The problem with “Murderoni” isn’t that it’s got multiple plots going on – I want to be clear about that. Plenty of great Futurama episodes have been built on the A-plot/B-plot/occasional C-plot model. But in the past, there’s usually been a sense that the A-plot and the B-plot belong together, that they grew naturally out of the same basic premise.
Like, Fry goes to college on Mars, and that leads to Bender tagging along and getting into their own wacky college antics. The Professor invents a bodyswapping machine, and everyone uses it to advance their own plots. Leela joins an environmentalist group, so we also get Fry & Bender trying to run the ship without Leela. And, of course, Nixon gives everyone on Earth three hundred big boys, and we see how everyone spends their newfound wealth.
There was a sense of unity to those episodes, where even as they follow separate plots, they all make sense as part of a larger whole. But in “Murderoni”? It feels like a bunch of loose plot ideas just got stapled together.
Sure, there’s some tenuous links between the three storylines. The local pizzeria being targeted by Fishy Joe’s political campaign is what prompts Hermes & Dwight’s journey to the Central Bureaucracy, and Fry filling in for Dwight’s job at the pizza place is where that pants-ruining incident comes from. But, c’mon, none of these stories needed to be together.
Hermes & Dwight could have been searching for anything at the Bureaucracy, and it would have played out the same way. And the pizzeria plot didn’t need that sidequest to resolve it – all it needed was someone to spot the basement door behind the arcade game. And Fry’s pants? Those could have been ruined any old way.
This episode, it doesn’t come across like multiple plots arising naturally out of one another. More like the writers had accumulated a folder of random plot ideas, none of them robust enough to carry an episode, but realized they could fill out an episode’s runtime by putting several of them together. If that makes for a stitched-together Frankenstein of an episode, where every plot feels like a B-plot, and no central theme or idea elevates the proceedings? Eh, we’re on Season 13 now – we can let our standards slide a bit.
Stray Observations:
- So a story that parodies both Pizzagate and Al Capone’s Vault. They’re doing this social satire while the iron is hot.
- I will say, though, that Fishy Joe as a Trump analogue really works.
“How many people?”
“A lot. One of the biggest numbers.” - Now both The Simpsons and Futurama have done episodes about Homer/Fry losing their blue pants, which are suddenly treated like a core part of their identity. Though in Fry’s case, at least it calls back to a good joke from “I, Roommate”:
“I don’t even have room to hang my clothes.”
“Look, pal, you’ve only got one set of clothes, and you’re not taking them off while I’m here.” - Continuity Error Alert! They discover the ruins of Panucci’s Pizza, when the show already had those ruins discovered in “Jurassic Bark”. And not in some random, throw-away gag, but as the inciting incident for one of their most famous episodes.