Futurama is a science fiction show – that’s kind of undeniable. Robots and mutants and aliens and high-tech gizmos fill almost every scene in the series. However, what we mean by calling it science fiction … that can vary.
Truth is, most episodes of Futurama tell stories where, if you set them in the past or the present day and got rid of all the sci-fi stuff, the basic plot would still work. Roommates having a tiff, a failed attempt at an ecological protest, a murder mystery in an enclosed location: stories like those don’t need to be science fiction – Futurama just uses its sci-fi setting to inject extra absurdity into the proceedings.
Next most common in Futurama‘s roster are science fiction stories that are specifically about the science fiction genre, doing homages and parodies of stock sci-fi plots. These’d be your body swap stories, alien invasion stories, time travel stories – all the classics.
But, occasionally, Futurama will produce an episode that doesn’t merely use the tropes of the sci-fi genre, but actually embraces being science fiction in a more fundamental way.
The founding principle of science fiction is to imagine something that does not yet exist, that may never exist, and then asking: what would happen if it did? This is a storytelling approach Futurama doesn’t take very often, but when it does, it can produce either some of its most hilarious outings (what if time kept randomly leaping forward?) or some of its most philosophical (what if, drifting alone in space, you first became God and then met God?)
“The Numberland Gap” exists somewhere between those extremes. The world of numbers provides ample opportunities for absurdist humor, with a mix of jokes that you’ll need higher learning in math to get, and others that delight in their pun-based simplicity (I got a far bigger laugh than I should have out of 911 saying “You have the wrong number”). But it’s also used as an opportunity to muse on the nature of abstract math, and if appreciation for it can ever be fully divorced from the physical things math is meant to represent.
Both of those approaches work well, though they’re let down a bit by weak character arcs. The Professor is arguably the centerpiece of the episode, being the one who falls in and out of love with Numberland and rethinks their desire for pure, abstract thought. But until about halfway through, the Professor barely appears in the story – the task of discovering the strange numerical message and building the portal to Numberland falls to Amy, who then disappears for the back half of the story. So when we get to the climax with the Professor escaping Numberland, it doesn’t have the same oomph as if we’d been following their story the whole time.
(And, needless to say, Bender overcoming their fear of numbers is far too silly to carry any emotional impact.)
However, this episode has a unique charm that buoys it up: it is so clearly a labor of love. No one was asking them to make an episode about conversing with the abstract concepts of numbers. No algorithm or studio exec told them they needed to show a math theorem worked out on screen. No one was thinking that Danica McKellar and Georg Cantor were the celebrity appearances they really needed to draw in audiences.
This episode is some math nerds taking the opportunity to talk about a subject they love, a subject that much of the populace finds dull or confusing, and making a half hour of television out of it. That earnestness, and that willingness to be so niche and weird, gives “The Numberland Gap” an endearing quality that makes me smile. Well done.
Stray Observations:
- Fry being a paint-by-number artist doesn’t go much of anywhere, though the running gag of “Exquisite!” is a good one.
- The Professor insisting that all numbers must be equally interesting, otherwise there would be a least interesting number, whose unique status as the least interesting would make it interesting … I’m a sucker for utterly absurd yet perfectly logical statements.
- Also, the opening dinner scene, with Amy saying the key to great baked Alaska is first buying the real Alaska, and Bender competing with the kid to see who’s lazier: it’s all a nice bit of casual, just-hanging-out banter that we don’t often get much of.