“Please don’t stop playing, Fry. I want to hear how it ends.”

Those are the final lines of “The Devil’s Hands Are Idle Playthings”, the episode that concluded the original Fox run of the show more than 23 years ago. It wasn’t planned to be a series finale, but through serendipity, its closing moments proved a suitably beautiful moment to end the show on, a balm to soothe Futurama fans in the face of its cancellation.

Since then, Futurama has gotten a lot more practice at ending the show. From actual ends of eras (“Into the Wild Green Yonder”, “Meanwhile”) to episodes designed to serve as series finales, just in case the show wasn’t renewed (“Overclockwise”, “Otherwise”), the question “How do we craft a fitting conclusion to Futurama?” is one they’ve had to grapple with again and again.

So perhaps it’s not surprising that, at this point, they’ve gotten a bit sick of it.

All their best ideas for an epic, moving conclusion? They’ve already done those. There’s only so many times we can see Fry & Leela re-affirm their love for each other, or have the characters step through a portal into the unknown, or use timey-wimey shenanigans to fit years worth of character growth into a 22-minute runtime. Heck, their last series fauxnale was mostly about revisiting the events of “Meanwhile”, as if to say, “Yeah, we don’t think we’re gonna top that ending, either.”

So, as Futurama comes to a close once more, they’ve finally just said, “Screw it.” Rather than deliver an inspiring farewell to the characters, they instead dish out an irreverent, thoroughly meta episode, where characters debate whether learning how stories end is even important.

To that purpose, we get a bunch of stories within this story (and stories within those stories), each of which is interrupted by a different story before it can reach its conclusion. No grand finale here, but instead a bunch of silly vignettes with only the flimsiest of connective tissue. Rather than copy their past attempts at finales, they’ve instead decided to copy “Three Hundred Big Boys” – right down to “My story kind of petered out without me learning a lesson.”

Now, comparing this episode to “Three Hundred Big Boys” does it no favors – but then, comparison to “Three Hundred Big Boys” does most episodes no favors. I’m not gonna tell you this episode is anywhere near as good as that classic – certainly, there’s nothing as sublime as Fry entering the Speed Force via coffee. But that rapidfire, quick-cutting format does give “Final Ending: The Last Conclusion” a vibe unique from all other non-Big Boy episodes, and shows they can approach the idea of ending the show in a different way.

Futurama is first and foremost a comedy show, after all, so ending with a wild panoply of jokes poking fun at the very idea of a satisfying conclusion: it’s definitely apropos, arguably moreso than some of the more earnest attempts at sentiment they’ve tried in the past.

Maybe if I thought this was really for really reals the final ending/last conclusion, I’d be a bit bummed the finale was such a deliberately lightweight affair. But that’s not the case: Hulu has announced there will be three Futurama specials released in 2027.

So, knowing this is sort of the series finale, except not really, maybe that let me appreciate its whole anti-finale vibe on its own terms. Grousing about anti-climaxes and lack of payoff … we can wait one more year for that, can’t we?

 

Stray Observations:

• Despite everything, they did work in a few common finale tropes, what with revisiting the cryogenics lab, Fry’s life in the 20th Century, and the ruins of Old New York, plus giving us just a smidge of tender emotion right at the very end.
• Though that smidge of tender emotion is followed by one of the most callously irreverent, nothing-matters jokes of the whole series, and easily my biggest laugh of the episode. And as that’s the very last shot of the episode, that counts as ending on a high note.