This episode was all over the place … and not in a good way.

Being all over the place can work for a comedy. Just look at “Three Hundred Big Boys”, an episode that starts with the premise that everyone on Earth receives three hundred dollars, and then bops around from character to character, exploring what each of them does with their sudden windfall.

The result is a bunch of disconnected plots that have nothing to do with each other besides a starting premise and a wildly improbably climax where they all collide with each other. The whole episode is just a bunch of stuff happening, not a tightly constructed narrative – and it’s clear that’s what it meant to be. Its humor comes from just riffing it up, doing whatever is funniest in the moment, and making it clear from the outset that that’s the sort of episode you’re it’s going to be.

“The Charm Offensive” does not do that. It may riff on a lot of ideas related to futuristic pop sensation Coco Charm, but the presentation of the episode doesn’t set us up to view it that way.

Instead of bopping around between different stories immediately, it spends the whole first act focused on the Amy & Kif relationship story, with Kif struggling to buy a gift for the wife who already has everything, and settling on Coco Charm tickets as the solution. And when that concert turns out to be a massive supervillain scheme, with Coco Charm mind controlling everyone with music? In theory that could be a good escalation of the Kif/Amy plot, taking a simple story off into strange new directions.

Except Amy & Kif are immediately turned into brainless drones by Coco Charm’s music, effectively taking them out of the story for the whole next act. They were the focus of the episode up till now, but suddenly they’re pushed aside, and the story instead becomes about everyone else trying to save the world from Coco Charm.

And just when that story’s reaching its climax … Earth gets invaded by Omicron Persei 8. (Yes, again. Even Lrrr’s getting tired of it at this point.) But that only lasts a few minutes, before the episode shifts to what it considers to be the true villain: Ticketmistress.

And, I mean, what are we even doing here? They did one joke, early on, about website Ticketmistress having ridiculously high convenience fees. Then, half the runtime and several wild plot turns later, suddenly everyone decides they should forget all the mind control music and alien invasions and relationship drama, and just go smash Ticketmistress’s servers.

That’s the problem here. It’s treated like the big payoff to the story we’ve been watching, except we haven’t been watching that story – not for more than half the episode, at least. We’ve been following a bunch of stuff not remotely related to Ticketmistress, so to suddenly pivot to it as the cathartic conclusion … it just feels like a big, random, ball of nuthin’.

Ditto goes for the Amy/Kif heartfelt talk at the end. You can’t sideline these two as mindless drones for most of the episode – and, once freed of mind control, have them focused on the Ticketmistress plot rather than each other – and expect to earn that schmaltzy ending. No! Bad plotting, bad!

You know what “The Charm Offensive” feels like? It feels like one of the Futurama movies, where they tried to split the difference between being one long movie and being four half-hour episodes stitched together. So you have running plot threads and stuff that pays off in the end, but also these other plots that’ll become important for half an hour or so, then suddenly resolve themselves, because they were just a plot for that one episode rather than the whole movie.

“The Charm Offensive” someone manages to do that same sort of awkward plotting, despite only having a single half-hour to fit it into. That’s honestly impressive … but, again, not in a good way.

Stray Observations:

• When Kif confesses money woes to Amy, I was expecting the resolution to be Amy explaining the concept of a joint checking account.
• Futurama is becoming self-aware about how it repeats itself, with Lrr getting frustrated at invading Earth again, and Fry only getting halfway through expressing shock that Mom was the villain before stopping and declaring that, yeah, of course Mom is the master villain.
• One bit did get a good laugh out of me, more from the delivery than anything else:
  “What is this? Tron?”
  “No, Star Wars!”
  “Got it.”