We’re back, baby!
Well, sort of. You may have noticed that I am not beloved Avocado scribe Drunk Napoleon, who has reviewed all prior episodes of Futurama for the site. DN has since moved on to reviewing Seinfeld from the beginning (check those reviews out – they are awesome), and with a new season of Futurama now airing on Hulu, I thought I’d step up to the plate and keep the reviews going!
Wish I had a stronger episode to start with. “The One Amigo” is not, in the strictest sense of the word, a bad episode. It’s not painfully unfunny like “The Prince and the Product” or staggeringly offensive like “Neutopia” (admittedly, though, I’m not Mexican, so “The One Amigo” might come across differently for someone who is). It’s just really poorly constructed.
It’s got three plots going on, and while some effort is made to tie them together, those efforts are extremely weak, and none of the plots enhances the others the way they should.
First, we have Bender and Planet Express’s daycare getting in on NFT grifting. This plotline is over in the first few minutes – which is probably for the best, as it’s airing well after the NFT bubble has burst (when they did the countdown to launching Bender’s NFTs, I half-expected it to go “Three … Two … One … and NFTs are over now”). But this mini-plot isn’t just a random bit of fun before the episode really begins – it’s integral to setting up the other two plots that follow … and that setup is fumbled hard.
Of the two plots that follow, the main one is Bender going to Mexico and reconnecting with their extended robot family. And what prompts the trip is (get this) that selling a bunch of NFT photos of themself has sent Bender into an existential crisis. If other people own digital tokens representing Bender, that means they own the essence of Bender, so what does that leave Bender themself? Clearly, a trip back to their homeland is the only way to regain a sense of identity!
While a ridiculous chain of logic, this does kind of make sense for Bender. Central to Bender’s character are both a massive ego and a hyper-sensitivity to anything that threatens that ego. We’ve seen time and again that, if Bender feels like something is attacking the sacred principle “Bender is great!”, then no matter how tiny or imaginary the attack might be, Bender tends to spiral into erratic behavior (more erratic than usual, I mean).
The problem is this has no bearing on anything that happens to Bender in Mexico … and nothing that happens to Bender in Mexico has any bearing on what happens once Bender comes back (other than providing a handy resolve-the-plot-quickly trinket). You could drop this Mexico trip into any other episode, with the excuse that Bender was on vacation that week, and nothing about it would need to change. Even the writers seem aware of how tenuously the Mexico plot is connected to everything else – near the end, Bender tries drawing a parallel between finding their family and finding the pieces of themself represented by the NFTs, but quickly gives up on it as being too big of a stretch.
This sort of disconnectedness also affects the B-plot where the Planet Express crew plans a museum heist to steal back Bender’s NFTs. This could have been a lot of fun if they’d delved into the absurdity of trying to steal an NFT, especially since none of the characters understand what an NFT is. They could also have had fun with the characters trying to do a robbery on Bender’s behalf but without the help of their resident sexy-smart-aleck-burglar-robot, maybe with them arguing about how Bender would plan this robbery.
Instead, it’s just our heroes doing some heist movie spoofing for a bit, and none of it goes anywhere or matters to anything. They do the heist, get caught, are bailed out of jail with seemingly no consequences, and are told what they were trying to steal didn’t matter in the first place … after which, there’s still six minutes left in the episode, and in that time the heist B-plot is never mentioned again. You could lift this plot out entirely, and nothing would change.
But, okay, all right, you might be saying, “Raven, Futurama is a goofy comedy. Does it matter if the plot’s a mess, so long as it’s funny?” And, I’ll admit, “The One Amigo” is … slightly funny.
While I ragged on the museum heist for being nothing special, it does have some good physical comedy, and a couple inspired bits of absurdity. And I enjoyed Bender’s time in Mexico more than I expected to (I’m not normally a fan of sending Bender off on their own plot separate from the Planet Express crew – a little Bender goes a long way). It’s a good example of Futurama doing its Reverse Flintstones thing, where instead of using Stone Age technology to recreate modern society, they use futuristic technology to recreate an old-timey society. Think “The Deep South”, except instead of mermaids and Atlanta, it’s robots and Mexico.
Plus, Bender’s grandma was a hoot. The guileless joy they have stealing a family heirloom from Bender, that’s how you know Bender has truly found their kin.
But while there were a decent number of good gags, there were no great gags. And without a stronger story to bolster the gags up, the whole ep comes across as average bordering on mediocre. “The One Amigo” is just entertaining enough not to be a waste of time … but I can’t see myself ever going back to it for a rewatch. For most shows that’d be fine, acceptable, but with Futurama, I’ve come to expect a little more.
Stray Observation:
If you’re someone who’s a lot more down on the Hulurama revival than I am, and wish the show had ended back during the Fox or Comedy Central years, I have some good news. The presence of the finglonger in this episode indicates it is not set in the same continuity as the classic years, but instead in the alternate reality seen in “Anthology of Interest I”. So if you want to pretend none of this is even canon, there’s your out.