142. Children of a Lesser Bog

Original release date: July 31, 2023

The premise: Amy and Kif’s children finally emerge from the swamp, and the two must finally deal with being parents.

The reaction: When you’re rebooting a series and trying to come up with ideas for episodes, it’s certainly smart to look for any loose ends the show may have left behind that you could follow up on. The fate of Amy and Kif’s children qualifies, I suppose; the ending of “Kif Gets Knocked Up a Notch” basically gave Amy a “get-out-of-Mom-free” card by having Kif wait until the very end of the episode to explain that his species lives in their native swamp for twenty years before emerging back onto land as children, at which time Amy claims she’ll be ready. Now we’re twenty years past that episode, so it’s time for the grand reveal of those kids! (just like with the season premiere, the passage of so much time between events where nobody has aged isn’t addressed.) Only three kids manage to survive their re-emergence from the wild, all of different sizes, and one sporting only one eye, a clear reminder of the events of “Knocked Up a Notch” where Leela was the unwitting DNA supplier, mixing with Kif’s to create this new life. Bizarrely, Leela has no memory of this (claiming she was drunk, then we see her chug a bottle of wine, which was very discomforting), and the Professor shows a sex-ed film to re-explain how Kif’s species are conceived by touching hands. I get they need to refresh the audience on the events of the past episode, but it felt like an oddly clunky way of handling it. The kids proof to be a handful, running Amy and Kif ragged in their apartment, par for the course for any “new parents” episode of TV, a situation that gets even more desperate when Kif is called away by Zapp on urgent DOOP business. Amy is hurt when she sees her kids seem to effortlessly bond with Leela, and she’s later shocked to find her parenting status is in danger thanks to the reappearance of the Grand Midwife.

We’d seen the Midwife skulk around in the background with a bark-back clipboard two times, then she shows up to drop the bomb on Amy: if an Amphibiosan’s smizmar is not the biological parent of their children, their role as parent is automatically “challenged.” Was she waiting on DNA test results or something? Why did it take so long? And what was she observing? So this creates a big build-up to the end about this “challenge,” where Amy makes up with Leela and tearfully worries for the fate of her children. But the stakes were hard to follow. Would parental rights automatically go to Leela if Amy failed? In which case, couldn’t Leela “give up” the kids to Amy to adopt legally or something? What executive power do the Amphibiosans have across the universe to combat this? I kept wondering why they were being so vague about what this “challenge” was, but then it turned out to be an emotional climax where all the Grand Midwife does is ask Amy if she loves her children, and that’s all it takes to be a good mom, and everybody cries and that’s the ending. But why was she saying the challenge could take days or weeks? Was she just fucking with Amy? It’s all just part of the dopey misdirect. This felt like an ultra-syrupy-sweet, eye-rolling ending right out of a modern Simpsons episode. Futurama has had its fair share of genuine emotional moments, lots of truly affecting ones that I love, but they always felt like they were earned, and very specific to the plights of these characters. Meanwhile, this ending is less about Amy and more about generically praising non-biological mothers, something I’ve seen tons of other movies and shows do, so I’m not exactly jumping out of my seat to applaud this show for daring to stand up for mothers who are just trying their best, dammit! So yeah, two duds so far, sad to say. I’ve gotten a couple laughs out of both episodes, but I’m still waiting for the old magic to kick in at some point…

Random thoughts and tidbits:
– I’ve always loved all the weird retro cartoons that play in the opening title sequence. Now that Disney owns the show, they could definitely pull some incredibly weird and obscure old Disney films they could cut clips from and use license-free. But I’m not gonna hold my breath that Disney would let them do anything fun like that.
– I wanted to give it two episodes before saying anything, and maybe it’s just me, but the animation looks… cheaper? It’s a little hard to explain. It just feels like there’s less movement overall, both with the basic character animation and reacting characters in a shot being motionless, in some cases not even blinking.
– I kept expecting the honey candies to become important to the plot, and they just didn’t. They kept appearing throughout the episode, and then they got Zapp in trouble on the mission, but that was all. Zapp could have irritated those creatures a dozen different ways, so it all felt like a big lead-up to nothing.
– We see a few clips from “Kif Gets Knocked Up a Notch” play over Amy’s eyePhone display, presented in 16:9 widescreen, which just reminds me how damn thankful I am that the show never went through the bullshit The Simpsons did in attempting to fuck with its aspect ratio. The original four seasons are still in 4:3 fullscreen on Hulu (as far as I’m aware), as are the reruns on adult swim. I think Syfy and Comedy Central reruns might have blown them up to widescreen, which sucks anus. Are people going to be that terrified and confused that a TV show made before 2006 looks a little different?
– As expected, Leo Wong has a new voice actor, Feodor Chin. I feel like I’ve talked about this recasting stuff enough with The Simpsons, so I’ll just quickly say that I’m fine with it, and Chin does a decent job emulating Leo’s voice.
– It feels a little weird that the ending of “Kif Gets Knocked Up a Notch” featured Amy’s big moment of stepping up to the idea of motherhood by protecting her newly birthed spawn from predators so they could safely make their way to the water, and now we see “the winnowing” process where they all must stand by and watch as a fleet of dangerous animals viciously devour almost all of the kids. I understand this was a necessity, since no way were they going to draw Amy and Kif’s hundred-plus kids, but maybe there’s another way this could have been done.
– Futurama seems to be suffering a bit from relying solely on its existing secondary and tertiary cast for one-off gags, similar to modern-era Simpsons. We see Petunia as Amy’s would-be babysitter, and the DOOP mission to Ursa Major re-introduces us to the whale biologist from “Three Hundred Big Boys,” except now he’s a bear biologist, and he hates them too. Was anybody clamoring for this character to make a grand return? Couldn’t this be a new character? At least with The Simpsons, its setting is a small, nowhere town, but it’s a little stranger in Futurama when the primary setting is the enormous New New York, and the secondary setting is literally the entire universe.
– I got an actual big laugh at the reveal that Scruffy somehow is a 1% biological parent to the kids, alongside Kif and Leela (“Scruffy’s stuff gets around.”)
– Amy gets incredibly emotional by the end of the episode, with Lauren Tom really digging deep for the feels with her performance. But it borders on sounding a little non-Amy-like to me. We’ve seen her get choked up in the past, but it sounds different here. Then I need to remind myself that like the rest of the cast, Lauren Tom is much older now, so of course it’s going to sound different.
– Katey Sagal gets the first “starring” credit this time, so I guess there goes my theory about John DiMaggio getting a consolation primary credit. So are they going to just rotate all the principal players so everyone gets a first credit?