[FUT] Bender's Big Score

TV Programme: Futurama
Season: 5
Episode: 1-4
Date I watched this episode: 17/07/2009
Time since I last watched this programme: About 4 years.

Well well, finally back to the old Planet Express crew and their crazy antics. I've had something of a love-hate relationship with this show to say the least. In the beginning I loved this show. It was, and still is, a far superior cousin to Matt Groening's other show, The Simpsons. One of the first DVD purchases I ever made was the first (and at the time, only) four seasons of the show. (I should add at this point that this was my "start off my DVD collection" purchase, and also included the first nine seasons of Friends, first two seasons of 24, and all five seasons of Cold Feet).

As soon as my DVDs arrived, I started watching the show in earnest. However, I gradually tired of it, and despite the fact that I didn't have anything else much to watch (this was before I discovered most of my now-favourite shows) and loads of free time on my hands, it took me in the end more than 2 years to watch all four seasons. Completely fed up, I actually sold my Futurama DVD collection for a reasonable price, and spent the money on programmes I thought were more worthy. However, then the fifth season was announced, and I felt like I really did miss the old gang. So I decided I would re-buy all four seasons of Futurama and the fifth one, and get back into this show. I'm still ranking it 36th out of 37 of all time, but I feel it's worth watching.

Anyway, enough of that - on to the matter at hand. I must admit I rather enjoyed this episode/film/whatever you want to call it. Most of the laughs came from the paradoxes of time travel, but that is admittedly quite funny, and Futurama's already proved that they can do paradoxes in last season's "The Farnsworth Parabox", my personal favourite episode of this programme. Another great thing was that uncharacteristically for this programme - but in keeping with the traditions of time travel - pretty much everything was explained, including seemingly unanswerable questions like how Fry's tattoo got there in the first place. Also nothing seemed too ridiculous, at least in the Futurama universe - and even the way the scammers managed to take over Earth seemed plausible.

I think the really funny part, the classic part of the episode was the explanation of how Fry, who had been seemingly murdered centuries earlier, managed to return for his own funeral. This turned out to be all a plan to get free pizza - which is hardly surprising for Fry. Well, all of this timetravel stuff was pretty funny, starting from around where Bender said "it's about to get a lot more confusing". And it was confusing - trying to keep track of who was who and where all the various "doomed clones" (especially those of Fry and Bender) were at any particular time.

One thing I did wonder was - shouldn't there be three Fry clones? And my head hurts just thinking about this - but usually any time someone goes back in time, there is a clone created. And Fry travelled back twice - once to escape the aliens and once to get the free pizza - so there should be two clones. Well, I resolved this in the end by the fact that the "second Fry" in the current chain of events actually didn't go and get back in time, but the original Fry (frozen in the cryogenic container through all this) actually did still go back, meaning he is actually the same Fry as the one who wanted to go back to get some pizza. I think. Well, that was confusing.

The whole twist about Lars and Fry being the same person was a stroke of brilliance. The show made you really hate Lars at first, due to Fry's jealousy that Leela was so happy with him, but you realise that actually it all turned out for the best. It was just completely unexpected, the thing was almost over and then it happened. Which brings me on to my main criticism of the episode - it didn't keep you interested, mainly due to the structure of the story.

Let me go into a bit more detail on that. About 50 minutes into the episode, we'd resolved all the "free pizza clone" stuff above, and it felt like it should be the end. However we still had another half-an-hour to go and it didn't seem to be moving in a clear direction. First, we saw a bit of backstory on what had happened to the old Fry who had seemingly died in 2012, and the story of Leelu. This backstory came and went, and was interwoven with stories of trying to sprunge the timecode, robot Santa (the song thrown in there was pretty good though), Barbados Slim, and the wedding of Lars and Leela. But all this seemed boring and incidental. In my opinion, in something like this the laughs and the action should just build up - but instead it seemed to have come crashing down, with a load of pointless stuff thrown in there.

But then, we had a fairly exciting story again, with the evacuation of Earth, the fleet returning back to Earth and that colossal battle, with the final use of the doomsday device. Pretty good. But the feature still had another 10 minutes to run - and it wasn't clear how they were going to make that up. And then, of course, we had the final twist that Lars and Fry were the same, and everything fell into place. The backstory had all been relevant, and I started to see the whole picture as one whole piece in a different light. So this is only a fairly minor criticism, but at the time I was watching, I did feel a bit bored for 10 or 15 minutes there.

This is kind of backwards but it'd be cool to talk about the start now. This was a really brave move by Groening and co to jive at the network executives who cancelled and revived the show. Really funny though and I'm glad to see they've been given some artistic licence - even calling the delivery network "morons". One joke I didn't get the first time round was Leela talking about "our many fans", surrounded by actual desktop fans. They just had to make the language fit in with the universe of the show. This whole sequence was followed by intertitles in which for the first time we have the characters introduced by name - pretty well done I think.

There were a lot of references in this episode, both to past episodes and pop culture. To give a couple of examples: the Nibblonians come in and finally everyone finds out about them (last season they appeared but were secretive) and it's revealed that Bender was ultimately responsible for destroying New York (the scene seen in the very first episode "Space Pilot 3000"). As for pop-culture, there were references galore to The Terminator saga with Bender taking on that role against Fry (complete with the dark glasses) and also Star Wars during the battle sequence with the different methods of destroying a Death Star.

As is fairly normal for this show, there wasn't much character development. We pretty much know these characters by now, and they fall into their established stereotypes. Which isn't such a bad thing, as we can just relax and enjoy the laughter. One story that did fall a bit flat though was the whole Hermes-LaBarbara-Barbados love triangle. Just wasn't really that funny and felt like a time-filler.

I'd struggle to list my funniest moments from this episode but here's a few: Fry throwing the flowers in his bubble only to make it burst, Bender's comment "I hate auto-destruct sequence" on engaging his own, Fry and Bender's constant cloning during the middle part of the feature, and Nibbler's comment "everyone out of The Universe, quick!"

The last of these came in the final scene of the episode and set up a cliffhanger, which I'm reliably informed will be resolved or at least continued in the next episode, "The Beast With A Billion Backs". The universe is tearing apart, and Nibbler is nowhere to be seen. This episode showed a lot of promise and I'm glad I'm finally enjoying this show again.