A year ago, I reviewed the Season 12 finale, “Otherwise”. I talked a lot there about the formula Futurama has for its season finales: a big, heartfelt sendoff for the Planet Express crew that brings their stories to a close … while also ensuring the characters return to their old lives unchanged, ready to go on more wacky adventures, the same as ever, when/if the next season starts.
Now I’m reviewing another season finale, and it’s interesting how “The White Hole” both does and does not fit that pattern.
On the one hand, yeah, it’s another ending-that-isn’t-really-an-ending. We see all our main characters, in the last bit of life they have left, launch themselves into the birth of a new universe, ready to experience whatever wonders it might hold, while toasting the long, strange road that brought them there. Of course, these are just 3D printed copies of the characters, so the original versions can still return to Earth having experienced none of that, keeping the status quo in place for next season.
But while it’s superficially similar to prior finales, the vibes of the thing go in a whole ‘nother direction. In the past, these series fauxnales were where the show became uncharacteristically sentimental, approaching events with an air of wistfulness, occasionally going full maudlin, the way they would if they were the very-definitely-for-real-no-revivals-for you end of Futurama.
Not so for “The White Hole”. This is Futurama at its most callous, most cynical, most thoroughly unsentimental. Once the mission to the White Hole gets under way, the whole story’s devoted to the duplicates of the Planet Express crew, who possess all the same wants and dreams and inner lives as the originals, except these versions were created only to perform a single menial chore each, and then die right afterwards. And that’s what we see happen, over and over again: Fry, Leela, Bender, and all the other characters we know and love (plus Zoidberg) living short, pointless lives, and dying horribly. And it’s played entirely for laughs.
No room for nostalgic pseudo-farewells here – this ep’s all about having as much fun as it can with a weird sci-fi premise and mining as much dark comedy out of it as possible. And they do get a lot of fun from this setup, with plenty of laugh out loud jokes. And yet … I feel like it’s missing something.
I’m not saying I wanted another maudlin series fauxnale, but I do feel like they didn’t do as much with the story as they could have. We spend a lot of time on the duplicates of the crew doing funny stuff before dying, and while that’s definitely the main hook of the episode, maybe too much time was spent on it. ‘Cause once we get to the end of the journey, and the last set of duplicates decide to rebel, there’s no confrontation with the originals, no exploration of where this might lead. Just the duplicates heading off into the White Hole, sending the originals back still in stasis, and the episode’s over.
I find myself wishing the duplicates’ lives and deaths aboard the ship had been done in a shorter, snappier style, closer to a montage. A quicker pace would’ve both made the jokes there feel more wildly madcap, and allowed more time at the end to take the concept further. I mean, I know the Planet Express crew tangling with exact doubles of themselves is something the show’s done before, but screw it, I wanted to see it again!
Stray Observations:
- Of course, this season finale is no more a series finale than any past finales have been. Hulu has renewed the show for at least one more season (though by the time that season comes out, Hulu may have been merged fully into Disney+).
- For all the wacky antics going on this episode, my biggest laugh was the simple character detail of the Professor just hating the children chosen for the White Hole exploration, and taking wicked delight in their withered and wasted lives.
- The Professor didn’t get any pushback from the others about going on a ten million year journey to witness the birth of a universe. This would have been the perfect time to bring up “Didn’t this use to be a delivery company?”