All week I’ve been struggling with what to say about this episode. Even now, as I finally open Word Press to write this review, just twelve hours before I’m due to post it, it’s difficult to know what approach to take.
For this is no ordinary episode of Futurama. This, dear readers, is a crossover episode, with the Futurama crew visiting the world of that other other Matt Groening cartoon, Disenchantment. Y’know, the fantasy styled one on Netflix that ended a few years back? The one with the hard drinking princess, an elf named Elfo … some sort of demon imp guy …
Okay, this is what’s making the review such a challenge: I’ve never seen Disenchantment. A lot of this episode is clearly meant as a love letter to that show, checking back in on its characters and world and celebrating the good times had with them. And I am utterly unqualified to judge how well it does any of that, since this is my first time seeing any of Disenchantment outside of promos. It’s like I’m going into this thing half-blind.
But, while I can’t judge how well this ep works for Disenchantment fans, I think it’s fair to assume that a lot of other people went into it having never seen Disenchantment. I mean, Netflix doesn’t disclose viewership numbers, but I get the sense Disenchantment wasn’t exactly a Stranger Things level hit, or even a The Last Airbender. So from the perspective of someone who’s only familiar with the Futurama side of this crossover, how does it work?
Honestly … it’s decent. Not great, I wouldn’t even go so far as pretty good, but y’know, it’s not a bad way to spend 22 minutes plus commercials.
Now, the story’s a bit of a mess. Everything set up in the first act suddenly has to take a back seat once Fry gets to the Disenchantment world, and the plot in that world can’t get going till all the Disenchantment characters have been (re-)introduced. So by the time things get cooking, there’s not much time to actually explore the story being told (long short story shorter: it’s a riff on Cinderella III: A Twist in Time). Like, I enjoyed the joke about how Fry tried to fix the timeline dozens of times off-screen before getting it right, but it feels like the sort of thing a better episode would have actually shown us.
Still, the jokes are mostly solid, and it does deliver one big laugh-out-loud moment (the reveal of what was chasing everyone down the stairs had me howling). So I can’t call it a boring or a waste of time. And it did get me curious enough about Disenchantment that, if I still had a Netflix account, I’d probably check it out. (Not curious enough to make me add a second streaming subscription ontop of Disney/Hulu, though).
So, yeah, that’s where I’m at with this one. There’s not much deeper I can dive into it, but if we have any Disenchantment viewers here on the Avocado, I’d love to know what y’all thought about it.
Stray Observations:
- Okay, despite not having seen Disenchantment, this episode did give me a clear sense that it must’ve had one of those bittersweet finales, where the main characters each get their own happy ending, but in a way that separates them from each other, seemingly forever. So this ep having them quickly and easily reunite, with the implication they could’ve done this anytime if they’d wanted to … just from my knowledge of other fandoms, this seems like the sort of thing that’d go over either really well or really, really, really poorly, depending on how well the original finale was received.
- Since there was also a Simpsons episode that crossed over with Futurama, and a Simpsons episode that crossed over with The Critic, I’m now picturing Jay Sherman being told that they share a continuity with Elfo.