I’m gonna breeze past the bulk of this episode (long story short: it’s decent, few good jokes, nothing special, C+ bordering on B-), ’cause I want to focus on that ending.

This isn’t the sort of ending Futurama normally does. Normally, the show ends each episode with a return to status quo, with all plotlines either wrapped up or dismissed as unimportant, and everything going back to the way it was when the episode began. But that’s not what happens here.

We see that all the clothes people are discarding into trashcan wormholes have fallen upon an unsuspecting planet, wiping out its civilization. Then we find out said planet is actually Earth in the future, and our closing shot is of the first wave of civilization-destroying clothes falling down upon the world, with no clue as to how this apocalypse might be averted.

And I’m left in a puzzlement, ’cause I can’t tell what this ending is meant to be.

It’s possible this is a genuine cliffhanger, setting up a problem that the next episode will have to solve. This isn’t entirely without precedent on Futurama: both Bender’s Big Score and Into the Wild Green Yonder ended on cliffhangers that were addressed (half-assedly) in the next installment. But those were movies, and operated on a different story structure from the rest of Futurama. The show proper has never ended a regular ol’ episode on a cliffhanger before. But then, it’s no longer a network show from the 2000’s or a cable show from the 2010’s – it’s a streaming show from the 2020’s, where serialization and episode-ending cliffhangers are the norm, so maybe the series is belatedly hopping on that bandwagon.

Then again, it’s possible this wasn’t meant to be a cliffhanger at all. It’s possible the end of the world was just a dark joke to close out the episode, and our next ep will begin with everything back to normal, never mentioning how they averted the clothespocalypse. This isn’t without precedent, either. “The Futurama Holiday Spectacular” ended each of its three segments with apocalyptic events that were never referenced again, but the fact that the segments blatantly contradicted each other (with characters killed in one reappearing alive in the next) clued us in that the whole episode was never meant to be part of the show’s continuity. Then there’s “When Aliens Attack”, which ended with Earth in ruins, only for everything to be fine next episode – but in that case, it was explicitly a joke about how TV shows always have things return to normal. Point is, when Futurama has previously done episodes whose events will just be ignored, it’s been obvious within the episodes themselves that that’s what was happening.

We don’t get that here. There’s nothing within “Attack of the Clothes” to indicate that Fashiongeddon is just a joke whose consequences will disappear between episodes. It plays out like a very conventional cliffhanger – the only thing making me doubt its cliffhanger status is the meta-knowledge that Futurama doesn’t really do cliffhangers like this.

So whether it’s meant to be a cliffhanger or a don’t-worry-about-it joke, the ending doesn’t work. Instead of being in suspense for next week or laughing at Earth being destroyed for the lulz, I’m just left confused, uncertain what sort of ending this is meant to be. Regardless of what they were going for, they needed to make their intent clearer.

(Of course, the next episode of Futurama will be released just twelve hours after this review goes up, so I’m well aware all the above speculation is going to become dated fast. Them’s the breaks.)