ended up playing into the episode’s finale – Roberto’s brain takes over Hermes’ old robot body, then melt upon eating a piece of Hermes’ spicy skin – was a brilliant masterstroke, and it’s to the writers’ credit that I didn’t see these moments coming.

This was perhaps the most assured episode of Futurama this season, one that managed to service the characters and give us a half-hour that didn’t feel over-stuffed or random in how it played out. Let’s just hope that there are more episodes like this one coming down the tubes.

Quotes and Other Thoughts:

This week in Opening Captions: “This Episode Worth 250 Futurama Points”

“Lets the interviews begin! Good luck everyone but Zoidberg.”

“Plus that one boiling toilet. Fire me if you dare.”

“No, not you Right Brain. Right, Left Brain?”

“Is that a harpoon in your chest?” “Yes. And I’m happy to see you.”

“Good old Hermes. When he stops insulting, that’s when I worry.”

“Of course I tried eating you. But your flesh was too spicy.”