Surfing Cartoons: Futurama – “Ghost in the Machines”
Check out these Futurama spoilers while I go watch the Parade Day Parade…
Based on my limited reading of Internet comments, it feels like there’s a fight starting to break out among Futurama fans. One side are those who think that the newer episodes of the series produced since its return on Comedy Central are markedly worse than those from way back when on Fox, that now the show is just repeating itself. Then there are those who think the members of the first camp are overvaluing the old episodes and nitpicking the newer ones, and that the new incarnation of Futurama is just as amusing as the old. “Ghost in the Machines” was the sort of episode that only exacerbates such a dispute. It reused a bunch of elements from way back in the Futurama archives, included the Robot Devil, the Robot Preacher, Scruffy, suicide booths, etc., etc. They even reused a joke from way back in the day: “Time to let my guard down, even for a minute.” On the other hand, well, wasn’t all that stuff well done and a lot of fun?
I suppose on another show this week’s plot might qualify as a particularly dark installment. After all, the main plot centers around Bender killing himself (or setting himself to get murdered by a vengeful ex-girlfriend/suicide booth) and then ending up caught between worlds, stuck as a ghost. He can only interact with the world by possessing various machines. Follow this up with him making a deal with the Robot Devil to haunt Fry until he’s scared to death, and we have an episode. Of course, only on Futurama would Fry eventually decide to escape all the infernal haunted machines by moving to “the Amish Homeworld.” And only on Futuramawould Bender’s change of heart eventually end in him possessing Robot God (who is, of course, also a machine) until he’s allowed to just go home.
There are moments when I could do with smaller doses of Bender on this series, but somehow this episode didn’t quite stray into that territory. It had an Exorcist homage and a random Ghostbusters IIreference, after all. My favorite parts would have to be the appearance by the “Sacramental Firewall” (part of any good robot ghost exorcism) and the Amish Spaceship. Plus, this being Futurama, we had to have an in-jokey scientific explanation for machine life after death… Bender’s software has just been uploaded to the Cloud. His data is now everywhere.
Bits:
-”When I was boy, we had a parade every day! Those were dark times…”
-Loving wife to nerd in “Chicks Dig Paleontologists” shirt: “Oh honey, I dig you so much!”
-”Bender, you always say you’re gonna kill yourself, but you almost never do!”
-”My mom tried to commit suicide in me.”
-”The number you have dialed has been lame since 1989.”
-”Fry’s dead you say? Funny, that’s not what it says on his Wikipedia page!”
-”Survived the heart attack?! Damn you Obamacare!”
-Fry, apropos of nothing: “It sure was nice of the Mayor’s Wife to have sex with me.”
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