I went into “Scared Screenless” full of trepidation – my fault for reading the episode’s Wikipedia summary beforehand, ’cause that thing sent up a crapload of red flags.

I’m not alone in feeling that Futurama‘s attempts at “topical” humor have been, at best, mixed. And this particular topical topic, with young people becoming addicted to their electronic devices, seemed ripe for them to fall into old-man-yells-at-cloud cluelessness. Add in that this means focusing on the kids of the Planet Express crew … look, maybe someone out there has special fondness for Dwight, Cubert, or newcomer Axl, but I gotta concur with the fan consensus: that lot usually hovers somewhere between “tolerable” and “annoying”.

So imagine my surprise when “Scared Screenless” turned out to be, of all things, good.

A lot of factors play into that. An important one is that, while it focuses on the child characters, it lumps Bender in as being a child, too (which … fair). Having one of our main three characters take part in the kid story, not as a parent or antagonist or hanger-on, but as just another one of the gang: that goes a long way to keeping the comedy hopping.

Another important part is that it doesn’t even attempt to deliver an important message about the topic at hand. This satire is firmly in “both sides suck” mode: the kids are hopelessly addicted to their devices, yes, but the adults objecting to it are ignorant hypocrites. By the end, nothing about the issue is solved, except that we’ve had a bunch of laughs at their expense.

Also helping is that, for most of the episode, the kids aren’t pitted directly against their parents. Had the episode done that, we’d almost instinctively side with our main cast over these uppity whippersnappers. Instead, the kids are separated off early on, and pitted first against the dependably awful Zapp Brannigan, and then against a colony of back-to-nature hippies (the latest, quickly-pruned branch of the Waterfall clan). Those are opponents no one’s gonna have trouble rooting against (unless you’re a back-to-nature hippy yourself, in which case, why the hell do you have a Hulu subscription?)

But perhaps the episode’s greatest asset is just how fast it moves. Like, the bit where the kids are cut off from the Internet, turn to a street dealer of illicit wifi, and literally overdose on Internet content? In a lesser outing, we’d have spent half the episode driving that screens-are-drugs point into the ground. Instead, it’s one quick sequence of events, getting some good laughs, then quickly moving onto the next plot point, sending the kids camping with Zapp. And that only lasts a short while before the kids meet the hippies, and it’s not long after that that we get a hippy uprising. Couple that with two separate B-plots covering the Ladies Night Out and the Gentlemen’s Ladies Night Out, and this ep is jam-packed. No joke is allowed to wear out its welcome, no observation on how we use devices is given time to be done to death – it all just keeps moving along at brisk, snappy pace.

Might be my favorite episode of the season so far. Not a return to Futurama‘s golden years or anything, but still a very fun outing.

Stray Observations:

• The trees on that alien planet look a lot like the Truffula Trees from The Lorax. Given said planet is the home to tree-hugging hippies, I’m thinking that’s not a coincidence.
• Everything with the hippies justifying contradictions in their philosophy is great, from insisting the spaceship they used to escape technology was pedal-powered, to explaining they don’t kill the snipes for food – they just capture the snipes in nets, and the creatures die of fright.
• Some wonderfully Futuramish turns of phrase in this one: “I’ve had precisely enough of this!” “Everytime I see it, it only gets a little easier.” “You’re as bad as everyone else, only worse!” “The snipe! It fooled us by existing!”