This season, I’ve often found myself comparing the quality of an episode’s plot to the quality of its jokes, and wondering if one of those being good enough can make up for the other being lousy. This week, that conundrum got kicked into overdrive.
On a line-by-line, joke-by-joke basis, “Wicked Human” is an absolute hoot, easily the funniest episode of the season so far. The Professor being cantankerous is one of the show’s best comedic routines, and it’s used excellently here, along with so many other great bits: Amy’s de-programming, Cult-Aid, Zoidberg being a pet, the chum bucket (“Hi, chum!”), the ceiling that people keep forgetting to close …
If this episode had aimed to be a simple, anything-for-a-laugh joke fest, it’d be an unqualified success. But it’s not just aiming for that – it’s also trying to be a work of satire, using humor to examine the Faith vs. Science conflict. And there, “Wicked Human” falls down hard.
The basis of the story is that a seemingly impossible event occurs (specifically: people suddenly floating up towards heaven) – most people see this as a clear religious miracle, but the Professor stubbornly insists there must be a scientific explanation, even as efforts to find such an explanation fail …
… except, the only reason they fail is because the script won’t let anyone even attempt any actual science.
The Professor claims to be searching for a scientific explanation, but aside from taking a few whiffs with the smelloscope, not once do they try gathering any sort of data. Never asks where people go once they float up into the sky. Never tries examining a floating person or seeing what happens if you block their path or pull them back down. And certainly never looks into whether there’s any technology capable of causing this phenomenon (because, y’know, this is Futurama‘s gonzo future setting where there’s a sci-fi gizmo for everything).
And when we get the reveal, that the floating people were just being reeled in by a bunch of alien fishermen, that makes it so much worse. First off, this requires that, with billions of people floating up into the sky, in zero cases was anyone watching or recording as said person bit into a cheese puff at the end of a fishing line. What’s more, these fishing operations are apparently well-documented in-universe, given Hermes can immediately look up the regulations concerning them, yet they’re never brought up as a potential cause for what’s happening.
Had they pursued any of these lines of inquiry, they mystery would have been solved within minutes. But instead, the Professor just immediately adopts the aesthetics and rhetoric of a wacked-out cult, yelling at people to trust in science, without ever, y’know, doing any science. “Wicked Human” makes jabs about science being just as dogmatic as religion, and has the Professor learn the importance of faith, but it’s only able to make that happen by having its scientist characters not do any of the things that a scientist would do.
That’s really the worst criticism you can level at a satire: that it bears no resemblance to the thing it’s satirizing.
…
Still funny, though.
Stray Observations:
- Futurama law apparently accepts that anyone who bites into a cheese puff on a fishing hook is dumb enough not to count as an intelligent being, and so is okay to harvest. Like how it’s okay to eat a dolphin who blew all its money on instant lottery tickets.