Past-o-Rama: Decision 3012

Great science fiction has always held a mirror up to our modern world, but making the analogues too specific to a moment in our present runs the risk of becoming dated. This especially becomes the case when your 31st century series gets rebooted nearly a decade after its original run, and the futuristic setting ironically has to re-adjust itself to the advancement of our new present day. Rewatching the original four seasons, one of the big things that made it feel locked in time was its mocking of how dumb cell phones are, which was definitely in vogue in early 2000s comedies. Fast forward ten years and smartphones have become an unavoidably vital presence in society now. Having “Attack of the Killer App” be one of the first new episodes feels like a rectification for this, giving our characters access to a whole world of iProducts, with the futuristic bent being that the phone gets installed directly in their eyes. Sure, it was trendy to riff on Apple at the time, but people’s crippling addictions to their devices and social media, and companies using personal data to exploit is still incredibly relevant today. Leela’s mutant boil being a Susan Boyle parody? Not as relevant, but I’m not as bothered by it as some fans are. The following episode “Proposition Infinity” was also ripped from the headlines, based off the then-current raging debate about gay marriage, and named after Proposition 8, the 2008 California legislation to ban it in the state. But societal prejudice is always going to be present in some form, and the demonization of new kinds of groups will probably become even more arbitrary, as pointed out by Bender in that episode: a union between a ghost and a horse is okay, but between a human and a robot is not? The issues are pulled from today, but they are smartly adapted to fit the world of the show. There seems like there’s some apprehension about the new Hulu reboot that the show might feel too locked in the current moment, and with upcoming episodes titled “Rage Against the Vaccine” and “Zapp Gets Cancelled,” I can definitely see the worry. But the series has had a very good track record with these kinds of episodes at being able to toe the line between being relevant but not too specifically relevant that I’m hopeful they can hit that sweet spot once again. “Decision 3012” is a great example of this, taking a then-very current political story and putting a clever sci-fi spin on it that works to a really satisfying pay-off that feels very true to this show.

It’s election season on planet Earth, which means Nixon has kicked off his re-election campaign, using his bully pulpit to rile up the crowd about illegal aliens (of the outer space variety) taking their jobs, building a wall to keep them out, cutting taxes for the rich and fucking over the poor, all to tremendous applause (all of which feels even more evergreen over a decade later.) We also get an excellent Fry line, encapsulating the feelings of the average American voter who supports politicians like these perfectly (“Why are you cheering, Fry? You’re not rich.” “True. But someday I might be rich, then people like me better watch their step!”) Meanwhile, the opposing party platform doesn’t seem much better, as Leela attends a debate filled with charisma-free talking heads spouting calculated catchphrases to appeal to the base instincts of the masses (again, still very, very relevant) The only exception is Senator Chris Travers, a man of practical ideas who is instantly shunned for having them (getting an enormous boo uttering the phrase, “According to reputable scientists…”) Now, the biggest red mark I can give this episode is when you view Travers as a literal Obama stand-in. He’s a Nobel Prize-winning Harvard graduate representing Hawaii, the parallels couldn’t be clearer. But it feels a little late to be making an episode about the infectious optimism of Obama’s 2008 campaign, considering when this aired in 2012, we just lived through his first term and saw basically none of those political promises come true. The shiny veneer of his public image was peeling away from his inaction in office, so all of the fawning words Leela pumps Travers up with in this episode ring so hollow if you think about it as a Hollywood writer’s room stroking off Obama in their comedy show. But I can mentally put all that baggage aside and just focus on Travers as a generic idealistic political candidate, with the later real-life political “controversy” element sprinkled on top of it.

Invigorated by Leela’s support, Travers makes her his campaign manager, leading to a steady and growing support base. With that, we get some fun, futuristic campaign trail stuff, like him simultaneously dining at 250 small-town eateries via hologram (“This pie at this diner is the best pie!”) Meanwhile, Bender finds himself teaming up with Nixon, who is dead-set on smearing his political rival any way he can. I talked about in “Bender’s Big Score” how wonderfully malleable a character Bender is, where he can oscillate between a heartless evil bastard to a helpful ally not just in the same episode, but sometimes in the same scene. I think it helps that Bender’s motivations are purely focused on the criminal acts themselves, not the intentions. Bender doesn’t give a shit about Senator Travers. He barely even cares about President Nixon (as he tells him to his face, “I don’t even know who you are!”) But to discredit somebody’s good name just for the thrill of it? He’s totally game for that. He’s just a lovable bastard, that silly robot. On the other end, Nixon has basically transformed into a cartoonish villain at this point, staring out the White House window hoping a squirrel will drop off a power line, and his trademark “Arroooo!” has transformed into Billy West doing a werewolf howl (“I think I feel a jowl movement coming on!”)

Unfortunately for Nixon, Senator Travers is totally clean, but he latches onto his rival’s middle name, Chris Zaxxar Travers. More than willing to stoke a xenophobic flame, he and Bender launch a conspiracy theory that Travers wasn’t born on Earth, with low-information voters swarming his office, demanding to see his Earth certificate. Clearly this is referring to the smear campaigns festering for years during Obama’s initial presidential run and his term in office, claiming he was not born in America (which only became relevant for even longer given that one of the main propagators of the bogus theory went on to literally became his successor to the Presidency.) It’s very on-the-nose from the start, but what really works is how quickly they start to play with it. Travers says to Leela that he was born in Kenya, but unlike Obama, this is absolutely no problem, since he’s running for President of Earth. Fry, Leela, and a newly on-board Bender travel to the hospital to find record of his birth, but come up with nothing. Travers then reveals the truth: he’s actually from the future, having grown up in a hellish post-apocalypse shepherded by Nixon’s brutal regime resulting in a robot uprising (led by Bender.) Humanity’s only hope was to send a promising young man back in time to eventually run for President and defeat Nixon for good (using a xeroxed photocopy of Fry’s ass with the time code on it, a fun callback to “Bender’s Big Score.”) Taking the Obama “controversy” and using it to base a character who wasn’t born in this time period, and throwing in some Terminator time travel in there, is a pretty excellent twist, in my opinion. Then it ramps up even crazier when Leela makes a logical suggestion: how will people be convinced Travers was born on Earth? Witnessing his birth live, of course.

So everything culminates in Travers comforting his mother in the delivery room as he himself is about to be born, with a camera aimed right at the action down south for all the world to see (as well as Morbo, who is reporting live from the pelvic region.) It’s not quite in the same ballpark of Fry sleeping with his own grandmother, but it’s in a similar vein of weird time duplicate hi-jinks that I’m a sucker for. The only thing that does feel dated about all this is the mass populous accepting Travers’ birth with no question; nowadays there’d be a whole QAnon conspiracy about how it was a fake baby and the footage was all fake. But whatever. Travers wins the election, but he ends up being quickly erased from existence, since by stopping Nixon from winning, he created a time paradox where he never would have had to go back in time in the first place. It does kind of fly in the face of the “paradox-free time travel” promised by the Bender tattoo, but I’m okay with playing fast and loose with it as long as it’s amusing. Plus couldn’t it kind of work if you consider he’s supposed to be the time duplicate who would end up being doomed? Or would his newborn past self be considered the duplicate? I could never get that straight. Regardless, we finish the time continuum normalizing around everyone, with Travers erased from everyone’s memory as the time stream catches up to itself, and Nixon gloating about an uncontested victory (“Nixon always wins!!”) When I saw the trailer for the new Hulu season and they had an extended bit from their upcoming COVID episode, my initial reaction was to roll my eyes, but episodes like these showed that the series is capable of maintaining that balance of covering something topical through a warped lens that fits within their futuristic setting. Whether they actually do it, however, remains to be seen…