Past-o-Rama: Meanwhile

It’s (former) series finale time, and now it’s finally time to talk about Fry and Leela. The seeds of their romantic future were planted way back in the pilot, with Leela being inspired to quit her miserable job thanks to this free-thinking wildcard of a man from the past. But the ship teasing didn’t really seem to kick into gear until season 3, where we got multiple episodes devoted to Fry’s hopeless romantic attempts to win the heart of his beloved cyclops. It became such a revisited topic that the show quickly started to make fun of itself for stretching out the “will they/won’t they” for so very, very long. The DVD movies would continue this even further, but at last, they seemed to cut the bullshit once and for all with “Into the Wild Green Yonder” ending with Fry confessing his love to Leela and them kissing. But the revival premiere “Rebirth” seemed to hit the reset button AGAIN thanks to a robot duplicate Leela, with the real Leela pumping the brakes on things with Fry for the time being. Then, at long last, almost unceremoniously, the two were made a canonical couple by the seventh and (formerly) final season, where we saw bits and pieces of them actually as partners. The Fry/Leela saga was thought of as so important to the series that it was a major component, if not the main component, of all four series “finales” we’ve had so far. But here’s the thing: I never really got Fry and Leela. I’m not quite on board with their relationship, but at the same time, I am.

For as long as we’ve had sitcoms, we’ve always had those two characters, the ones that so obviously like each other, but through various circumstances, find themselves unable to get together for season after season. Everyone has their favorite ships of show’s they’ve loved, and they’re so engaging because you care about these characters you see week after week, year after year, and you just want to see them happily living their best lives by the final episode. Futurama is kind of a unique case in the world of animated sitcoms, in that the majority of them are about families, with the main couple typically being a long-standing marriage with kids, so even if the two characters are wildly different and squabble a lot, you can more easily accept they’re in love based on their unseen, pre-show history. Meanwhile, Futurama introduces us to two twenty-somethings who have a meet-cute in the year 3000, and we’re eventually meant to believe that they see the other as the love of their lives, one they’d like to marry and start a family with. It’s more in tune with a workplace comedy romance, if your workplace was surviving deadly space battles and dealing with bizarro sci-fi bullshit every week. Fry and Leela are co-workers and good friends, but are they convincing as the romantic leads of this series? Well… ultimately I’d lean towards no, but it’s a soft no. A gentle no.

Why does Fry love Leela? Why does Leela love Fry? It’s something I wish the show did a little more groundwork on. In the ship teases in the first season, they seemed to be drawn to each other because of their isolation. Fry a 20th century outcast, Leela an unloved orphan, the two kind of gravitated toward each other in vulnerable moments because of their shared understanding of not belonging. As the show continued to develop, Fry and Leela’s personalities became more generalized, and later more exaggerated. Fry became a well-meaning, but intensely moronic man child, while Leela was the no-nonsense, occasionally impulsive captain, consistently rolling her eyes as Fry’s idiocy. However, there are moments throughout the show that feature Leela letting her hair down. Season 7’s “Fun on a Bun” has a lovely ending where Leela willingly makes a fool of herself at Fry’s behest (“Just this once, I’m going to let you embarrass me.“) Those are the instances I wish went explored a little deeper. There’s not enough moments in the show of Fry and Leela actually having fun together, sharing similar interests, anything that would help build something of a foundation for their eventual relationship.

The Fry/Leela ongoing story isn’t as pivotal to the show as “will they/won’t they” couples in other sitcoms, but they did a dozen or so episodes exclusively about their relationship, so the work still needs to be put in. Episodes like “Parasites Lost” and “The Sting” are very emotional and effective in a broad sense by the stories they’re telling, but it becomes a little tougher when you try to specifically chart them onto Fry and Leela. You can enjoy them just fine on their own, but when you work the rest of the series into it, it gets a bit dicier. Lots of times they write Fry as borderline brain damaged, while Leela was still turning the poor guy down despite being shown a million parallel dimensions where she and Fry are destined to be together. There’s also a fair bit of the Fry & Leela stuff that feels like male writers criticizing women for being indecisive and daring to reject a man asking them out, which is not very cool (“Fry is very sweet, but he’s so immature. I love his boyish charm, but I hate his childishness.”) I think an excellent, more effective parallel to Fry and Leela would be Jake and Amy from Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Both characters have their personalities exaggerated, with Jake often being scatterbrained and childish, and Amy being super straight-laced, but we also get plenty of moments of Jake being actually competent and a good guy and Amy being a big goofball that we understand what connects them to each other. So I can’t help but find all the Fry & Leela stuff through this series (past season 1) to be surface-level sweet. I can’t deny I teared up a bit at the endings of “Time Keeps on Slippin'” or “Bender’s Big Score,” but I feel like I’d be more emotionally satisfied if we understood Fry and Leela more as a couple.

So finally, onto the actual episode. The crew makes a delivery to the Moon, recalling Planet Express’ very first mission, where a near death experience for Leela has Fry worried he’s been beating around the bush with her for too long (fourteen years to be exact.) So he’s going to finally pop the question to Leela, and to make the moment extra romantic, he absconds with the Professor’s latest invention, the time button, an incredibly stupid device that rewinds time by ten seconds, but requires ten seconds to recharge. I’m glad this (former) last episode got in a whole bunch of the Professor explaining scientific gobbledygook, like how they’ll be safe from the temporal displacement in his chroniton-resistant time shelter (a callback to “Time Keeps on Slippin,'”) and his explanation for how dangerous it would be to leave said shelter during a reset, with the universe not knowing where to send your molecular makeup (“We’d be shredded across the space-time continuum like human coleslaw!”) Fry wants to use the button to make the sunset last forever after he proposes, a moment he hopes to remember forever. He gives Leela a time to arrive for their date atop the tallest building in New New York, but is so crestfallen when she doesn’t show up, he impromptu decides to commit suicide, which to me, feels too dark, and seems like a story-convenient stretch for Fry to do. They could’ve just had him accidentally fall during his lamenting and it would have been fine. But Leela isn’t late, his own watch was actually slow, having used the time button repeatedly to steal a bunch of diamonds for Leela’s ring, in a wonderful sci-fi twist. Unfortunately, Fry realizes he can hit the time button in free fall too late, rewinding him to when he just started falling, trapping him in an unending loop of unavoidable doom.

Thanks to Bender and the rest of the gang, they manage to cushion Fry’s fall (but not before the Professor gets accidentally evaporated by Leela pressing the button), but Fry ends up landing on the time button, crushing it, resulting in the entire universe instantly freezing in time. With the button destroyed and no means to repair it, Fry and Leela are stuck as the only two unfrozen beings left on Earth. But neither are too bothered by it, because they have each other. They finally get married, and proceed to live out the rest of their lives, traveling all over the globe over beautiful piano music in a genuinely affecting montage. It feels a bit weird that this (former) final episode of the series was exclusively about Fry and Leela, with an ending that literally freezes out the rest of the main and supporting cast. But considering we’re on our fourth series finale, and Bender had a prominent role in the previous “final” episode “Overclockwise,” I guess why not try something a little bit different? Also, I haven’t done a full rewatch of this series in a long while, but coming to this episode now as a married man, I feel like the fantasy of spending a lifetime with just one person is much more novel to me now. And again, even though I just complained about how Fry and Leela don’t feel that connected as a couple, I’m still a sucker for this ending, where the two have no regrets for how their lives turned out, despite the weird circumstances (“It was a good life.” “Kind of lonely, though? Maybe?” “I was never lonely. Not even for a minute.”)

Fry and Leela, now in their old age, return to New New York to finally do their engagement toast, only to be shocked by the appearance of the Professor, who had been trapped in an adjacent timeline, desperately searching for the time button. He quickly repairs it, as well as recalibrating it to send them back in time, erasing their memories of all that’s happened. And so the series (formerly) ends with the Professor hitting the button, resetting history. In some airings of this episode (and possibly the very first?), the pilot immediately ran right afterward, which was really wonderful, the entire series effectively starting over, a perfect time loop. Watching back now, as we’re a week away from the new reboot starting, I notice that the Professor says they’ll be sent back “to the instant before I conceived of the time button.” So they can basically restart the series at any point now. Although we’ve seen in the trailers that it’s currently the “present day” of 3023, so I don’t know how they’ll address the time jump. But I guess we’ll see, won’t we? What does the future hold for Futurama? Hell if I know. This truly is the show that just will never die. As for Fry and Leela, the promos seem to indicate that the two are moving in together, so I’m hoping that we get at least a little bit more insight on them as a couple. I assume they’ll keep them married, but will they go even further than that? A baby, maybe? In any case, this series has always felt like a weird miracle to me, that it managed to keep coming back and still maintained a mostly stable level of quality for its entire lifespan, and I’m really hoping this latest Hulu run can keep things at that level. But can they? Won’t they? I don’t know, LET’S WATCH THE TELEVISION MACHINE AND FIND OUT!

The review for the first new episode will be up on Saturday, then the second episode sometime early next week.