[FUT] Bender's Game

TV Programme: Futurama
Season: 5
Episode: 9-12
Date I watched this episode: 02/08/2009
Time since I last watched this programme: 14 days.

I had quite high expectations of this episode. Okay so I saw the trailer, and I saw the Lord Of The Rings references, and thought that was pretty cool. But pop culture references aren't enough, and this just turned out to be a parody (of both LOTR and Star Wars), and not a very good one at that. The "parody" itself didn't even start until over half way through the episode, whereas the rest of the episode seemed to be devoted to incidental nonsense!

Well in general this episode was just too geeky to be able to be any good. Obviously based largely around Dungeons & Dragons, and in large part taking place within Bender's imagination, the jokes were mildly funny to begin with but just got repetitive and boring. The involvement of "Mom" and her cronies was just annoying more than anything, even in the flashback sequences which didn't seem to add anything, and even the shocking revelation that Ignus is Farnsworth's son was just cringeworthy.

The "Leela's anger collar" storyline, together with the entire Demolition Derby sequence, just felt like complete filler. Leela is well known for having a bad temper, it's just who she is, and wasn't any worse in this episode than in the past. Not much more to say on that I'm afraid, it was just pointless.

There were a couple of redeeming features. Firstly, I liked how each character had a different representation in the parody universe. Zoidberg the sidekick had to be Sam, flirtatious Amy had to be the lady of the swamps and Leela had to be a revolutionary centaur. It really did fit quite well with the actual personalities of the characters.

The other thing was the Nibbler backstory (incidentally, how on earth did Nibbler manage to get back into the Universe after leaving it during "Bender's Big Score"?) The fact that he was named by Leela doesn't make a whole lot of sense as his race are also called the Nibblonians, but seeing his peoples' history and enslavement was interesting.

I'm guessing that the method of transport demonstrated at the end was only a joke. I don't know if it will be mentioned again that we need an alternate source of fuel, but obviously they need something to power their spaceships. I have a sneaking suspicion that this will be merely glossed over though.

Admittedly this episode was slightly more fun to watch than "The Beast With A Billion Backs" but not much. Certainly both of them pale in comparison next to the brilliant "Bender's Big Score". But I can sort of see what they were doing with this film, so hopefully with a better spark of an idea, the final episode of this season can be a lot better.