*sigh*
We’re back, baby … I suppose.
Look, I want to be excited right now. Thanks to Hulu, we’ve got another season of Futurama on our screens, and I absolutely want to be jazzed about it. I want to laugh my ass off, I want to delight in spending time with these characters again, I want to revitalize my love of the series with each new episode, and then share that love with all of you. I want to have a good time.
But the pair of episodes that kick off this season …
Well, they’re not Futurama at its best. And they’re not Futurama at its worst, either. They are Futurama once again wallowing around in its middle – and like a cheap mattress, its once firm middle has, over the years, collapsed into an uncomfortable hole it might be hard to ever climb out of.
Of the two eps, “Beef” in particular is a dull, ambitionless chore – just a mash of ideas from earlier episodes, reheated and poured together, but with everything that once made those ideas work now boiled away.
Fry flashing back to a failure from the 20th Century, and trying to get closure from it in the 31st? We’ve seen it done with ex-girlfriends, birthday blowouts, science projects, five-leaf clovers, and college dropout certificates. After all that, I just cannot get it up for Fry trying to reclaim competitive hotdog eating glory.
Something thought long extinct in the future being revived in the far future? That’s been done with garbage, anchovies, Fry’s dog, the common cold, and the hit drama Single Female Lawyer. So, reviving the all-beef hotdog … ho hum.
Planet Express abandoning the delivery company angle for some new business venture? They’ve peddled coffee, popplers, fast fashion, and cryptocurrency. To now see them as hotdog vendors …
Hotdogs just aren’t interesting, is I guess what I’m getting at.
There’s no spark to any of this, nothing special, no particularly inspired jokes or character work to make these well-worn plot points exciting again. Like hotdogs, once you’ve choked down your fourteenth or fifteenth one, they just stop tasting like anything.
The second episode, “Catfish Hunting”, is a little better than that.
Bender falling for yet another sexy fembot who things inevitably won’t work out with? Seen it. Bender scamming the rest of Planet Express, and them scamming Bender back, and it not working out for anyone? Been done.
But a sendup of 1970’sDeep South Loveable Outlaws Versus Corrupt Sherrif Car Chase movies? (God, there’s gotta be a better name for that genre.) That at least is a little different, and gives the third act some nice adrenaline and visual oomph.
Doesn’t raise the whole outing up too high – certainly not to the level of Classic Era Futurama – but some improvement is better than none. I want to hold out hope that improvement can continue, that this season will deliver at least one or two more gems to justify still being a fan …
… but they are not making that hope easy, I tell you what.
Stray Observation:
- “Catfish Hunter” ends with a in memoriam tribute to Renée Victor, the voice of Bender’s Abuelatron, who passed away … when the very last line of the episode was Abuelatron taunting Bender with being an immortal robot who will never die and pass on an inheritance. That is … that is up there with Phil Hartman’s NewsRadio sendoff for really, really, really bad timing.