#hulurama predictions

[fryandleelasbigfling]

on fry, leela, and the baby carriage (pre-hulurama)

aka “jen infodumps about her freela parenting headcanons for a very long time”

i think about this a lot. other people in the fandom think about this a lot. if fry and leela do get permanently married and settle down... would they ever have kids? could that work in the narrative, somehow?

this is, in my opinion, a complicated question, but one that i think would be utterly fascinating for the show to address. and to explain it, i’m going to talk about leela and fry’s individual trauma surrounding family, the struggles this would cause them in trying to have kids, and whether they would want to give it a shot anyway.

this is going to be a very long post.

leela

i’m gonna be honest. leela has mom energy. i think this is the inevitable reality of any character played by katey sagal, but the show itself has leaned into this characterization several times -- bender sarcastically calling her “mom” in “fry am the egg man,” and of course “2d blacktop” making an entire joke about her suddenly acting like a soccer mom (though her character writing in that episode is a bit weird... i think it’s the Written By Men of it all).

but despite this, leela has a bit of a complicated relationship with the idea of motherhood. there are two episodes where she’s been convinced to conceive a child under the guise of repopulating her species. i obviously don’t count these instances towards her wanting to be a mother because A) it was out of obligation and she never suggests otherwise and B) she didn’t properly consent to either situation. 

her excitement to start a family with adlai gives a bit more credence to the idea she would genuinely want kids. in fact, she even gets the idea to adopt because of her own experience as an orphan.

however, this is complicated by how superficial her relationship with adlai was. was she genuinely excited to be a mother at this point? or was she just happy that her very normal childhood crush wants to start a nuclear family with her? is it about her actual feelings, or is she just doing what she thinks she’s “supposed” to do?

there’s also the fact she has no emotional connection (so far) to her biological offspring with kif, consistently calling them “her DNA” rather than “her kids.” this is because culturally, they’re amy’s kids, and i like that she (and the narrative) respects that they came from kif and amy’s love. it’s almost guaranteed that the tadpoles will return and i think it would be very interesting to address leela’s relationship (or lack thereof) with them. after all, part of her connection to motherhood in several of these situations is that it’s what’s expected from a committed, loving, normal relationship -- if she has a loving husband and good kids, it means she proved that she’s a lovable, capable woman after all. her accident with kif doesn’t mean any of that. 

despite these nuances, it’s clear leela is an extremely caring, dare i say maternal (no matter what her sims 3 counterpart says) person. it’s a core trait that she will do anything to take care of what she perceives as a helpless animal, probably because she spent decades without anybody to take care of her. she coddles nibbler like he’s her own baby boy, and the way he refers to himself as the “object of [her] misplaced affections” is primarily about her lack of a boyfriend, it also kind of leans into him as her substitute baby, especially since she seemingly has this hover pram thing already set up:

she was good at babysitting the de-aged coworkers in "teenage mutant leela's hurdles." she also obviously connects very strongly to the kids at the orphanarium and wants to be a good role model to them. she connects with the young jrrr and even outright says she hopes he always sees her as his mama (before he drops the detail that his species eats their mothers). 

in “the bots and the bees,” she’s the only one who isn’t fully repulsed when bev gives birth, jumps up to help her out, and is generally the most interested in bender’s journey through fatherhood. while this is because she’s a naturally helpful person with a lot of personal hangups about parenthood, i just think it’s worth noting here.

she also gushed over the nannybot back in the fox era!

even in “meanwhile,” despite a later joke that i’ll discuss later, her response to the unexplained glimmer is “if it keeps bugging us, we'll either kill it or adopt it.” literally right after their wedding, i love it so much.

i also have to bring up the futurama comics because, while they are only debatably canon, there are multiple instances that pretty much confirm that leela wants kids. issue #26 (my favorite comic hands-down) sets up leela being forlorn about the fact she isn’t close to falling in love and having a family, playing on the “biological clock” trope.

however, after the harrowing ordeal of raising her own infant and teenage selves (god i love this comic!), she stops obsessing over her biological deadline and just lives in the moment, appreciating herself. i love that! 

even more explicit is issue #62. this comic sets up that leela wants to be a mom despite the rest of the crew not thinking she’s sensitive enough to be one. (personally i think it’s kind of shoehorned dialogue and that fry is OOC to talk to leela like this at this point in their relationship, but it is very, very comics-canon that leela wants kids.)

the plot of the comic is basically she gets amnesia, zapp claims her and convinces her that she’s his wife and they have three teenage robot kids. it’s a bit of a weird plot and it’s a weak zapp characterization imo, but it does establish that leela works well taking care of the kids and they get very attached to each other to the point she wants to have a biological baby of her own. 

she’s not in a fully lucid position though and she could very well just be leaning into the tradwife role because she doesn’t know anything else until later. however, when she does get her memory back, she obviously rejects zapp violently, but she is genuinely endeared to the robot kids to the point of crying. so this probably goes beyond just leela wanting to prove she can do something she was told she can’t do.

(granted the comic does have this as the punchline but it’s pretty clear that as caring as leela is, she’s got a lot on her plate which would get in the way of her being a mother in her actual working life)

there’s also an extremely cute comic where everybody becomes a scout leader and leela leads a bunch of mutant scouts and it gets me feelsy. it’s literally the issue right before the mommy leela one. something on the writers’ minds i guess.

so does this mean leela should be a mom? honestly, i would like to see her accept that she doesn’t have to be a mom to have worth in her life, but she still wants to be, once she feels ready to do so. a lot of leela’s arc is learning that she doesn’t have to fit someone else’s idea of a perfect woman, or a perfect family, or a perfect love life, just to stop being lonely -- she needs to lean into what makes her feel confident and happy. if she feels fulfilled taking care of a child, then she should go ahead and do it. not out of obligation towards the universe or towards the “good, respectable woman” mold -- just cuz it would make her happy. (this is why, if her role as “the other” really is referring to her needing to be a mom to fry’s child for some sort of Chosen One prophecy, i really hope they don’t play that straight, because i very much want leela’s autonomy to be a focus of any arc dealing with her being a mother and i do not want her to be forced into it after multiple other episodes where she almost gets tricked into conceiving a child.)

i can see her struggling with perfectionism about it, though. we see in issue #26 that she struggles to calm her baby self and communicate with her teenage self and i think not knowing exactly what to do would put a lot of stress on her because she’s so used to being the one who has everything together. i think she might have to reel herself in from lashing out and then feel guilty about not being an “ideal” loving mother.

“teenage mutant leela’s hurdles” shows her deliberately trying to live out what she thinks a “normal” teenage youth entails because she never got that as an actual child, and i wonder if she would project these same ideal expectations onto her own child, particularly if she had a daughter. (i do think fry is good at helping her outgrow this desire to fit a particular mold, though, as are her parents.) she’s also really obsessed with being a good role model (”a leela of her own,” “yo leela leela”) and i can see her worrying that any fault of her child is a reflection of her “failures” as a parent.

it’s interesting to think that leela probably never expected to have biological kids due to being the last of her kind (though i do headcanon she once had a pregnancy scare with sean). but i also headcanon that mutants don’t have a lot of kids, as we don’t see many, if any kids in the sewers (barring an issue or two in the comics where mutant kids show up). it would make sense because A) a lot of mutants don’t want to bring kids into their life situation, B) they can mutate enough to live for very long times so reproducing isn’t as needed, and C) i don’t think a lot of them want to or even can have sex with each other, ha ha. i can see there being a lot of pressure from her parents, because they probably also want to live vicariously and actually be able to raise a baby like they always wanted to, especially on the surface. 0′)

i don’t think her being a “strong independent woman” is at odds with this arc, either, as long as it’s not treated as an obligation. bojack horseman has a great example in princess carolyn of a character who still wants to have a family despite being a career woman who is incredibly attached to her work, and she doesn’t have to give either of it up if she has people to support her. i think it helps that we have amy to contrast, as she didn’t want kids (despite ending up with them, though i suspect kif will be the one taking care of them). 

(also, female writers. that goes a long way in making an arc like this not come across as a derailment.) 

fry

there is much more to say about leela than fry because they haven’t done as much with this subject when it comes to him. sure, he has a son, technically, but y’know... it’s his dad, and he never sees that as anything but a weird sexual encounter he had in the past.

but i do think fry would want kids with leela, especially if that’s what she wants. there’s a one-off line that implies he’s not opposed to this in “the cyber house rules,” though this is before he (knowingly) sees leela as anything more than an attractive coworker and doesn’t care much about long-term goals yet. it’s really more a joke about fry just being extremely persuasive (especially given how he gets roped into bender’s mass adoption scheme). 

but the actual biggest thing that makes me wanna see fry as a dad: he is so, so, so attached to taking care of things, usually in the context of animals in need. he saved seymour from starvation, brought the orphaned leelu out of depression, and protected mr peppy at the risk of his own life. creatures are naturally drawn to him for some reason, probably because he’s got such a big heart and lacks the reservations most people have. he connects to animals at their level and doesn’t have the confidence to act superior most of the time. i think this can easily be applied to kids as well. 

“fry am the egg man” is probably the most glaring example of this, because he immediately latches onto the egg when he learns the egg has a chance of hatching. (which kind of raises some “pro-life” questions that aren’t necessarily contradictory to fry’s political upbringing, but i think He Could Outgrow That in the right situation, ideally.)

his initial plan is to eat it but he does genuinely get so attached and protective and it’s sweet to me. he does drop it at the end and quickly detach but i think this at least shows that he has a real sense of love even if his sense of responsibility and focus can slip sometimes. (this is where i remind the audience that leela lays eggs according to “leela and the genestalk” so fry being good at raising eggs could be very useful there)

fry grew up with a very inconsistently-affectionate, often emotionally neglectful family. like leela, he doesn’t have a really clear reference point of what a good family unit entails, but he isn’t self-aware enough to seek it out. he can be reckless and indulgent, and that often puts whatever he’s caring for at risk, but he is loving. we know from his behavior towards leela (and bender, and even a few of his other girlfriends) that he will put his life on the line for what he loves. and i think if he had a baby with leela, it would mean so much more to him, because he loves leela so much i don’t think he would want any child of hers to be in danger. he just needs to be able to recognize what danger is.

one of the comics i didn’t bring up yet is issue #32, which introduces us to the closest thing we have to a canon freela baby: leelan von fry-bot, a hybrid clone mixed with fry and leela’s DNA (so not the result of nookie😔) that also takes over a bender copy’s body and overthrows humans for oppressing him like a boss. anyway my point is that fry’s initial reaction to having a kid isn’t more than “oh cool this means leela and i have sex” (and thus getting slapped bc their dynamic is still kind of like that by this point in the comics), but when leelan gets apprehended, he straight-up forgives the little genocidal maniac. 

i don’t think fry really thought of himself with kids before leela. pre-canon, i don’t think he expected to settle down or have any committed relationship that didn’t exist for the purpose of mooching and surviving. i do think, if he did have a child, fry always saw himself with a son (again, not counting yancy sr). there’s a joke in “the route of all evil” that is analogous to him wanting a son (”i hope it's a lager, so I can take it to a ball game”), and in FATEM, he specifically wants the egg “to blossom into a beautiful young man, like [he] did as a baby.” it’s just easier for him to project that way and i think the culture of his house (i.e. the persistence of the yancy fry name) would put a lot of expectations on the boys to have sons. i think not having a son would surprise him but he’d still get so excited. he’d probably expect his daughter to be an action hero as much as leela does (though i think his expectations are way lower). 

we also see in later episodes that while he represses it, fry really does miss having family and gets very quickly attached to the family he does have ("near death wish," "game of tones") so i think having a kid, especially biological offspring, would shake him to his core in a way he didn't expect could ever happen. it helps solidify to him that leela truly is his family now.

there’s also a gag early in the comics when they need to get more humans on earth and it’s implied fry asks leela to repopulate the planet but otherwise idrk if there’s much specifically with him and kids. 

there’s the other joke in “meanwhile” where he implies it’s good they didn’t have children because they might get violent with them (and admittedly they have gotten a bit aggressive with kids in the past, i.e. leela trying to hit cubert), but personally i don’t think fry would do that, even if it’s been implied domestic abuse was uncomfortably normalized for him. leela might be tempted but i think she can reel herself in. and the reason i think they didn’t have kids in the meanwhile timeline is just because it would be too risky to bring a child into a universe where nobody else is sentient and able to help them out, especially after fry and leela die. 

so my conclusion is that fry might not be knowledgeable on the traditions and necessities of healthy parenting right away, but i think he would try to learn. he clearly tries to learn for the people he loves, even when it’s hard, and making leela happy is his top priority. he doesn’t want her to get stuck with all the hardship (even if she’s still gonna be better at organization and the like). and i think he has such an earnest, unfiltered sense of love that he can connect to his own children immediately. and i think they’d sense that.

here’s a fry kid dogpile for extra cuteness

the narrative potential

fry and leela having kids has been thrown around the writers’ room a lot, according to commentaries. now most of this information i’ve gotten secondhand as i haven’t listened to most commentaries or read older interviews as much. there is an interview/commentary (i forget specifically which) where the writers joke that fry and leela would not be good parents because they’d either be dragging their kids with them on dangerous space missions all the time or leaving them home for long periods of time. (edit: there's also this 2010 bit where DXC says he doesn't want them to "[have] a baby and [move] to the suburbs" or anything for the show's sake lol)

this is an extremely understandable reason not to give fry and leela kids. it’s already bad enough when you overthink where cubert and dwight are during farnsworth and hermes’ various adventures, and fry and leela both work so this is an obstacle. there are ways around this practically -- get leela’s parents or even nibbler to babysit, or get a hologram or something as a proxy, or even have fry stay home at times. but it changes up the dynamic of the show in ways that might be hard to adapt to, especially if they’re already doing something similar with amy and kif. plus, they probably don’t wanna make fry and leela too domestic -- i know they worried about that back in season 6 which led to all the on-and-off stuff, but i think now their concern is just staying sci-fi and not simpsonsy.

but they’ve also, reportedly, teased the idea before, and i think the changing landscape of adult animation (a bit more room for serialization and more serious story elements, which futurama always dabbled in even before other shoes did). rumor has it that the original plot of “law and oracle” involved fry and leela’s son coming back from the future (and i think talking backwards or something???), but it was scrapped for i believe being too dark. i think a time traveling child is a great way to avoid the status quo shift of raising a child, even though it would be pretty big and tragic for fry and leela to meet their child and then watch them go knowing they won’t exist for several years. it’d be funny to see their child try and ensure their conception, or maybe even prevent it in some sort of twist on the trope. (this is one of my theories for “the temp.”)

we’ve seen hints of them as parents in “the route of all evil” where they both get hype about bender’s analogous pregnancy with beer, though they’re also excited to... have beer, lol. also some of my friends read a lot into the way they look at tonya in “stench and stenchability” and i do not blame them for that.

this concern about the status quo is also where adoption can come up again, as i can totally see fry and leela adding some wayward teenager to their family, someone just self-sufficient enough to not be too much of a detriment to the crew. i know the orphanarium kids are all adopted (though they could easily go back on that) but ideally i’d like them to adopt a mutant kid; i think it would mean a lot to leela for obvious reasons. maybe an alien or a robot, even. it doesn’t need to be formal adoption -- i can see them just picking up some lost little outcast guy because they feel bad he has nobody to raise him. maybe not for the rest of the series but even for an episode it’d be funny.

however, i think the idea of them having biological kids is utterly fascinating. is there precedent for a mutant breeding with a normal human? if leela “occasionally lays an egg,” what other weird stuff happens with her reproduction system? having an egg to carry could be another way to make the baby plot easier without incapacitating leela and fry too much after all. (and like i said before it’d be so cute to imagine fry carrying around an egg all protectively... like the dad in harvey beaks.) i think more people should take advantage of leela’s mutant genetics and give their offspring a bit more of her latent mutant traits, or traits from her parents’ side. more tentacles and tails and sheddable skin! hell, give them three eyes like leela’s grandma!

(but i think leela actually being pregnant would be interesting too. you know she’d be even more emotionally fucked up than usual on hormones, and would get so stubborn about not being incapacitated and not needing help even though fry keeps wanting to dote on her. also i wonder if mutant pregnancy would be different at all? radioactive morning sickness? fun! it would make some aspects of the show harder to work around though, like i do not know if she could fit behind the wheel while pregnant without making weird adjustments, and i also worry about the infamy behind the whole MWC pregnancy arc, but i don’t think that same uncomfortable and traumatic risk translates to animation.)

and what about fry’s genetics? does his child inherit the lack of delta brainwave? this comes up a lot in freela baby talk, especially with the “chosen one” theory, that fry’s brain thing and leela’s mutant thing might combine in some world-saving combination. again, i’d rather this be deconstructed, because nibbler trying to coax fry and leela to have babies for the sake of the universe is amusing but also pretty fucked-up, and we know fry doesn’t like being used and leela has already had this kind of deceptive thing happen to her before. i want them to do this because they want to, not out of some debt to the universe. that’s way too much pressure on them and their kid.

even putting that aside, i can see both fry and leela having insecurities about having a child, especially biologically. leela of course has her mutant/cyclops trauma and aforementioned perfectionism, but i think fry would be worried too about “ruining” their child with his own mental issues. i can see a sitcom type of story where they try to conceive (maybe with some weird sci-fi assistive technology) but start panicking when it doesn’t work and blaming themselves. one of my theories for “parasites regained” is that fry only takes the worms again when he’s trying to get leela pregnant, because he knows leela loves him for him by now, but he still wants to make sure their child is as perfect and healthy as can be. (i could even see a twist with leela also taking the parasites due to having these same issues.) honestly them getting pregnant on accident (and you know fry’s pullout game weak) would also throw them for a loop.

there’s also the complicated drama and fun of bender getting jealous of fry putting his attention towards not just his wife, but some smelly brat he put inside her. bender sometimes has the vibes of being fry and leela’s bratty teenage son so i love him interacting with their kid like a bitter older brother.

even if they don’t give fry and leela a kid, i could see them bait-and-switching the audience cuz they know it’s such a big deal to some people. like leela seems to have pregnancy symptoms but it’s really just some weird facehugger possession or womb horror. or they catch a glimpse of their future and think they see themselves with a kid but it’s out of context. or they knock fry up instead cuz they love making the guys pregnant instead. i have this joke idea for when the kif babies come back that leela seems to get baby fever really bad, but it’s a literal fever she contracted from the amphibiosian swamp and it’s only cured by the insanity of babysitting the kif babies. 

honestly if they decide they’re not ready to have kids, if they’re not emotionally stable enough or they don’t have a good place to live or if they’re worried about bender or their careers, i’m fine with that. i’d actually love them communicating and deciding on that together! i think it’s just an interesting subject to explore and i really hope the revival does something with it. :)

[fryandleelasbigfling]

would like to add the crucial context that they confirmed at NYCC that "otherwise" will also have significant call backs to "meanwhile" so regardless of whether it's a direct follow up to the whole "other" conspiracy, There Is Going To Be Some Freela :)

I've been curious about Leela being called "The Other" for years

It got me thinking again after seeing the next lineup of episodes

The supposedly series finale (before the renewal was announced) is titled OTHERwise which is similar to Meanwhile (previous series finale)

There's also my shipper brain interpreting "The Other" as "The Significant Other" of Fry

[fryandleelasbigfling]

ive already freaked out a lot in private over the futurama teaser and press release so let me just throw out some updated Thoughts

ive been calling it hulurama for months so im vindicated that its canon

the fulu office space sight gag is so classic but i’ll be a little disappointed if the streaming satire is literal. i still hope it’s a weird sci-fi allegory about timestreams or something. or some weird planex business mumbo jumbo.

“the epic love story of fry and leela” is giving me so much energy. Let Them Move In Together Please. Let Them Get Married. Also Maybe Talk About Kids But They Don’t Need To Have Them Necessarily I’m Just Really Invested In Their Feelings On It

also if calculon is alive please let my joke about calculon end up being true

loving the leela and bender interactions we see lol

talked about it with friends and we now theorize that nibbler is the one getting worms, and that desert scene could be the result of a worm mixing with dark matter ad going full dune sandworm.

we are gonna get some on point mom satire this season i just know it

[fryandleelasbigfling]

revival prediction masterpost (pre-teaser)

so for the past several months i’ve been trying to think of what the hulu episode titles could mean and i’ve decided to post them all in one place in hopes that i get Something Right and can come back to prove i thought of it (or that someone else did and i took the idea, lol). 

note that several of these are biased towards specific characters and concepts i already like so i don’t expect a lot of it to come true. in some cases i just wanna see some fry and leela stuff happen, lol.

the impossible stream

i believe in the theory that “stream” refers to the time stream and that this is a sequel to meanwhile. i have a few ideas for how this could go. it’ll probably focus mostly on fry and leela, and i think they might get lost in the time stream trying to get home, maybe even separated, and have to jump through moments in their lives to find each other / their friends. this would be a fun way to do a flashback episode, as well as introduce new viewers to planet express via memories of the crew’s interactions. i also considered that maybe it happens simultaneously with meanwhile and we see how farnsworth jumped through all these moments in time to find fry and leela, so maybe we could even see moments of the meanwhile timeline with fry and leela growing old, with farnsworth reacting to them lol. there’s a possibility they might end up in 3023 while trying to get back to 3013 and that’s how they can make all these modern jokes. 

i’m positive they’ll make fun of hulu / streaming as they always make fun of their host network when they come back. one of my ideas is that maybe fry gets obsessed with watching/reliving old moments of his life in the time stream as a parody of how people binge-watch nostalgic properties on streaming networks, and leela has to pull him out of it. he’s the one who seemed more willing to see his old friends again in meanwhile while leela was more okay living in the moment, after all. i also had an idea for a very labored joke where they talk about black holes or white holes or something but professor keeps pronouncing hole as ‘hoo-loo’ for some reason.

oh also had an idea for a meta joke where bender wants to bring all my circuits back after cancellation so he hops into the timestream when he sees the glimmer and that’s how the timeline gets fucked up. cuz they Have to involve bender somehow lol

children of a lesser bog

so pretty much everybody agrees this is gonna have kif and amy’s babies return to the surface as children because it’s been 20 years since that episode premiered. so i have a couple ideas for how this could play out. 

for one i expect the kids to be parodies of zoomer culture and modern youth, as cringe as it sounds, or at least have them try to fit into the 31st century equivalent of gen z. this is cuz i can see amy grappling with the fact she’s not a cool college student anymore and having a midlife crisis where she tries to get into 3020s culture and gets into scraps along the way. 

my other idea (especially from the relevance of “lesser bog” in the reference title) is that the kiflings get disowned by the wongs for having mutant blood, and this leads to an argument where amy gets disowned by her parents. i think amy being cut off could be an interesting plot and maybe even tie into the above plot somehow. lauren tom has said we’ll see interesting amy development and i think it’ll be here.

in either case i want to see the crew try to babysit the kids and have that lead to Shenanigans. i really want to see leela’s relation to the babies come up, especially if it leads to her and fry talking about having their own kids, something i’ve always wanted to see them at least mention. i would love this to be a leela and amy friendship episode where amy’s fear of growing up contrasts how leela grew up too fast, or if leela is jealous of amy for having kids even though leela helped make them. or maybe the babies imprint onto leela instead of amy. 

how the west was 1010001

i’ve had some friends speculate that this could parody westworld (they do like to parody modern sci-fi works after all) since that deals with a wild west amusement park. i don’t know the show too well but i think the characters indulging in their greatest fantasies and getting into scrapes with robot employees could be really funny.

also the binary translates to “81″ apparently but i have no idea what it could mean. it also translates to “q” so some people have wondered if it’s a qanon parody and i could kind of see that checking out. they do like to make fun of political extremism and conspiracy theories. maybe there are robots hacking into other people’s minds to make them believe in conspiracy theories (which sounds like a conspiracy in itself ironically, lol).

also ken keeler is reportedly writing this so i hope we get some good fry and leela content lol

parasites regained

i already pitched my idea for this episode on reddit but generally i just wanna see how the other characters -- especially leela -- behave with parasites. also my personal idea for how the parasites come back is that they’re in szechuan sauce lmao

related to items you’ve viewed

i think this could be an experimental episode about advertising or maybe fake spinoffs? like maybe we get a look at shows that are on future hulu or whatever. or maybe it is a normal episode but the second-person nature of the title feels like it’s playing with the audience. it could be an anthology, though i’m more sure we’ll get another one later. my half-serious idea is that the framing device is fry and leela (and maybe bender) trying to find shows to watch and then we watch the show and it cuts back to them doing weird stuff out of context, haha. 

the only other idea that my friends have floated around is this could be their amazon parody, where the crew gets targeted with ads for products that ruin their friendships, maybe? (could also work for ‘the prince and the product.’)

i know what you did next xmas

i like the theory that this is about santa punishing people for future crimes. personally i’d love if the crew somehow learned what they were doing next year and started panicking then it’s revealed that it’s all out of context. like one of them thinks they’re gonna be dead by next xmas but they’re just offscreen. fry and leela see themselves with a kid but it’s just some realistic baby doll. that sort of thing. also there’s a coolio song confirmed (rip) so musical episode, maybe?

rage against the vaccine

okay so i really hope this is about a robot pandemic. we’ve already seen a normal pandemic in “cold warriors” so i’d like to see how a virus would spread across robots and affect them. they could use metal plates to block off wi-fi signals so they don’t share files unprotected, that sort of thing. plus bender would be a baby about inoculation and social distancing, lmao. maybe it ends up spreading to carbon based lifeforms somehow. we could get a calculon cover of “imagine.” so many opportunities!

at the very least come up with a creative alien virus or something, not just a complete covid analogue. it’d also be funny/sad if they don’t even end the pandemic it just persists quietly in the background like the real pandemic lol.

zapp gets cancelled

ohhh boy this title! i would love to see them parody cancel culture if the butt of the joke isn’t on abuse victims but on the assholes who deserve cancellation, or at least if they poke fun at opportunists who don’t care about the issues besides poking fun at a celebrity they already dislike. i have no idea why zapp would get cancelled but i assume it’d be for something innocuous compared to everything that actually would earn him a ruined career. i think it’d be funny to have leela avoid giving any say in the matter or having her side of the story get warped, or have kif get dragged into some nonsense, to parody how people can latch onto these campaigns w/o regard for victims. maybe kif quits his job to raise his new babies lol.

the issue here is idk how to make it sci-fi... maybe they do a meta joke with people from other planets watching the characters like a tv show, like that south park episode? or maybe zapp gets cancelled from reality, like a george bailey style retcon, and we see what life would be like without zapp (leela wouldn’t meet nibbler, kif wouldn’t meet amy, etc). honestly maybe it’s not even about this type of cancellation at all, and zapp gets like a tv show or something. he should do stand-up and get cancelled for that lmfao.

the prince and the product

yeah i’m kind of clueless about this one. it could be a literal prince and the pauper thing but they already did something like that in prisoner of benda, plus the whole flexo arc. maybe bender gets replaced with something new but they did that in obsoletely fabulous too. i’m wondering if the “prince” thing is relevant because i really want them to do fairytale parodies.

all the way down

the 150th episode, midseason finale, written by DXC! the title is speculated to connect to infinite regress so maybe it’ll have something to do with paradoxes. however i also want to believe it’s related to the sewers, as i’m really gunning for more mutant lore in the revival. hoping this is a leela episode... maybe she flees to the sewers for some reason? i kind of want this to signify some good change in leela and fry’s relationship too.

the one amigo

we’ve been speculating this could be about bender feeling left out as fry and leela get closer -- possibly even move in together if they wanna change the status quo like that. maybe he gets in touch with his mexican roots, i dunno.

quids game

i don’t think this is a squid game parody as the reference titles aren’t usually this clear-cut but i wouldn’t mind a futurama take on the battle royale genre (i wanna see fry and leela pit against each other for the angst!). quids can mean british money but i don’t know how that would be relevant, unless they fight for british money.... 

it also can refer to lumps of tobacco so maybe it’ll have to do with that. maybe bender gives up cigars finally.... switches to vaping lmao. 

the temp

okay this is very likely about a temporary employee at planex which could mean a lot of things. it could be a new character, or maybe a recurring character. labarbara could join the company and cause drama for hermes, or maybe one of mom’s sons leaves to work for planex. 

but my personal favorite idea is that this is where they could do the time traveling freela kid plot, who joins planet express to get intel on his past, or maybe even prevent his own conception because he hates his life or something. temp could be a stealth pun on temporal as well. this is purely self indulgent and i don’t expect it but it could happen! if fry and leela have kids i do think the time travel angle they’ve teased before is the best way to go. 

beauty and the bug

no idea about this one. johnny2cellos thinks kif could turn into a swarm of bugs but i doubt that since they’re also giving him a family, and it’s singular bug, not bugs. it could refer maybe to amy’s pet buggalo, i’ve seen speculation about a beauty contest which would be cute. but it could also be about a computer bug, maybe? a bender episode? 

one is silicon and the other gold

lost on this one too but it’s definitely a bender episode. it’s a reference to the “make new friends but keep the old” scout chant. it’d be fun if it was about robot scouts but i don’t think it would be. it could be related to universe 1 since they quote the song in that episode but i don’t know for sure. my wild guess is maybe it’s about bender making new friends.... or maybe it’s about silicon valley, maybe AI writing/art since that’s controversially treated as a replacement to artists instead of a tool used alongside them? i definitely think that subject will come up somewhere. hell maybe it’s about calculon because he’s gold colored, haha. 

attack of the clothes

i just keep picturing that jimmy neutron episode when the pants come to life. i think it’ll pretty much be that, plus excuses to push the envelope on how much nudity they can show. maybe we’ll get more uniforms. maybe zapp’s velour will rise against him. maybe we’ll see the return of fry’s bedazzled underpants or leela’s cute pink lingerie. maybe it’ll be some sort of statement on fashion trends idk.

planet espresso

this is my favorite title of 8b lmao. planet express becoming a coffee shop feels most obvious, and my personal theory is that they’re gonna make fun of coffee shop hipsters and gentrification. i would love to see the 31st century take on gentrification. farnsworth fighting college kids on his property, hermes fighting annoying stoner kids, idk. 

cuteness overlord

so since these 3 titles were released together i feel like they might be related somehow, like a trilogy. i think futurama will lean into more recurring elements if they’re gonna be made for streaming, especially since they had elements of continuity even before it became big for adult animation to do that. 

i don’t know much about this one but i think it could relate to nibblonians... or maybe something else cute. maybe something with the internet... or babies. idk. i reference the boss baby conflict, or that phineas and ferb episode where they harness the power of cuteness, or that one animaniacs 2020 bit where dot turns the world cute.

the futurama mystery liberry

so this is definitely an anthology! my idea is that they’re gonna answer futurama theories like one of them youtube channels, but it’s all mysteries nobody ever asked and they keep distracting us from the real mysteries lmao. but on the other (ahem) hand, they could use this for some closure on random unanswered questions and abandoned plot elements. either way, it would be fun to have an anthology that gives us canon information!

also! the spelling of liberry is a call back to “the day the earth stood stupid” so it could be a brainspawn thing, maybe that’s the framing device, the brainspawn giving us all the canon information we’d want to know.

otherwise

this one drove my friends CRAZY cuz it very well could be about the whole “the other” thing from “the why of fry” which would guarantee it as a freela episode. i don’t personally know exactly what “the other” could mean, others have theorized it better than i could, but i really want to see it deconstructed. i could see leela grapple with the idea of being defined by her proximity to her boyfriend and then it’s revealed that’s not what it means. maybe they’re each other’s “other.” hell maybe leela isn’t even the other. who knows! either way i’ll probably cry like a baby even if the show does get renewed.

[fryandleelasbigfling]

new revival wishlist item is, if we get more mom backstory, i wanna see her as a child. i want her to be old money, like “her parents own a space emerald mine” money, still totally unsympathetic from birth, acting like veruca salt except with twenty times as much swearing. maybe she inherited the “mom” label or maybe, somehow, she was called “mom” as a child. maybe they called her “daughter.” she lashes out at her parents like she lashes out at her sons now. i want her to reprogram all the robot merch to backfire horribly cuz she’s mad she didn’t get a candy bar. that sort of shit. 

[fryandleelasbigfling]

I would bet money that the revival is gonna bring calculon back to life just for the sake of extremely on the nose jokes about how nobody expected or asked for him to come back to life and his second death was perfectly fulfilling and how much of an insult it is to give him a new voice box just because the old one was apparently "too expensive" to maintain

[fryandleelasbigfling]

i love ur blog:))

do u think the orphanarium kids will return in the revival? i know theyre adopted now but with the idea that itll be set in 3023-ish, they could be teens. could be some interesting dynamics :00

thank you! and that's a good question and definitely one i've thought about. i don't expect them to age up the kids (including dwight and cubert) after not doing the same in the CC era, but it could be funny for jokes. i think they could also justify it by saying the kids are just that malnourished they haven't grown physically in 20 years, or otherwise kept in some sort of stasis.

i think it would be mad funny if they aged up cubert and dwight to make fun of nerdy millennials though, definitely tracks with cubert's original purpose of mocking those ACKSHUALLYYYY kind of fans. most of the orphans don't have the same level of personality except sally, but i would not be opposed to seeing them again especially interacting with leela. honestly i don't even 100% expect the show to remember they got the orphans adopted (or maybe they'll handwave it as abner firing them if their show ended lol) but it would be funnier IMO to see them still working in the TV industry.

[fryandleelasbigfling]

tag navigation intro post for pinning:

i tag every character with their colloquial name (fry, leela, farnsworth, bender, etc.), but my original posts get the full name tag for extra visibility. 

i tag episode titles when i can, i may sometimes miss punctuation though

i won’t guarantee that everything here will have a ton of posts in it. some posts on my main blog (@redandfranticfeelings) dating back pre-2023 may be tagged similarly tho!

shipping tag guide:

#freela (for fry x leela shipping stuff)

#freela baby fever (for theories, discussion, memes, etc about fry and leela as parents + designs for their kids)

#kifamy (for kif x amy)

#frender (for fry x bender)

#delivery trio (for fry, leela, and bender together)

#lamy (for leela x amy)

#leelars (for lars x leela)

#turannigan trashfire (for discussing zapp and leela’s toxic dynamic -- NOT a ship tag)

other tag guide:

#hulurama (for the new futurama revival, mostly prerelease)

#hulurama predictions (for revival theories)

#futurama spoilers (for details given by the trailers onwards; i tag spoilers for a week after the episode) 

#doodly dee (for my art)

#my fic (for fanfics)

#paradox baby AU (”what if lars got leela pregnant before he died” AU)

#momcorp leela AU (”what if mom adopted leela” AU)

#vibes (for posts that aren't directly about futurama but inspire world building jokes or just relate to the humor of the show for me)

also please DNI if you hate leela or hate freela. there is just nothing good for you here if that's true.