Surfing Cartoons: Futurama – “Law & Oracle”
IS THE CAT ALIVE OR DEAD!? FUTURAMA SPOILERS COMING UP!
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Sometimes an episode wins you over in spite of yourself. I was prepared for “Law & Oracle” to be a meaningless throwaway maybe four minutes in, right about at the point that Fry decides to quit his Planet Express job and become a policeman. Of course, it was a meaningless throwaway. But you know, sometimes it’s okay for a comedy to drop everything else and just try to be funny, and that’s where Futurama succeeded for this week. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I was (literally, mind you) laughing out loud more during “Law & Oracle” than I was during any other Futurama installment this season (of “half-season,” whatever). Some of the jokes were very smart and some were very stupid. But it was all working for me.
Perhaps this was because this episode felt even weirder than most of this show’s for me, and my sense of humor leans decidedly toward the weird. The A-plot, in which Fry joins the police and turns out to be way better at that than he ever was at delivering stuff, eventually settles down into a Minority Report parody, of all things. This turned out in even more bizarre way than that movie did, complete with “prediction proof glass.” Meanwhile, the Planet Express gang discovers that, though they can’t put their finger on what Fry did, he was an essential member of the team. Bender and Leela go on a disastrous mission to Pandora… yes, the planet from Avatar, where Leela can’t see anything because she only has one eye and the planet is “in 3-D.” At the end Fry is welcomed back with open arms, and it’s like nothing ever happened.
However, this one of those episodes where describing the plot does not do it justice. For example, there is at one point a lengthy motorcycle chase that turns into a Tronparody. Eventually, the stop the suspect and he turns out to be named Schroedinger, and he has a box in the passenger seat containing a cat and “a bunch of drugs.” This was one of those weeks where stuff like that happened all the damn time. At this point it’s become clear that Futurama isn’t going to put Fry and Leela together or have some ongoing plot or change the status quo in some meaningful way, so honestly I would be okay if there were more episodes like this on the horizon.
Bits:
-One great part of this episode was that it introduced some great new, possible recurring characters rather than just falling back on old ones, such as the lady sergeant.
-My biggest laugh of the episode, I’m somewhat embarrassed to say, may have been when Bender slaps the guard dog with the steak.
-Or possibly the sudden title card “PUT ON 3-D GLASSES ONE MINUTE AGO”
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