If “Beauty and the Bug” felt like a good episode from the Fox years, “One Is Silicon and the Other Gold” feels like an average episode from the Comedy Central years. All the hallmarks of CC era Futurama are here:

• Unusual character teamup
• Interesting premise
• Lackluster payoff
• Hit-or-miss jokes
• Spoofing of “current” events

Let’s go over each of those elements in order.

In the world of television, main characters rarely have any close relationships outside the core cast. Even when the ensemble’s not meant to be close friends, but just an assortment of co-workers, they’ll still spend all their holidays together, be the only people who show up when one of them’s in the hospital, share all their most life-defining moments with each other, etc. After all, who wants to see them go through all that rich stuff with some supporting character that we, the audience, barely know?

However, this can have an unintended side-effect: since many shows have only one or two women in their main cast, we get the impression that these women don’t have any female friends. If the show’s writers notice this, they’ll often address it in the show itself, having the female regular move away from their male friend group for an episode and seek out some female bonding.

So putting Leela in a bookclub-turned-wineclub with Amy, LaBarbara, Dr. Cahill, a sewer mutant named Vyolet, and PERFECTLY NORMAL WOMAN Phoebe – I get the impulse behind it.

And the premise cooked up for this motley crew ain’t half bad!

In a show full of slackers, underachievers, and lunatics, Leela has always been the competent one, the one person who actually cares about being good at what they do. Usually that makes Leela the straight man to the others’ wacky antics, but on occasion we’ve seen how that drive to be competent can be its own wacky quirk. So it’s both endearing and very true to form that Leela would spend months befriending a chatbot, getting their friendship skills up to par before going out into the wild and making a flesh friend. And said chatbot growing jealous of Leela’s non-digital friends and seeking revenge? Great story hook!

But then we run into the lackluster payoff I mentioned earlier. It’s a great idea for an episode, but the episode itself doesn’t do much with it. We barely see anything of Leela and Chatbot Chelsea, and what we do get doesn’t show us much of their dynamic. Then Chelsea’s rampage at the winery is over almost as soon as it begins. And the episode ends rather abruptly after doing its big twist, without expanding on it in any interesting ways.

If I went back into script doctor mode, my instinct would be to expand on all that stuff. Focus more Leela and Chelsea’s “friendship” early on, build it up before having Leela make meatbag friends. Then, at the winery, have Chelsea make a lot more attacks on the Women of the Wine, so we can actually see the women bonding together as they fight this chatbot menace. And at the funeral, after Chelsea reveals their master plan to foster friendship among the women by giving them a tragedy and a common enemy to bond over? It feels like you need a little something more. Like, when they fail at killing Chelsea (who’s just software hosted on servers all over the world), have the Women of the Wine realize there’s only one way to get revenge: stop being friends with each other, driving the chatbot to self-destruction at having failed its objective. This’d make for a suitably cynical & subversive Futurama ending, having everyone triumphantly celebrate their friendships being over.

Except … to make room for all that stuff, you’d have to cut out the InfyrnoFest opening and the B-plot about the men forming a rival bookclub. And that’s where all the best jokes are!

There are a few good laughs involving Leela and friends (breaking the giant bottle of wine with a model ship, for instance), but in this episode’s hit-or-miss comedy, they got most of the misses. The funniest bits are all tangential stuff: Fry quoting The Adventure Boys at a funeral, John Steinbeck being at bookclub, and everything involving InfyrnoFest.

This is where we get to the use of not-so-current events. It’s a lampooning of Fyre Festival that some would say is about six years too late. But as someone who barely paid attention to Fyre Fest news even when it was fresh, I approached it as a parody of over-hyped/under-delivered events in general, and as that, it’s gold!

The festival itself has some great gags, like the miniature “VIP Villa”, or the runner about bologna, but the real standout is the Plan Ex crew watching the commercial at the beginning. Just so many great lines coming at you rapidfire!

• “An event so awesome it could only be called InfyrnoFest!” – “Every other name was taken.”
• “Two hundred bands on three hundred stages!”
• “*yawn* Just another music festival.” – “InfyrnoFest is not just another music festival!” – “*gasps* I was wrong, Bender!”
• “It’s an audio-sensory quest to disrupt the impossible and transcend the transformative!” *head explodes*
• “We need tickets fast! Can I buy ’em by just thinking about it?” – “Apparently.”
• “Did we mention the belly-busting buffet?” – “No! Why did you keep it a secret!?”

Without that opening, I’d probably rate “One Is Silicon and the Other Gold” as a dud – but there’s enough laughs in those first few minutes, the episode crawls its way up to just barely average.

Stray Observations:

• I’ve long thought Gravity Falls and Futurama have a very similar sense of humor, so I couldn’t watch this jealous chatbot plot without being reminded of a much better version of the concept in Giffany.
• Chatbot Chelsea (and robot avatar Phoebe) are just so, so bland. On the one hand, that is absolutely the sort of virtual friend Leela would seek out. But on the other … it’s just not very funny.
• Leela’s best friend is a chatbot? Sad and pathetic. Fry’s best friend is a bendingbot? Perfectly normal. And they somehow went the whole episode without once acknowledging the incongruity for a joke. That, good fellows, is unforgivable!
• Okay, I criticized the main plot for having few laughs, but the giant mechanical foot that has to take its giant mechanical shoe off before stomping grapes? A+, right there.
• Also, it’s such a small thing, but it made me chuckle anyway: Leela’s funeral tank top.