Josh Reviews Futurama Season 12!

A new season of Futurama is nearly upon us, and I realized I’d never posted my review of the previous season!  How did I let that happen?  Time to rectify that error!

As readers of this site probably know, I love this show!  I watched the four original Fox seasons alongside The Simpsons when they first aired, back in 1999-2002.  It was during the fourth and final (original) season of Futurama that I truly fell in love with the show.  (I have a powerful memory of watching “Love and Rocket”, the episode in which Bender starts dating the Planet Express ship — with predictably catastrophic results — and wondering just how on Earth this crazy, funny show existed.)  It felt like a show that was made just for me — it was so funny, and so packed with obscure sci-fi references.  (I’m not sure I’ve ever laughed harder at a TV show than I did when the Beneath the Planet of the Apes joke about sub-surface mutants worshipping an unexploded nuclear bomb in the second season episode “I Second That Emotion”.)

The show has died and been resurrected many times!  First it returned to life in the form of reruns on Comedy Central in the early aughts.  The popularity of those re-runs led to the creation of four direct-to-DVD feature-length movies (each the length of four original episodes).  The success of those led to the show’s eventual return to TV, in four seasons of 13 episodes that aired on Comedy Central from 2010-2013.  Then the show was cancelled again, but it returned as a crossover episode on The Simpsons in 2014 (called “Simpsorama”), and then as a one-off audio podcast version of a new episode in 2017.  Then it was dead again for a while, until returning to Hulu with a new 10-episode season in 2023!  I loved that new season, and while the second season on Hulu (about which I am writing now) doesn’t quite match the show’s greatest heights, it’s still a wonderful season with 10 great episodes of this sci-fi comedy that I love so much!

As always, the show has fun with of-the-moment technological issues (the kids make NFTs out of “the concept of Bender” in the opening episode of the season, leading to an identity crisis for Bender himself; in the fifth episode, Leela runs afoul of a vengeful AI chatbot that escalates quickly from relationship advice to attempted murder) and also devotes some time to environmental messaging (in episode six, “Attack of the Clothes”, the Professor uses a wormhole to get rid of the “fast fashion” disposable clothes he’s created, only to destroy a future Earth that drowns beneath this waste.  The message is pretty clear!).

One of the joys of this show from early on has been the expanding cast of characters (beyond the main Planet Express gang), and this season continued to have fun with supporting characters like Zapp and Kif and Cubert,m Dwight, etc.  I loved seeing the Planet Express crew hired to cater Lrrr and Ndnd’s wedding in episode three, an episode that also calls back to “Amazon Women in the Mood” from the show’s third season!  (That episode, with the vengeful temp Frank who no one seems to remember, was a stand-out of the season.)

Of course, the main gang had a lot to do as well!  We got another pathos-filled flashback to Fry’s youth in “Quids Game”, Leela learned to make friends with other women, Bender became a matador, the Professor became a fashion designer, Hermes inherited a coffee farm and reconnected with his father, Amy became obsessed with collecting cure childrens’ toys… and more!

The show has often used the penultimate episode to tell a trilogy of stories, and that tradition continued with episode nine, “The Futurama Mystery Liberry”.  (“Liberry” is a joke, of course!)  This installment, hosted by Levar Burton, gave us three spoofs on classic children’s mystery book series (Encyclopedia Brown, Nancy Drew, and The Adventures of Tintin).

The finale, “Otherwise”, is a sequel of sorts to the season 10 finale, “Meanwhile” (which for a long while, until the show’s revival on Hulu, had also served as the series finale).  In that episode, Fry and Leela lived out an entire life together when the rest of the world got stuck in time.  I loved seeing a return to that memorable storyline, though I was a little bummed that we didn’t actually get Fry and Leela’s wedding for real; just another fake-out.  After so many years, I’d like to see the show allow these characters to move forward in their relationship.  I’m tired of the teases.

That’s a small complaint, though.  I enjoyed that episode, and I enjoyed this whole season.  I’m excited for the new season that launches on Hulu later this month…!

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