141. The Impossible Stream

Original release date: July 24, 2023

The premise: Yearning to actually do something meaningful with his life, Fry vows to watch every single TV show ever made. But he soon discovers that binge-watching in the future holds more risks than he thought.

The reaction: Season 6’s “Rebirth” had a lot of weight to carry, being the first new episode in seven years, having to effectively reboot the series proper while dealing with the events of the DVD movies. It was a very solid episode, with the Planet Express crew being literally reborn, and Fry having to deal with losing Leela, and then with the ramifications of creating a robotic Leela clone. The connective tissue between “Into the Wild Green Yonder” and this new episode was all relegated to the cold open, as well as a cute winking reference at their new broadcast home, with the gang being saved by being transported through Earth’s central shipping channel (“How humorous!” “Yes, it’s sort of a Comedy Central channel, and we’re on it now!”) Now, thirteen years later, we have season 8’s “The Impossible Stream” (or season 9, or season 11, depending if you’re organizing by production season, DVD volume, or broadcast season respectively. So damn confusing…), where that one-off joke is stretched for the entire episode. I knew this episode’s premise going into it, and I’d seen the shot of the Planet Express ship landing at the Fulu building in so many promos for the reboot, so I wasn’t surprised to see this coming, but I can’t say I wasn’t bummed that they weren’t more creative with it. In Fry’s pursuit to watch every single TV show, his final objective is to tackle the last season of “All My Circuits” (to which Bender responds, “Which final season? They got cancelled like three or four times.”) “Circuits” becomes the obvious stand-in for Futurama itself, with multiple jokes about its multiple cancellations and resurrections on different networks, a running gag that grows thin pretty quickly. Fry’s mission to binge all 13,000 episodes proves to be potentially fatal, as the Professor reveals his mind won’t be able to function if he reaches the end of the series. Thus, Leela and Bender must convince the heads of Fulu to reboot the show and keep it going to keep Fry alive. So we also get some jokes about rebooting old shows as well, something that I am absolutely sick of seeing at this point. I talked about it in my Clerks III review, that any meta humor about how silly and pointless retreading old ground is within the reboot you’re already making is, just doesn’t work anymore. Ha ha, yeah, the well’s gone dry, what kind of idiot would want to watch more of this show? Anyway, here’s more of it! The episode feels like it’s spinning its wheels in the second half, with Leela and Bender continuously having to keep the show going faster and faster to keep up with Fry’s viewing, and the final twist of the actors performing in front of Fry to ease him back to reality didn’t seem clever enough. So yeah, a bit of a disappointing start. I feel like it’s so hard to gauge this as a harbinger for the rest of the season since it’s so uniquely up its own ass, so I’m still looking forward to the second episode, which will hopefully be a more promising sign of things to come.

Random thoughts and tidbits:
– As expected, the opening recaps the Professor using the time button from “Meanwhile” to reboot the series, except instead of restarting the universe from the moment before he ever thought up of the time button as he claimed he would, he restarts the universe as is, but with Fry and Leela reverted to their younger ages. But that doesn’t really matter, I acknowledge that this was the neatest way to do this. I was also wondering where they would keep Fry and Leela in this newest season, considering Fry had more or less proposed to Leela before the universe froze, but it seems like they’re back to just being a couple, since Hermes refers to Leela as Fry’s “girlfriend.” Maybe they’ll circle back around to the engagement at some point in the future.
– I love that the full version of the opening title sequence is back. I always hated the abridged Comedy Central version. I understand that even saving a few seconds is incredibly helpful to give as much time to the episodes themselves as possible, but it almost felt like sacrilege abbreviating one of the most iconic title sequences of all time.
– I don’t like that Fry acknowledges he’s been in the future for 23 years. Like many animated sitcoms, Futurama exists in a floating timeline where time goes by and nobody gets older, but it only works if nobody calls attention to it. Even though canonically Fry was unfrozen on New Year’s Eve 2999, you can tell me it’s now the year 3023 and I can just go with it. But if you have Fry openly say he’s been living in the future for 23 years, then I start thinking about how he should be 50 years old at this point, and you’ve broken the illusion.
– A real blink-or-you’ll-miss-it Easter Egg of Fry’s Fulu activation code being his old PIN number “1077.” I only noticed it on the rewatch, since you see it so quickly as the numbers flash over Fry’s eyes.
– I really love that Fry doesn’t initially understand what “binging” means in regards to watching TV, since binge-watching wasn’t a thing back in the 20th century. As Futurama went on (and on and on and on…), Fry, as a regular scheme from 1999, became less of a contemporary of the audience as he got farther and farther removed from our present. In the Comedy Central era, I was really pleased they kept Fry’s reference points still locked in his appropriate past (the only counter example I can think of is in one episode, he does a joke about the Kardashians, which really bugged me.) It feels like the show could have a lot more fun with him learning about “modern” concepts like this that didn’t exist back in his time, but with a more sci-fi twist. The binge-watching machine is a decent example, but they could definitely improve on this idea.
– This feels like the most we’ve ever seen of “All My Circuits,” even more so than “Bender Should Not Be Allowed on TV,” where we see multiple full scenes of the show, which of course boil down to romantic deception and betrayal. It kind of made me think about how out-of-time this show-within-a-show feels. Soap operas started disappearing around Futurama‘s last cancellation, with only a few of them remaining to this day, so they’re not really a subject rife for satire anymore. Robots acting in a soap opera was a cute novelty of an idea, but I can’t say it really sustains for longer than thirty seconds an episode. I laughed at the very first scene (“Calculon! But you weren’t due back from the Time Traveler’s Convention until…” “Yesterday?!”) but the ensuing clips became more tedious, especially the double-speed scenes, which oddly were even more sluggish.
– “All My Circuits” is nothing without Calculon, but they need to revive him, since he had died (twice!) in the Comedy Central run. Of course, this is as simple as a quick phone call to the Robot Devil (“Hell yes, you can have him! If he dies again, no backsies!”) Calculon first met his end committing suicide on stage (for realism) in “The Thief of Baghead.” Then, he was resurrected in “Calculon 2.0,” initially feeling like the writers didn’t want to kill off a beloved character, but that episode ends with him getting killed again. I liked that despite bringing him back, they seemed like they were going to make the change permanent, but just as they undid it once, they undid it again. This series isn’t too big on continuity, nor does it need to be, but I feel like I’d have preferred they kept this as one of their few “permanent” changes.
– We get a random interstitial commercial for Slurm Zero (“None of the flavor! All of the addiction!”) But oddly, we get the grand return of Slurms MacKenzie, now an elderly worm who can barely spit out his catchphrase without wheezing. What’s up with this? It could have been a Duffman-style thing where different people have filled the role for a corporate mascot over the year (“Duffman can never die, only the actors who play him!”) But him being old implies this is the real Slurms, who died way back in season 1. I guess his death was seemingly unconfirmed? I guess?
– Leela and Bender’s tireless pursuit to keep “All My Circuits” endlessly in production ends up killing the writing staff, where we get some unfortunately timed jabs (“Any idiot can be a TV writer!” “Many are.”) Yeah, actual writers penned these self-deprecating jokes, but it reads as more sour as we’re several months in on a WGA strike thanks to obscenely overpaid studio executives and their refusal to open up their purse strings.
– I feel like I’m always surprised when I’m reminded that Billy West is now in his 70s. In this latest reboot, I’m finally starting to hear it a bit, particularly with the Professor and President Nixon, both of whom felt a little more low-register and slightly lower energy to me. Weirdly, the perpetually twenty-something Fry still sounds relatively the same.
– I was surprised to see John DiMaggio supplant Billy West as the first credited actor, which feels like a concession made by the production from when he held out for more money that he ultimately didn’t get. Again, now that we’re in the midst of an actor’s strike as well, it doesn’t seem quite as ridiculous that DiMaggio thought he should get a bit more of a pay bump. As the actor recently put it in an interview, “Now it’s not just me versus them. Now it’s everybody versus them.”