Spoiler Warning: Minor spoilers are present for Futurama.
So here’s a question to kick things off: is this Season 8 or Season 11 of Futurama? There are different points of view depending on how you count splits in earlier seasons and whether the TV movies count as their own season! It’s not really all that important, just an interesting side-note as we welcome back Futurama after a ten-year absence.
I was cautiously optimistic about Futurama’s return to the small screen. The show got a pretty conclusive ending back in 2013, but its episodic nature – combined with the fact that it’s never been a series that takes itself all that seriously – meant that it wasn’t too hard to pick up where things left off. In that respect, I think the resurrected Futurama did alright. There were several genuinely fun and entertaining episodes in the mix – but there were also a couple of duds.
One of the questions I had about this revival is how necessary it would feel. Or to put it another way: is Futurama being brought back because its creators, producers, and writers genuinely feel that there are more stories to tell – or is this just a cynical playing of the nostalgia card by a big corporation as it seeks to win and retain subscribers amidst the “streaming wars?” On that latter point, there were several really in-your-face moments across practically every episode of the new season of Futurama as the show seemed almost desperate to use nostalgia as a crutch.
Characters from popular or well-remembered episodes of the show would appear for cameos seemingly at random, in ways that added nothing to the story of the new episode – and practically all of these moments fell flat. Characters would also make unnecessary references to past events and adventures, again for no other reason than to say “remember how good old Futurama used to be?” Pretty much all of these cameos and callbacks ended up detracting from the episodes they were part of; net negatives as the nostalgia card was invariably overplayed.
And that’s a shame – because there were some fun, original stories this season. I particularly enjoyed How The West Was 1010001 and its western-inspired story arcs. The Christmas special – I Know What You Did Next Xmas – was also great, thanks to the uncommon pairing of Zoidberg and Bender for a time-travelling adventure! I’d also pick out at least parts of the episodes Zapp Gets Cancelled and Related To Items You Viewed as being highlights this time around.
Futurama has never been shy about having a point or making social commentary, even going all the way back to its first season in 1999 with episodes like A Big Piece of Garbage or Fry and the Slurm Factory. With that in mind, then, I didn’t object to the premises of episodes like Related To Items You Viewed or Rage Against The Vaccine… but I also don’t feel that the points those stories aimed to make were communicated particularly well, nor were they fully-realised by the time the episodes made it to screen.
Firstly, Rage Against The Vaccine arguably missed its moment of relevance, coming after most of the so-called “controversy” surrounding Covid-19 vaccinations has passed. Although the episode only premiered this past September, watching it felt almost like stepping back in time a couple of years, such was the outdated nature of the story. But also, within the story itself, arguments about vaccine safety, magnetism, and 5G were particularly on-the-nose and not subtle in any way. Subtlety is a huge part of what makes this kind of parody work, and when it was so flagrant and so obvious, for me at least part of the humour fell flat.
Related To Items You Viewed wanted to make a point about massive corporations like Amazon pushing small companies out of business – but did so quite poorly. Corporations like Amazon are, as the episode depicts, ever-expanding… but the story just seemed to end at that point without knowing what else it wanted to say. Corporations are putting smaller companies out of business, and then… what? Why go to the trouble of saying so if there’s not a broader point to be made?
The Prince and the Product was by far this season’s weakest offering, with an uninteresting frame narrative containing a couple of uninspired product/TV advertisement parodies. It was an attempt, perhaps, to try something similar to episodes like Naturama and Saturday Morning Fun Pit… but I didn’t like those either! It’s hard to put my finger on what doesn’t work about this idea… but taking the characters so far outside of their usual setting and appearances is probably part of it.
I love a good Christmas special, and I Know What You Did Next Xmas was definitely a fun story. Time travel can be difficult to get right in fiction, but Futurama’s less serious nature means that the show can get away with a lot. Dr Zoidberg and Bender made for a fun duo, and the episode was unique this season insofar as it built on what had been established in earlier seasons without feeling like it was little more than a naked attempt to rely on nostalgia. Futurama’s version of an evil robot Santa Claus was put to good use – and the time travel premise worked well, too.
Zapp Gets Cancelled didn’t go down the “cancel culture is stupid and/or fascist” route that I feared it might’ve based on the title, and had some fun and entertaining moments throughout. There were definitely nods to the Star Trek franchise in the presentation of the Democratic Order Of Planets and the Nimbus – as well as a surprisingly compelling villain in Dr Kind. My only criticism would be that Zapp Branigan didn’t seem to learn much from his escapade… and the character felt a bit listless after the main thrust of the episode’s plot got going.
All The Way Down was one of the season’s attempts to tell an emotional story – but it felt more confusing than emotional most of the time. Without much of a connection to the people of Professor Farnsworth’s simulated universe, it was hard to really care about them potentially discovering their simulated nature, and the episode’s talk of the main characters living in their own simulation never really went anywhere. The simulation hypothesis is a massively complicated topic – and this episode barely paid lip service to it. I get what the writers were going for here, but it didn’t quite stick the landing.
The rest of the episodes were neither outstanding nor awful, with some moments of well-timed humour that made them enjoyable enough to watch once or twice. I can’t say I didn’t have a good time with Futurama’s return overall, and it certainly killed a few minutes here and there this summer and autumn. But I can’t shake the feeling that, as things sit right now, Futurama is a corporate product. Some of this season’s opportunities for genuine social commentary felt toned-down to the point of irrelevance, and the cameos and callbacks to past stories were excessive. Futurama, then, hasn’t really found a justification for its return yet.
I’m not entirely comfortable raising this point, and I don’t want it to come across as an attack in any way. But I think it’s worth noting that, while he did a solid job with the voices of both Professor Farnsworth and Dr Zoidberg, Billy West’s portrayal of Fry is noticeably different – and I would suggest older – than in previous seasons. This isn’t a criticism exactly – and we’re all getting older, after all – but when you compare the way Fry sounded even in an episode from the most recent season before this one, there is a difference in his voice.
Speaking of Fry, I’m glad that Futurama didn’t try to write off his relationship with Leela or reset the characters. The events of Meanwhile were significant, and I wouldn’t have wanted the revived series to try to ignore everything that happened last time. Fry and Leela’s relationship wasn’t front-and-centre this season, but it was a permanent fixture as the episodes played out. That’s sweet, and I appreciated it.
There are ten more episodes to come in Season 8/11, and I assume they’ll be shown sometime in 2024. Nothing that I saw this time has put me off, even though not all of this season’s episodes have been as strong as I’d have liked! I’m sure I’ll be tuning in next year, then, to see the rest of the new episodes. And earlier this year, Hulu and Disney confirmed that another twenty episodes have been ordered, presumably keeping Futurama on the air into 2025 or even 2026.
So what’s the verdict, then? I had fun with most of the episodes most of the time, and even the season’s weaker stories still had moments of humour, the occasional good joke, or something else that made me crack a smile. Futurama isn’t a show that I take too seriously, and in that respect I’d say it was fine. Was it as good as it was in those early seasons around the turn of the millennium? Perhaps not. But I didn’t really expect it to be.
I’d recommend this new season to folks who enjoyed Futurama in the past – if for no other reason than to see what comes next. I don’t think that anyone who didn’t like Futurama in its earlier incarnations will be swayed by the revived series, and some super-fans from years past might not enjoy every story or creative decision. But as I’m not in either category, I’d say it was fine. Some episodes were decent, some were duds. None were exceptional, though… so make of that what you will.
Futurama is available to stream now on Hulu in the United States and on Disney+ in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. The series is also available on Blu-ray and DVD. Futurama is the copyright of 20th Television Animation, Hulu, and The Walt Disney Company. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Trekking with Dennis 