Written by: Ari John Kaplan and Eric Kaplan
Directed by: Corey Barnes

“Not even the finest macaroni artist could capture your beauty. Though this one did!”

What was the point of that, exactly? This season has been criticised for relying so heavily on current events because it makes it feel like the writers are out of ideas, and my apologia for it has been that the show is quite capable of processing these concepts through its particular, peculiar vision and its particular, peculiar characters. This, I think, makes those accusations feel a little more on the money; it has the dual problems of rehashing a really hoary storyline really badly, and a weak bunch of smaller stories with almost no ideas of their own. My first consolation is that the show has always had a pattern of ‘one or two absolute bangers, one really bad episode, the rest above-average episodes per season’, and this is just their flop of the season.

“I love you! And I can’t afford to live without you!”

The best of these sections is the Legally Not Hot Wheels part, and even then it’s pretty weak. It’s the one that best fits the show’s usual approach of putting all different ideas in a blender, combining ‘what if the world was Hot Wheels’, a parody of The Ring (now there’s your non-contemporary reference), and the genuinely very funny idea of Zoidberg as a supervillain, the last of which carries us through some of the weaker ‘lolwheels’ jokes. The segments surrounding them are significantly weaker; never falling into outright offensiveness, but never actually feeling like a joke.

“I’m not gonna make it! Go on without me!”
“That was the plan.”

The way they do Fry and Leela so dirty is the most frustrating part of this whole thing. Whatever we might think of the Fry/Leela romance, it’s been a Northern Star to this show the entire run – the one thing it always treats with any seriousness and that acts as ballast for the comedy. It’s certainly been one of the more sophisticated elements of the show’s storytelling since the CC years, where I feel like the writers have allowed it to develop organically in ways I find quite meaningful – and this has continued into this season, even! It’s even worked especially well for me in the non-canon episodes like this; David X Cohen remarked on one of the commentaries that writing “Treehouse” style episodes for Futurama is harder than doing it for The Simpsons because the world is already wacky, and Fry’s love for Leela has usually been a good grounding for short stories. Having Leela throw what has been worked on for literal decades is embarrassing to watch, and the punchline wasn’t nearly funny enough to justify it.

Title Card: What chatbots talk about in their free time
Cartoon Billboard: “Soda Squirt”, 1933

“No! Villains have more charisma! You’re just boring.”

I do admit, the designs of the King and Prince of Space are pretty cool, as well as the horse-things that Leela and the Prince joust on. The joke that bothers me most is the recycling of the “X? Perhaps. Y? Perhaps not!” joke structure.

“The water doesn’t have an end, numbduck.”

The title is a reference to The Prince And The Pauper by Mark Twain. As stated, one section parodies The Ring.

Biggest Laugh: “My name’s Fry. Is that your name?”