The Officially Awesome Futurama Season 7 / Volume 6 Time!
- Thread starter bigdaddy
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Enjoyable, but not one of the greats. It felt too much like the overdone Simpsons routine where Homer gets a new job for a week. And too much of it depended on parody/imitation of other pop-culture works, from Police Academy to TRON to Avatar to Minority Report. But it also had some inspired moments like the pursuit and arrest of Erwin Schroedinger. "That's a violation of Lorenz invariance, mm-hmm." (I also liked the "early retirement" bit.) And they managed to elevate the Minority Report knockoff by having it be the setup for a pretty nice Fry-Bender story. Humor that grows out of character is more satisfying than humor that grows out of pop-culture pastiche.
And even as pastiche humor goes, the selection could've been better. I mean, what has TRON got to do with police work? Surely there are more "future cop" movies they could've drawn on than just Minority Report. What about Demolition Man or RoboCop? Heck, wasn't there actually a movie called Futurecop?
And when they told us to put on our 3-D glasses one minute ago, does that actually make the scene 4-D?
And even as pastiche humor goes, the selection could've been better. I mean, what has TRON got to do with police work? Surely there are more "future cop" movies they could've drawn on than just Minority Report. What about Demolition Man or RoboCop? Heck, wasn't there actually a movie called Futurecop?
And when they told us to put on our 3-D glasses one minute ago, does that actually make the scene 4-D?
Phew. It's a good sign that, with a premise that lends itself to comedy, the show is still good.
The problem is definitely that they're out of ideas and stretching. Imagine if they tried to do a full episode parodying Avatar or Tron. They'd be back into lame mode because while there are plenty of things about those movies to sneer at, that's not the same as them being natural comedy fodder. Relegating them to brief bits is just about right.
What other premises could they do that they haven't tried? Maybe Fry could take another stab at a law enforcement career and this time be assigned to the Psi Cops. Being able to read minds should lend itself to hilarity.
Maybe they should just start working their way through the Twilight Zone catalog.
Damn, they sure missed that joke!
The problem is definitely that they're out of ideas and stretching. Imagine if they tried to do a full episode parodying Avatar or Tron. They'd be back into lame mode because while there are plenty of things about those movies to sneer at, that's not the same as them being natural comedy fodder. Relegating them to brief bits is just about right.
What other premises could they do that they haven't tried? Maybe Fry could take another stab at a law enforcement career and this time be assigned to the Psi Cops. Being able to read minds should lend itself to hilarity.
Maybe they should just start working their way through the Twilight Zone catalog.
Damn, they sure missed that joke!
It's called The Scary Door!
Give me a whole episode of that, and I'd be happy. Maybe like anthology of interest, but The Scary Door, and throw in the main characters. Ok, so maybe that wouldn't stretch out to more than the 5 second parodies they do, but at least they've made a start."Why should I trust you? You're Hitler!"
I think this week's episode is easily the best since this half of the season started, maybe since it came back as a series. I found it quite funny the whole way through, and it had a good storyline without getting stupid. It felt like it could have been a solid season 4 episode.
This was my least favorite of the new batch so far, but it wasn't terrible. I just always found the robot mafia a little stupid.
For some reason, I found "Bella"'s clanging bell as she walked to be extremely obscene
Speaking of obscene, isn't this the first time they ever had bleeped cursing? I liked it!
For some reason, I found "Bella"'s clanging bell as she walked to be extremely obscene
Speaking of obscene, isn't this the first time they ever had bleeped cursing? I liked it!
I was disappointed when they had Zoidberg used bleeped cursing as well as Clamps. I was hoping there'd be a joke that Clamps was self-bleeping, that that was actually what it sounded like to the characters. Missed opportunity.
Not one of the greats, but not bad. Had a number of good silly jokes. ("Jury tampering" -- heh. And cute that the court for robot crimes is the Battery Park Integrated Circuit Court.) Nice touch that Phil LaMarr was doing a Robert Stack impression as the Earth Bureau of Investigation robot agent. And we actually get to meet the Space Pope! Though it's disturbing that he seems to be tight with the Robot Mafia.
It was a nice touch to revisit the Moon farmer's family from episode 2. Though I saw it coming a mile away that "Billy West" actually wasn't Bender. After all, we've met Flexo, so we know Bender has lookalikes from the same mold (although it's odd that Billy isn't a bending unit).
I was kind of hoping the story would go in a different direction -- like, a relationship forms between Fry and Clamps/Francis and Clamps ends up being unable to kill Fry's friend because of it. But it was nice to see Zoidberg step up and have a Crowning Moment of Awesome, even if the basis of his conflict with Clamps was rather silly.
Good episode, but odd...there doesn't seem to be any sci fi concept behind it, other than the inherent sci fi-ness of having robots as main characters, the moon as a setting, etc.
Maybe this is where the show needs to go. Straining to pull stories out of whatever sci fi premises they haven't tackled results in awkward unfunniness. This ep was simply character-based comedy and was one of the better ones.
Makes sense that there would be more robots who look like Bender out there. Didn't he come from a factory?
Hey, I love the Robot Mafia. Futurama has a deep enough roster of crazy characters that they might be able to just get away with ditching the sci fi parody concept for good, and going for straight character based comedy. That's not something where you can "run out of ideas."
Isn't it about time to do a Zap Brannigan/Kif episode? What's Morbo up to lately? How about an episode that focuses only on the heads-in-jars? Do they have their own society, sitting there on the shelves?
Maybe this is where the show needs to go. Straining to pull stories out of whatever sci fi premises they haven't tackled results in awkward unfunniness. This ep was simply character-based comedy and was one of the better ones.
Makes sense that there would be more robots who look like Bender out there. Didn't he come from a factory?
Why is he a crocodile?
Hey, I love the Robot Mafia. Futurama has a deep enough roster of crazy characters that they might be able to just get away with ditching the sci fi parody concept for good, and going for straight character based comedy. That's not something where you can "run out of ideas."Isn't it about time to do a Zap Brannigan/Kif episode? What's Morbo up to lately? How about an episode that focuses only on the heads-in-jars? Do they have their own society, sitting there on the shelves?
There are two interpretations there. Either Morbo's bluster about our imminent conquest by his people is true and our days are numbered, or it's just empty talk to compensate for his insecurities or something. Either possibility has comic potential. And either way, I would like to see Morbo's bluff called.
I think this is why I liked the episode so much. I see Futurama as a comedy cartoon that happens to have scifi elements. When they try to do full on scifi, they sometimes lose focus imo. I like it when they do a more realistic story that has scifi elements to give it an interesting twist, which I find funnier.
This storyline was something that a present day show could do. Someone testifies against the mob and has to go into witness relocation. The scifi was used to add humour and interest to the story, rather than the basis for the plot. I think it worked successfully.
I disagree. One thing that makes Futurama better than most attempts at comedy SF (like Red Dwarf before it, at least in its strongest seasons) is that it isn't just a sitcom with sci-fi trappings, but a full-fledged science fiction show in its own right. The episodes that are just stock sitcom plots dressed up with superficial futuristic elements are typically their weakest. The strongest are the ones that really use a science-fiction premise to explore characters and ideas in a way that couldn't be done without the speculative element -- "Parasites Lost," "Godfellas," "The Why of Fry," "The Devil's Hands are Idle Playthings," and the like. That's the strength of science fiction as a genre -- it gives you whole new ways of telling stories, of exploring human nature and characters' personalities and relationships in ways that would simply never be possible in a conventional story. And Futurama is one of the few SF sitcoms with the imagination and intelligence to embrace that potential and use it to tell innovative comedy stories, rather than just rehashing stock sitcom formulas dressed up with parodies of old sci-fi movies. (Or rather, Futurama has done plenty of that shallow rehashing, but at its strongest it's far more than that.)
These latest episodes have been a return to form after some of the shaky ones when they first returned. I hadn't really been watching and was pleasently surprised to find the episodes better when I happened to chance upon a couple recently.
Well the best episodes do seem to be the ones where they blend the two elements seamlessly. I love Parasites Lost (one of my very favourite episodes), because while the plot is based on the science fiction idea of worms improving him, and shrinking down to defeat them, at its heart I see it as a character episode, with a lot of humour, even though the the science fiction element is essential to tell the story. And I like Godfellas too. Half of the story is Fry searching for his lost friend, and the Bender half of the story had a good mix of humour.
So you're right that the science fiction has allowed them to explore a lot of these elements. When they use it in balance, I have no problem with it, because most cartoons these days do equally crazy stuff anyway (not usually science fiction oriented though, although sometimes).
But I don't like The Why of Fry. It's one of the perfect examples of when they take it too far to me. Once they got into their head that there was some great cosmic relevance to Fry getting frozen, and him fighting these science fiction wars against alien races, those are by far the weakest episodes to me (aside from some of the recent duds since they came back which don't succeed with the humour and emotional elements either). And I felt the movies were mostly bad because they had more science fiction based plots to fill movie length, instead of more casual stuff.
Bender's Big Score felt like it was written for the sake of a time travel story first, with the rest shoehorned in badly. Bender's Game felt like an alternate reality story first, and The Beast With A Billion Backs was an alien monster story first. Once the scifi element becomes too prominent and the focus, they get weak.
Of course this is mostly bad writing, and the pre-movie episodes hit the mark the majority of the time, but I'd still say that most of my disliked episodes would be the ones where they tried too hard to be a science fiction show, without it being used to supplement the comedy and the exploration of the characters.
They're best when they remember that they're not a science fiction show for the sake of science fiction. They're a science fiction comedy. You're right that the scifi element is what sets it apart and allows them to do original ideas, but it only works when it's in balance with the rest. The episodes where the lose sight of that and use it for the sake of science fiction alone are the weakest imo. And the strongest ones to me are the ones where they are doing everyday things, but adding a science fiction twist.
Maybe we have different definitions of when these elements make an episode "science fiction" though. Because you could argue that all science fiction is best when it's used merely to drive the story, rather than as the sole focus.
But what I'm saying is that those aren't separate. It's totally, profoundly false to define it as a choice between a science fiction story and a character story. Science fiction, the real stuff as opposed to the sci-fi fluff that usually passes for it in the mass media, isn't just about showing weird stuff, it's about positing a hypothetical situation and exploring its consequences. E.g. you don't just postulate that teleportation exists, you explore how it transforms human society, customs, and morals. You don't just assert that immortality is achieved, you examine how it transforms people and their relationships. Science fiction stories are about people, but they're about exploring people in ways that can't be done without the SF premises. Take away the SF postulates, or reduce them to mere surface trappings (like, say, robot wrestlers instead of human wrestlers), and all you have left are stock situations that have already been done in a million other stories and can't really let you examine your characters with the freshness and depth that you can with science-fictional premises.
I mean, look at Fry and Leela. Most of the episodes that have advanced their relationship were driven by fantastic events that transformed them or their reality and allowed them to see each other (or themselves) in ways they otherwise couldn't have. If the parasites or the Robot Devil's hands hadn't given Fry the means to express his feelings and show Leela what a good heart he had beneath the surface, if the events of "The Sting" hadn't let Leela experience the scenario of Fry's death and ultimately be saved by his devotion, if the time-travel hijinks of Bender's Big Score hadn't allowed Leela to get to know an older, more mature Fry, then their relationship never would've advanced. It was the SF that drove and enabled the character growth. They were integral parts of a whole.
But that's not about being science fiction, it's about being big and epic. Those are two separate things. Yes, sometimes an SF story can focus too much on the events and ideas and not ground them in character, but that's not intrinsic to what science fiction is, as I've explained. If anything, it's missing the point of true science fiction, which is to explore not just the ideas themselves, but their human consequences.
And by the same token, they're best when they remember that they are a science fiction comedy, a show where the humor and characterization arise organically from the SF concepts, rather than just a run-of-the-mill sitcom with superficial futuristic trappings and sci-fi TV/movie parody references tossed in. The bad SF sitcoms (and the bad Futurama episodes) are those that treat SF as merely dressing on unimaginative, conventional sitcom plots. (Like the live-action version of The Tick, most of whose episodes were just warmed-over Seinfeld scripts with the characters happening to wear funny costumes. The only actually interesting episodes of that show were the ones where the comedy actually arose from the superhero concepts, and there were only 2 or 3 of those.)
I can agree with you up to the last sentence. The weakest ones are the ones that could just be ordinary everyday sitcom stories but substitute robots and alien planets for the ordinary stuff. As you said, it works when the concepts and the characters are in balance. And when the SF elements are reduced to superficial trappings on a wrestling parody or a mob-drama parody or an Animal House parody, that's losing the balance just as badly as if they overemphasize the high-concept stuff at the expense of the characters.
And what I emphatically object to is the false premise that those aren't the same thing. Science fiction is not just about ideas, it's about the human consequences of those ideas. That's what it's supposed to be. That's what it is when it's done right. Unfortunately, most of what passes for SF in the media gets it wrong, and that's what's given you this fundamental misconception that story and character are somehow not intrinsic to what science fiction is.
Some of my favorite episodes have been ones that parody a sci-fi trope like time travel, subterranean mutants, robot societies, parallel realities, Starfleet-style interstellar militaries, crazy aliens who are pompous monsters, disembodied brains or gelatinous blobs, etc. But I've been worried they've simply run out of all the "good ideas" and are starting to reach. In that case, they should fall back on character comedy and simply draw from the already established roster of characters.
The Why of Fry is my favorite Futurama ep of all time - I do appreciate the clever way they parody sci fi tropes - I just wonder whether it's time they need to move on, not because they want to, but out of necessity. What's left to parody? The only thing I can think of is mind-reading cops of the Psi Cops type. Have they ever done a full-fledged Mirror Universe parody? It seems familiar but there are too many eps for me to remember them all.
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