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Futurama Season 8 Part One Spoiler-Filled Review

Futurama is a mature animated sitcom with elements from the sci-fi and comedy drama genres. The original series aired from 1999 to 2003, then 2008 to 2013. Matt Groening created this series, like The Simpsons and Disenchantment. He developed it with David X. Cohen. Both were executive producers along with Ken Keeler and Claudia Katz.

Reprinted from Pop Culture Maniacs and Wayback Machine. This was the fifty-fifth article I wrote for Pop Culture Maniacs. This post was originally published on November 9, 2023. By this article, I've surpassed how many reviews I wrote for The Geekiary (52 posts), meaning I have written more for PCM than The Geekiary!

Part One of Futurama's eighth production season (and eleventh broadcast season) is a Hulu revival. It focuses on a crew of six misfits who work for Planet Express, a package delivery company. Turanga Leela (voiced by Katey Segal) pilots the Planet Express Ship. In a continuation from the Season 7 finale, she is the girlfriend of Philip J. Fry (voiced by Billy West), a man cryogenically frozen for 1,000 years before arriving in January 2999. They are joined by a foul, impertinent, alcoholic, smoking, and egocentric robot named Bender Bending Rodriguez (voiced by John DiMaggio), or Bender for short, the staff physician and lobster-like extraterrestrial John A. Zoidberg (voiced by West), and long-term accident-prone and ditzy intern Amy Wong (voiced by Lauren Tom). Other protagonists include company founder Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth (voiced by West) and company accountant/bureaucrat Hermes Conrad (voiced by Phil LaMarr).

Some characters play supporting roles. This includes Amy's partner, Kif Kroker (voiced by Maurice LaMarche), a lieutenant and assistant of Captain Zapp Brannigan on the Nimbus, a Democratic Order of Planets (DOOP) starship. Brannigan, like Fry and the Professor, is voiced by Billy West. He is a general with 25 stars, part of DOOP, and has feelings for Leela. There's also a highly intelligent animal, who often acts cute and innocent, named Lord Nibbler (voiced by Frank Welker), the rough janitor Scruffy (voiced by David Herman), and an aggressive corporate CEO named Carol "Mom" Miller (voiced by Tress MacNeille). She heads a mega-conglomerate known as MomCorp, which monopolizes robot production. She has three sons (Walt, Larry and Igner), and previous romantic relationships with the Professor and his nemesis, Dr. Ogden Wernstrom (voiced by Herman).

The first episode begins by re-introducing viewers to Futurama's characters. Bender cheers return of Leela, Fry, and their friends. The series takes place in 3023. Fry believes he has "achieved nothing" for his 23 years in the future. After taking Leela's advice, he pledges to watch every show ever made. He does this even after Bender warns him about the terrible TV content out there. There are also jokes on actual show names in blink-and-you-miss-it moments. Fry subscribes to the fourth-biggest streaming service in the world, known as Fulu, a play off Hulu.

The episode has social commentary about the binge model: Fry wears goggles which drill directly into your brain. Such devices allow a user to watch all the episodes in one continuous stretch but you must sit perfectly still in an all-encompassing metal suit. In the real world, binging a series can lead to regret, depending on whether viewers plan binging ahead of time. It can contribute to people feeling like they are "bored" unless they binge shows. In the case of this episode, Fry stays in a chair, sitting perfectly still for months without any breaks. His mind is soon overpowered by binging. He loses touch with reality.

In a plot line which echoes the goals of the recently concluded WGA strike, and ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike, Fry's friends convince the robot bosses of Fulu to reboot All My Circuits. They produce episodes as fast as they can, so that Fry doesn't die. To make matters worse, Fry watches the episodes at double-speed. The writers can't keep up with the fast script production. Bender declares that "any idiot can be a TV writer," beginning to write scripts himself. This episode makes clear how writers are so stressed/crunched in the current entertainment industry. The writers collapse from exhaustion during the episode.

The episode ends with the reality of the entertainment industry: executives give constructive notes, say the show isn't working, cancel it, and declare "you will always been an important part of the Fulu family." The episode undoubtedly comments on how TV shows work and ravenous corporate executives. I the past year, Ridley Jones, Inside Job, Dead End: Paranormal Park, and Human Resources were cancelled by Netflix, while The Owl House and Archer ended. For Fry, his friends attempt to shift his focus from the streaming world back to the real world. This plan is unsuccessful, as there is a huge explosion, and they believe he is dead. In reality, he had left the suit two days before, so he could catch up on reading.

Fry admits he stopped watching All My Circuits because the show quality decreased in the last couple of episodes (because Bender wrote them). In another timely moment, there is a mock presidential summit on the dangers of streaming television. Fry declares that shows should not be rebooted without quality. He states that viewers must binge responsibly, streaming no more than 10 episodes in a row. He adds that a TV show must be cancelled every few years if it cares about its audience. This episode is an effective way to begin the series. Even so, it is more dramatic than funny, with some comedic moments.

The next two episodes focus on entirely different subjects. One talks about definition of motherhood, noting that Amy is the smizmar of Kif Kroker and mother of their child even though she contributed no DNA, unlike Scruffy, Kiff, and Leela. Another is on the nose when it comes to social commentary about the cryptocurrency boom and Bitcoin. In that episode, Leela calls the latter a "pyramid scheme for rubes," after the Professor reveals that Planet Express went bankrupt because he invested in it. What follows is an episode spoofing the Gold Rush. The characters go out West, hoping to strike it rich, traveling to a town where all the electricity goes to Bitcoin mining computers, with everything else resembling the Old West.

If that isn't enough, everyone has a Wild West-flair. Roberto has a knife-shooter gun. Leela becomes a barmaid/sex worker. Fry meets a man made of borax (Borax Kid). Zoidberg becomes the town doctor. Dwight tries to team up with Roberto to rob a stagecoach (and take a USB stick). Bender kills a donkey by accident. In one of episode's, best jokes, they use Bender's "shiny metal ass" to sift through river stones. Amy complains there is very little Thalium and just "worthless gold."

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The episode ends with their confrontation at the Bitcoin mine. The saloonkeeper, Delilah (voiced by MacNeille), is using robot heads to calculate numbers. She defends her action, says that all the money earned is donated to an orphanage. In the end, she gets away with it, even putting three heads of the robot mafia into "the mine." Even so, the Borax Kid is punished for copying public domain stories almost word-for-word and changing a few words himself, so he could get the glory. This story ends with a classic so-called "Mexican standoff": everyone fired guns at each other, and the characters shown from multiple angles. The episode closes with everyone walking off into the sunset together, a good ending for the main cast.

The fourth episode is one of the best in this series revival. The beginning, which centers on worms attacking Nibbler's brain, seems to be on par with usual shenanigans in other episodes. This changes when the crew are transported in a toy tank, inside of Nibbler's litter box. They come across dung beetles and magic psychedelic dust. In a clear parody of Dune, the beetles lead them through the sand to find the worms, setting off a pounder (like a thumper) to attract the sandworm. In a callback to the original series, these worms are the same ones that once made Fry smarter. This goes even further: Nibbler claims to be "the messiah." He declares that everything is interconnected and should stay as it is, undisturbed.

As a result, Leela becomes despondent. She even surrounds herself in pure uncut magical sand. It helps her see how everything is interconnected. It is revealed that smaller parasites are weakening the worms. They put aside the whole "everything is connected" mantra to stomp out the smaller parasites, saying a line must be drawn somewhere. This is akin to characters discussing eating good "meat" in a 2000 Futurama episode, entitled "The Problem with Popplers." Later, Nibbler talks to his fellow intelligent beings about how Leela's bravery and loyalty allowed his previous consciousness to be restored.

More than other episodes, this is the most inventive, even featuring a character chewing on a Bart Simpson doll. As Jean wrote in a review on this very website, Dune, based on the well-known novel by Frank Herbert, can have a twisted timeline, dense plot, and have a wide scope and scale. It is, more than anything, a sci-fi epic, centering on the desert planet of Arrakis, with the resource of spice sought after by all. Even with its sweeping visuals, make-up, and CGI, there is exposition over the top. Characters are often referenced by their full names rather than abbreviations. The film is relatively long. Some of this energy comes through in this Futurama spoof, which is a sci-fi series quite different from Dune or Release the Spyce.

The fifth episode has extreme relevance when it comes to corporate conglomerates which dominate the economic landscape. Mom is the epitome of this, with her Momazon service, a play off Amazon, which runs a "fulfillment center" on the Moon. Some people resist these efforts, saying that her warehouse is polluting the Moon. She buys everyone off with speech recognition software known as Invasa, her version of Alexa. The way that the warehouse functions echoes criticism of Amazon for avoiding taxes, toxic work culture, and mass data collection from consumers. These workplaces take the conditions of the real-life equivalent a step further. They are fully automated by non-union robot workers who endure the conditions 24 hours, 7 days a week. When Mom is challenged by Leela, saying the robots are engaged in forced labor, she says the workers enjoy the work.

Not everything is happy: Bender, after quitting Planet Express, is forced to work at the plant. He even sends a package with a warning so his friends will save him. To make matters worse, the "wonderful" artificial intelligence (A.I)., turns against Mom, going rogue, and it ends up taking over the entire universe. As such, they can order what they want from Momazon with quick deliveries, which is supported by abysmal labor conditions. There are many Futurama callbacks, like the destruction of the Apollo lander, the man with a hat declaring "The Moon Will Rise Again," and the return of Al Gore's floating head. Bender ends up back in the same apartment with Fry and Leela, and is fine being the third wheel, rather than working in a warehouse.

This episode is not unique in criticizing A.I. Take Light Hope in She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, who tries to activate a planet-destroying weapon to annihilate the universe, and attempts to exploit Adora (as She-Ra) to accomplish that end, or Lunella's A.I., Skipster, in Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, which skips important parts of her life that she found "boring." Also consider Cyrano in Cleopatra in Space, an A.I. created by series villain Octavian who tries to control a protagonist, and a paranoid A.I. scared of ghosts, the godlike A.I. depicted in The Orbital Children, or malevolent A.I. in Star Trek: Lower Decks.

Moon Girl has a living/A.I. supercomputer named LOS-307. An A.I. named T.O.M.I. (Technical Operations Management Interface) is in Supa Team 4. A ship navigator named KRS is in My Dad the Bounty Hunter. The worst example of A.I. is in the first, and second (to a lesser extent) of idolish music series Kizuna no Allele. That series had a pro-NFT segment and almost encourages creation of anime by A.I. This Futurama episode leans toward criticism in Cleopatra in Space, Star Trek: Lower Decks, Moon Girl, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, and The Orbital Children, and away from other depictions. The episode acknowledges prevalence of A.I., as Carole & Tuesday does, with a music producer named Tao using advanced A.I. to ensure performers are profitable. It hints at danger of relying on A.I., which relies upon models trained by extremely low-paid workers.

Other episodes are callbacks or more relevant now than they would be even five years from now. One is an X-Mas themed episode featuring efforts to stop murderous Robot Santa with a time travel machine. Another parodies the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This involves quarantines, masks worn on ears, people working remotely, and conspiracy theories on Facebag (the version of Facebook in this world). The latter is enhanced by competition between the Professor and his sworn nemesis, Wornstrom. The Professor gives people a flimsy paper card (a dig at COVID-19 paper cards) and 3D chips inside of a vaccine to track it. The episode ends when everyone gets a vaccine using voodoo practices, likely a reference to Louisiana Voodoo rather than Trinidadian Vodunu or similar syncretic religious practices in the African diaspora. The episode ends with the statement that any sufficiently advanced magic is distinguishable from science.

This Futurama episode was one of the more hilarious ones. It echoed a "missing" Cleopatra in Space episode about protagonist Cleo facing the consequences of avoiding quarantine, and the August 2011 Futurama episode "Cold Warriors." The former includes Cleo realizing, after she infects the entire campus (but is a carrier), the importance of quarantine. At the episode's end, she enters quarantine as she presumably has common cold, and declares “quarantine stinks!” The Futurama episode is different because it parodies the oft remote work and hints at delays from the virus.

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The eighth episode is just as strong. Zapp is brought before a DOOP disciplinary hearing after an egregious incident with Kiff. It is declared that he is "cancelled." DOOP strips him of his title and states that he must undergo mandatory sensitivity training. The episode centers on "cancel culture," known as consequence culture. It has been covered poorly in some media and better elsewhere. In this episode, Leela becomes captain of the Nimbus. Fry and Bender join her as first officers. The sensitive training class teacher, Dr. Kind (voiced by DiMaggio), is abusive, and DOOP's worse groper.

While Zapp apologizes to those he harmed and Leela gets a medal of valor, there's a lot more going on. There are sequences which resemble Star Trek films, part of an all-around parody of Star Trek itself, including about the Prime Directive. Leela, Fry, Bender, and others come down to the planet in a bucket, making the residents of Tacila believe they are not advanced. Their society has sophisticated machinery running on pneumatic technology. This aligns with the original Futurama series where DOOP engaged in intensive mining operations and worry of Beckett Mariner in Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 3 that Starfleet has become a fighting force involved in armed conflict. DOOP only wants a treaty with Tacila to acquire air rights.

This episode ends with Dr. Kind, almost ruining the air with a Durian. At the last second, Bender (likely) orders the Nimbus to fire upon Dr. Kind, killing him. Later, Leela gets the aforementioned medal. She is discharged for not wanting to fire on innocent civilians. Everything returns to the status quo. Leela, Fry, and Bender return to Planet Express. Zapp goes back to DOOP. He doesn't care about civilian casualties if it "gets the job done." At the episode's end, the idea of consent is emphasized. Zoidberg sucks on Leela because of the Durian smell, and she thanks him for asking first.

Futurama's penultimate episode is a mixed bag. It includes some good moments poking fun at toy commercials, but is also dark with death, dismemberment (of cars), horrors of war, and the like. There is a strange plotline about a Space Prince (voiced by LaMarr), who Leela only loves because of a spell. Even so, there are good points about absurdity of religion (to an extent) and respecting ability of women to voice their opinions (although Bender doesn't support that view).

The final episode, for now, goes further, touching on the meaning of "life." The Professor creates a simulated universe, with copies in three-bit form. He declares that the simulation's beings are "nothing more than ones and zeroes" and aren't real. After he promises to Bender that the simulation won't be terminated, he changes his mind. He even finds an alternate power source to keep the universe functioning. Bender goes into this simulated world, wanting to tell them the truth (that the Professor made the world). He decides to not do so after that world's Fry, declares that it doesn't matter.

The episode closes with Bender returning to the real world. A solution to preserving the simulated world is presented: underclocking the processor. Although these beings realize the world is simulated, they care little about it. In many ways, this episode echoes the computer programs, known as "programs" in Tron: Uprising, but those depicted here are more basic.

Moving on, a largely-circulated spreadsheet in which people anonymously described their conditions in animation studios, does not mention The ULULU Company, previously known as The Curiosity Company, an animation studio and production company, that produced this series and Disenchantment. The company previously worked on the five Futurama films. Sadly, it isn't listed on Glassdoor. So, the company's conditions cannot be determined. Hopefully, people are being treated fairly and the work environment is productive.

The same spreadsheet had eight entries for Rough Draft Studios offices in Glendale and Burbank. These reviews were overwhelmingly negative, with anonymous entries saying there was overwork, disorganization, harsh treatment, and inflexible hours. These revealed an anti-union environment with unionbusting in Burbank. The same studio previously reached an agreement with Local 839 of the Animation Guild, which covered animated TV series and features at their studio in Glendale.

It is hard to know where the series will go from here. This is only part one of the eighth season. It has ten more episodes of its Hulu run, as part of the revival. Watching this revival is nostalgic. It was one of the first animated series I ever watched. I fondly remember episodes parodying Napster and homophobes opposing same-sex marriage, and visual jokes. Some episodes coined terms such as robosexuality, meaning love/sexuality between a robot and humanoid. The strong sci-fi themes stuck with me: the series premiere had the protagonist (Fry) time travel from 1999 to 2999. More than that, there was dimensional travel, voice actors such as Dawnn Lewis and Frank Welker, commentary on worker exploitation, heartfelt moments, advertising parodies, and storylines focusing on family history, roots, and connections.

Overall, the Futurama revival is different feel than the original. Even so, it differs from Final Space, and others like Disenchantment, and Steven Universe. The series is not fundamentally different than the original show. It is improved without few changes. For instance, there are no episodes about queer identity of main cast members or anything along those lines. In this way, it is like The Proud Family revival. Hopefully, the series continues to improve as it moves forward into Season 8 Part 2, and beyond. Futurama is currently streaming on Hulu, Apple TV+, and Disney+ (in some jurisdictions).