Past-o-Rama: The Why of Fry

Back when syndication was king, the appeal of episodic television was that you can run episodes in any order, and anyone tuning in to one of them could instantly get up to speed, and for animated sitcoms or cable cartoons, there was very little, if any, direct connection of any plot threads or world-changing events from episode to episode. But in the last decade or so, we’ve seen a shift in animated shows starting to embrace continuity, partially assisted by the rise of streaming, where not only is it easier than ever to watch an entire series in the order it aired, new shows can have their whole seasons dropped all at once. Futurama was never really interested in that sort of storytelling (and even if they had been, the network would have definitely discouraged them from doing it,) but in building the world of the show, they were definitely interested in laying down track early for future reveals and plot lines. From the inception of the series, Matt Groening, David X. Cohen and the rest of the writers intended to hide clues and Easter eggs hinting at greater mysteries behind the characters and the world of the future, things that might not pay off for entire seasons. It almost feels like the evolution of the mindset of early Simpsons, rewarding the audience for paying attention with quick sight gags and the incredible joke density of the scripts that rewards you from re-watching to see what you might have missed. Written by David X. Cohen, in one of the only episodes he has a solo credit on, this episode feels like the culmination of a lot of breadcrumbs placed over the past few seasons regarding Fry’s role in the world of Futurama.

After a particularly demoralizing day, Fry is knocked unconscious by Nibbler and taken to his home world, where he is debriefed about the nefarious mission of the Brainspawn, a race of giant flying brains hellbent on acquiring all the knowledge in the known universe before destroying it. The Nibblonian/Brainspawn conflict was established in season 3’s “The Day the Earth Stood Stupid,” which is recapped briefly as Fry has trouble remembering (“I remember the square dancing stomachs. Although that might have been a Mylanta commercial.”) In that episode, Fry was the only one immune to the Brainspawn’s powers, which at the time seemed like just a joke about how stupid he was. But this episode explains that Fry’s immunity is a result of him lacking the delta brainwave the Brainspawn hijacks, thanks to his time traveling canoodling making him his own grandfather in “Roswell That Ends Well.” As bizarre as all of this is, I can totally go along with Fry disrupting his genetic lineage in such an enormous way could create such an abnormality (I also love that an episode involving time travel incest nabbed Futurama its first Emmy.) It’s so weird to think about such an insane joke like Fry having sex with his own grandmother being used as foreshadowing for an epic science-fiction explanation, but I believe they had that in mind at some point during the writing process. Though I can’t imagine what the hell someone who hadn’t seen “Roswell” would think of that information just casually being thrown out there, but nowadays where you can watch the series straight through in order, it’s no longer an issue.

The Nibblonians need Fry’s help to infiltrate the Brainspawn’s HQ, the Info-sphere, to plant an explosive to destroy their database of all pilfered knowledge. But when he is caught, the Brainspawn reveal to Fry a monumental secret: Nibbler is responsible for him getting frozen in the past, having hidden under a desk and blown over his tipped chair, leading him tumbling into the cryogenic tube. As big a reveal as this seems for a show in its fourth season, the evidence was always there from the start. In the opening of “Space Pilot 3000,” you can clearly see the shadow of a little creature as Fry falls. Three episodes after that, we met Nibbler, a cute little alien Leela rescues that bears a striking resemblance to that shadowy figure from in the pilot. You could definitely start putting some of the pieces together of this mystery very early on, and indeed, having been around on the Internet in those days, Futurama fan pages and message boards were abuzz with all of these secret background clues, wondering what they could mean or what they’re teasing. One of the most notorious of these was the alien language, background gags written in strange text that needed to be deciphered. As seasons went on, new languages were created that became harder and harder to decode, but fans still were able to crack them. It was just fun to dig into all of the different secrets of the show, and this episode really seems like the ultimate payoff of the biggest secret of all, the one that kicked off the entire series in the first place.

The Brainspawn are able to project Fry back into the past to stop himself from being frozen, leading to a one-on-one confrontation with Nibbler under the cryogenics lab desk, all while past Fry is kicking back in his chair, leaning precariously back and forth, his ultimate destiny unwittingly in the balance. At this point, Fry has been in the future for several years now, and by his own admission, he loves it, but being confronted with the truth that it wasn’t fate that brought him there is a tough pill to swallow, his emotional outlook butting heads with Nibbler’s pragmatic one (“What is one life weighed against the entire universe?” “But it was my life!”) When Nibbler pleads with Fry if there’s anything worth saving in the future for him, Fry’s immediate answer is Leela, which leads Nibbler to ponder to himself, “She must be the other…” This became an item of speculation as to what Nibbler meant by that, and what Leela’s role in the fate of the universe was. I always just assumed it was no deeper than just a Star Wars reference (although thankfully not a tee-up for a future reveal about Fry and Leela being distant siblings.) And ultimately nothing was really made from this hint, but hey, you can read into it whatever you want. Leela is one of the first people Fry met in the future, and ultimately is partially responsible for them getting jobs at Planet Express, going to Vernon 6 and finding Nibbler in the first place? Sure, let’s go with that. In the end, Fry makes his choice: he triggers his past self’s chair to topple, sealing his own fate for himself. And even this was foreshadowed as well: just three episodes earlier in “Jurassic Bark,” when we see the scene from the pilot again, we see a second, larger, unusually familiar shadow alongside Nibbler during the chair falling scene. Thankfully, even with FOX airing episodes in an erratically different order for its final years, “Bark” still ran before this episode did, so fans were able to spot the second shadow and theorize what it meant before this ultimate reveal.

Running alongside Fry’s story is Leela’s date with a “very important” man, the aide to the Mayor, Chaz (voiced by the great Bob Odenkirk.) I don’t want to dig too much into the Fry/Leela saga (since I intend to make that the bedrock of a future review), but it’s a recurring plot line that really kicked into high gear in seasons 3 and 4. The seeds of their affection for each other were definitely planted from back in the pilot, and there were a couple of scattered moments like that going forward, but season 3’s “Parasites Lost” felt like the first of many “Fry tries to get Leela to love him” episodes. Here, Fry is hopelessly out-of-luck, a lowly delivery boy of limited intelligence up against a slick, fast-talking man in politics. To sweeten the deal for Fry’s choice, Nibbler promises that in a thousand years time, he’ll help Fry with his courtship of Leela in whatever way he can, which you can read as another re-contextualization. Why did Nibbler act like a dumb, helpless animal upon the crew finding him for the first time? Perhaps to appear more cute and desirable so Leela could “adopt” him? In this episode, he nabs a flower for Fry to instinctively give to Leela, which is a pretty sweet moment. The episode ends with Leela kissing Fry on the lips (with an adorable, overwhelmed “Yes!” from Fry under the executive producer card), but it would still be a ways before the writers decided to cut the crap and just make them a couple already. Between this point and into the Comedy Central run, the will-they/won’t-they teasing started to veer into ridiculous territory. Like, what was the conversation after Leela kissed him?

I can’t quite place when the announcement of Futurama‘s cancellation was officially made. I only remember rumors about the show being on an indefinite hiatus in its final few years, with online fans like me nervously bracing ourselves for the inevitable. FOX aired a “season five” of the show in its 2002-2003 TV season, which comprised of the remaining production season four episodes (and one long season three holdout), with “The Why of Fry” seemingly acting as a “finale” in April 2003. After that, the final seven unaired episodes were dribbled out over the summer, and that was that. The show was officially done-zo. The media landscape is much different nowadays, where studios are chomping at the bit to revive any property that has any small amount of name recognition (hence why Futurama is being brought back yet again.) But back in the olden days of the early 2000s, if a show was cancelled, that was it, and no amount of whining on the Internet or signing fan petitions was going to change that. But an unlikely savior was already lifting the show up, in the form of Cartoon Network’s burgeoning new late-night block Adult Swim. They had picked up the syndication rights for Family Guy and Futurama, airing both at the start of 2003, with strong ratings and high DVD sales reinvigorated interest in the two shows. Family Guy was the more successful of the two, and with Seth MacFarlane having gotten another shot at a FOX series with American Dad, FOX decided to resurrect Family Guy and throw them both on the air on the same night. But what about poor old Futurama? It wouldn’t be a few more years before we got the miraculous announcement we fans thought would never happen: Futurama was finally coming back. For realsies!!