Good news, everyone! We have a new Futurama review to share with you!
In Thursday night’s episode, Amy leaves Kiff due to him being a wimp and finds herself falling in the arms of Bender, thus engaging in (mentioned but never shown until now) robosexual activities. Of course, robosexuality is a taboo in the year 3000 and looked down on by both humans and robots due to it’s unnatural display of love (even though it’s ok for ghost and horse to marry). As society looks at disgust at them and tries to “cure” them, Bender and Amy instead lead a pro-robosexuality march in the hope that it will allow them to love each other in whatever way they so choose.
Let’s take a look at the episode behind the jump. As always, spoilers are discussed, and while Futurama certainly isn’t a show where spoilers hurt the show’s plot, I still urge you to watch the episode first.
This episode was pretty evenly split between stuff I liked and stuff I didn’t really care for, and the split is pretty even. Up until the 18 or so minute point, I found the episode to be a lot of fun. But around the time when it got a tad bit preachy, my already tired brain began to tune out.
Here’s the thing about the episode: we knew the episode would obviously would be taking shots at Prop 8 and what happened over in California. That wasn’t a big secret. It’s just the way that it went about it that didn’t really work. I don’t really support this new angle of social commentary because I think Futurama has been doing fine without it for years, but there certainly isn’t much I can do about it. However, while the episode started out with the obvious intent of heading towards social commentary, for the first 18 or so minutes it was just pure Futurama goodness. There were jokes, I had laughs, and some great little character moments (such as Morbo’s opinions on Jim). That was all great.
Once the episode jumped into heavy handed commentary, though, I stopped appreciating it as much. I get it: people on the left disagree with people on the right and feel the need to share it consistently. I’m all for anyone who wants to get married getting married if it makes them happy. But do I need this in Futurama, a show that I’m watching due to it’s comical space travel antics? No, I don’t. Leave it to the folks at South Park and stick to what Futurama is best at, because with two episodes of the commentary done and over with, I’m already a tad tired of it.
The other thing I noticed in this episode that had initially come to mind in the previous one is that the endings of Futurama are very rushed this season. Usually the episode plays out with the odd jokes and situations and everything seems natural up until the point where the show needs to end, at which point some sort of conclusion is rushed to, a lesson is learned, and everybody moves on. It was really apparent last episode with the boil, but this episode is what made me notice it as a recurring trend. I’m going to go ahead and blame this as a side effect of the gear switching to social commentary, because most previous Futurama episodes had a very natural way of story telling.
The long and short of it is – the episode is still funny, but I’m already weary of Futurama trying to jump on the social commentary bandwagon. It’s not what I want to get out of the show, and it’s also fairly unfunny. I think that when Futurama sticks to backhanded comments and little jokes to make fun of the 20th century, then it’s great. When they spend an episode trying to drill a certain point home, they lose some of the charm, and at the very worst they risk alienating viewers of differing opinions. It’s a tricky gamble to embark in, and is something they should honestly think twice about when moving forward with the show. The Futurama formula is simple: Fry and Bender or Zoidberg do something funny and stupid, write around that. There’s no need to focus on what’s going on in the real world here.
