Josh Reviews Futurama Season Thirteen!
What a joy to get ten new episodes of Futurama!! I have loved this show ever since it began with its initial four-season run on Fox in 1999-2002, and I have loved it through all its various permutations, cancellations, resurrections, more cancellations, and more resurrections in the years/decades since!
Counting the seasons is tricky (there are different ways of counting the four direct-to-DVD movies that came out between 2006-2008), but I count this latest season as season thirteen, the third of the show’s most recent revival on Hulu. I loved the first Hulu season, season eleven, and I also enjoyed season twelve, though that season felt like perhaps it was a very slight dip in quality, in my opinion. So I’m thrilled that this latest season, season thirteen, is spectacular, with ten crackling new episodes with nary a stinker in the bunch!
Episode 1 — “Destroy Tall Monsters” — Things kick off with a bang in the season premiere, which has two terrific stories. First, conflict emerges when it becomes clear that Fry thinks he’s with Leela because they’re so similar, while she thinks opposites attract. Their fight builds to a wildly obscure Pacific Rim gag that made me so happy! (And a guest appearance from Guillermo del Toro!) Meanwhile, Bender takes demon steroids to get tall enough to date a robot supermodel, which of course eventually leads to a fun “Godzilla attacks” sequence (with Bender wreaking havoc in the city). We also get an amazing D-roids parody of the type of medicine commercials with an epic list of possible side effects that you often see on streaming. This was a great start to new season!
Episode 2 — “The World is Hot Enough” — Futurama takes on climate change, yet again, because we stupid 21st century humans haven’t done anything to avoid the coming “climateastrophe!!” I love when the show applies its sharp wit to real world issues (like the best sci fi should always do). This was a very funny and very biting episode. One of my favorites of the season.
Episode 3 — “Fifty Shades of Green” — I was a little annoyed at first to get another Fry/Leela fight/misunderstanding story. I want to see their relationship progress; this feels like treading water. On the other hand, I was happy to see another Xmas story with the return of the murderous Santa, and the core idea of dating apps run amok is gold. There was a lot of very funny stuff with Fry’s love/hate relationship with Branch (the idealized hippie dude who he’s afraid is Leela’s soulmate). And it has a sweet ending!
Episode 4 — “The Numberland Gap” — This was a fantastic episode with extreme silliness mixed with extreme nerdiness! Just like Futurama always does at its best! Fry becomes obsessed with paint-by-numbers artwork, only to discover a numbers-based secret message giving paint-by-numbers instructions on building a mysterious machine that leads to a world of pure numbers. There are a LOT of math jokes in this episode! Some of them were over my head (like all the stuff about proving imaginary numbers). But i loved the ballsy nerdiness of this math-based episode!
Episode 5 — “Digital Detox” — This was another very timely story, about kids being addicted to screens! Seeing the Futurama kids (Cubert, Dwight, and Axl) be as addicted to their screens as kids are these days was a great idea, and very funny.
Episode 6 — “Wicked Human” — Another banger of an episode, this was a hilarious & interesting story about science vs religious faith, kicked off when the Rapture appears to befall New New York and characters start floating up into the sky. I loved the way this mystery played out.
Episode 7 — “Murderoni” — I was excited by the idea of Futurama taking on the Pizzagate controversy, and the set-up was great, but the ending fizzled for me. This was the one off-note in this great season for me. (Revealing that at least one aspect of the crazy mob’s ridiculous accusations about the pizza parlor was true — that they DID have a basement with a secret inside — was troubling to me and smacks of a both-sides-ism wishy-washyness. The real right wing accusations about “Pizzagate” were so crazy and so dangerous that I wanted to see them roundly condemned in this episode.) More successful was the B-plot, which was an excellent story about Hermes wanting his son to follow his path of becoming a professional bureaucrat, and going on an adventure together into a nightmarish filing system. This was clever and sweet and funny! I loved it.
Episode 8 — “Crab Splatter” — The odd-couple pairing of Leela and Zoidberg as adoptive siblings was a crazy idea, but somehow it works in this funny and sweet episode! Leela acts a bit out of character in being so nasty to her parents in the early part of the episode, but I could go with it because of the fun character stuff that followed. There’s also an inspired “Better B’Cawl Hyperchicken” joke sign in this episode that made my heart sing. (This is complicated to explain… you need to know that the Southern chicken lawyer character on the show is actually called a Hyperchicken, and then get the Better Call Saul reference…)
Episode 9 — “The Trouble with Truffles” — Bender and his new sidekick, a very cute and very tiny truffle-sniffing pig, set out to hunt space truffles in Bender’s latest scheme to get rich. Hearing Bender say “zut alors!” made me laugh a lot. The episode takes a dark and disgusting turn at the end!! It made me almost nauseous, but I applaud the big swing in the storytelling.
Episode 10 — “The White Hole” — Futurama seasons often end with a mind-bending sci-fi adventure through space and time, and this was a nice new addition to the pantheon. Because I want to see Fry & Leela’s relationship actually progress, I was a little sad that this episode wasn’t focused on the two of them (as so many previous season finales have been), though in the end I was OK with it because this was a fun change of pace! I was glad that the whole crew was involved in this story, in which they set out to observe the birth of a new universe. The only problem is that, because of the time-dilation as they approach the hole in space-time, the journey will take ten million years! So they go into cryogenic freeze, leaving a series of clones to take care of any problems on the ship that emerge during the journey. Of course, things don’t go as planned. As the clones pile up (and meet increasingly ghoulish demises), I was laughing my head off. So clever and funny and weird and dark. Classic Futurama! This was a great capper to a great season.
I hope this isn’t the end and there will be many more seasons of Futurama on Hulu to come!!
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