Surfing SF: Futurama – “The Late Philip J. Fry”
“Slow down, I’ll shoot Hitler out the window…”
In the year 2525, if man is still alive, there will be Futurama spoilers…
This was the best episode Futurama has had since its return, and man was it spectacular. We also learned that the show can span billions, nay, trillions of years, and still really be about Fry and Leela. In the meantime, the writers of this episode got to throw everything at the wall, and appear to have had almost all of it miraculously stick. In one episode we got wounded soldiers surrounded by mountains of skulls lamenting “We created them to make our lives better…”, a futuristic all female paradise inviting Fry to a “fertility banquet” (Fry’s response: “I could eat. And fertilize.”), messages send through time using the geologic process of stalagmite formation, and a time period where giraffes have enslaved humans and eaten all the leaves. If this did not make you happy I think it may be time for us to see other people.
This episode sent Fry, the Professor, and Bender hurtling forward through time in a “forward-only” time machine invented by the Professor. Unable to get back to the present, they decide to keep going forward until they reach a time where a machine that can travel backwards in time is invented. This climaxes in what might be the piece de resistance of the entire series, with Fry, Bender, and the Professor kicking back with a six pack and watching the end of the universe. And then being surprised by the Second Big Bang, which leads to even greater hijinks. Meanwhile, we get a chance to see how Planet Express would have evolved without the three guys in the future, and learn that with Leela at the helm and Hermes’ apparently becoming a head attached to a pogo stick, the company becomes a huge success. But though Leela eventually marries Cubert (!), and then divorces him, she never forgets Fry…
In the end the episode is too madcap to simply be described, and must be experienced for oneself. It was obviously created by folks who had seen all the major time travel-related works, and decided to do them one better. Everything from The Time Machine to Planet of the Apes gets thrown into a blender and comes out maybe even a little better than before. On top of that, there’s enough sheer randomness (“This universe is ten feet lower than the old universe!” what?) to fill out two episodes on its own. Since the show has come back, it has almost suffered from having too many ideas at once. Here, it manages to make all those ideas come together into something great.
Bits:
-I think my favorite bit of all might have been the Time Machine homage, where the human race has split in an “intellectually and morally advanced” race above ground and the brutish “Dumblocks” below ground. Our team skips forward five years and finds the Dumblocks beating the dead bodies of the “intellectually advanced” race with clubs.
-Somebody needs to make a cave restaurant like “Cavern on the Green”. It would be cool. Also points for creative use of geology.
-This may be the sweetest TV episode of all time that ends with a robot burying the body of his temporal duplicate under a bridge.
-The shout-outs to past episodes here were great as well. Of course we had to mention Fry being his own grandfather, but we also got to see Elzar and Hedonism-bot again, the latter getting to deliver the most groan-worthy orgy-related catastrophe line I’ve ever heard: “I was surrounded by bodies! And then there was an explosion!”
-Another great section of the episode was the homage to/parody of “In the Year 2525″, one of the weirdest hits of the past fifty years. I’ll bet there are plenty of young geeks out there who have not heard the original of this song, and they are living dull, colorless lives. This was number one for six weeks in the summer 1969. Check it out here and then try to wrap your brain around that. You can’t, can you?
So, what did you think of all this? Were you as happy as I was?
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