143. How the West Was 1010001

Original release date: August 7, 2023

The premise: When the price of bitcoin skyrockets, the Planet Express crew head out west to mine for precious thallium in an effort to pay off the Professor’s considerable debt to the Robot Mafia.

The reaction: In my retrospective, I defended topical episodes of this show, specifically from the Comedy Central era, and how, in my opinion, this series has a pretty good track record of taking current events and retrofitting them into a futuristic/sci-fi setting in a clever and entertaining way. So when the promos for this latest reboot featured bits referring to COVID and getting “cancelled,” I wasn’t as pessimistic about it as some seemed to be. Here’s our first “ripped from the headlines” episode, as Futurama takes on cryptocurrency. As the Professor explains, the microchips used to “harvest” crypto are made from thallium, which is being found in abundance out Californee way, so the stage is set for our Old West gold rush episode, where the crew puts on Western outfits, visits the local saloon, and gets involved with some dangerous outlaws. I was kind of disappointed that the plot didn’t really develop past the initial premise. Hustling for crypto is like panning for gold, and that’s basically it. There’s a “twist” involving the saloon owner stealing robot heads to use to mine for bitcoin, which logically makes sense, but there’s not really much of a joke to it. No jokes about crypto mining farms being harmful for the environment or anything? Also, this episode feels like it falls victim to being late to the current events party, sort of what The Simpsons would often do. Crypto is certainly still around, but it’s definitely nowhere near as big as it was a few years ago. The bubble kind of burst on this scam, so jokes about Dogecoin and Ethereum feel like blasts from the past. The episode is also filled with little subplots: Zoidberg replaces the deceased town doctor, Hermes desperately tries to bond with his son Dwight, Bender buys a mule for some reason, and Fry is excited to become the Borax Kid’s new sidekick, blinded to the obvious fact that his beloved hero is actually a cowardly cheat (does anybody like this character? He showed up twice in the Comedy Central run, most notably in the awful “Neutopia,” but I don’t know why they brought him back here.) None of it is all that funny or interesting to me. “The Old West” is a pretty classic comedy setting that many shows have thrust their characters into, a lot of these kinds of jokes have more or less been done to death, and it didn’t feel like this episode had a whole lot to add, other than layering the crypto “commentary” on top, which wasn’t all that good either. Honestly, I’m almost ready to write this reboot off. My tolerance for revived properties is pretty low, you really need to grab me right away and assure me that you’re doing something new and interesting to keep me invested. The latest Beavis and Butt-Head and Clone High reboots definitely did that for me. Futurama, meanwhile, so far is not terrible, it just feels a bit tired and unsure what it should do. We had the meta premiere, an emotional episode paying homage to series continuity, and now a topical episode, all of which have felt unsuccessful. I’ll try to stay hopeful that we might get a gem or two in the coming weeks, but it’s hard to muster up the energy for a show’s third reboot.

Random thoughts and tidbits:
– Every Hulu show has the same opening titles, but I’m a bit annoyed having to see them in front of Futurama. Hulu Presents a Hulu Original by 20th Television Animation Production, like okay, I get it, I know who made the show. TV shows don’t need opening credits like these.
– This episode’s credited writer is “Nona di Spargement,” a name I was slightly baffled by upon seeing it months back when the first ten episode titles and credits were revealed online. At this year’s Comic Con panel, Patric Verrone said the episode was written by Ken Keeler, but didn’t explain as to why they used a pseudonym. The name is kind of like a pun on “non-disparagement,” but I have no idea what that could mean.
– Leela is hesitant to accept the saloon owner’s offer to work there, until Amy walks up to do some classic negging (“I’m not sure Leela has the skills to be a barmaid.”) It’s not quite directly insulting as her older jabs (“You don’t really have the thighs for the miniskirt…”), but thank goodness the Leela/Amy cattiness is back! It’s so great to write women like that!
– The Hermes/Dwight subplot is kind of weird. Hermes hopes to have some cool father-son bonding, but Dwight is an unreachable little brat (“This whole trip is stupid! You’re stupid, Pops!”) I get that Dwight is still a kid, but this attitude feels out-of-character for him. He and Cubert were usually more snarky than whiny, with Dwight being the more collected of the two. Then Dwight goes to the violent outlaw Roberto and begs to let him join his next heist, for reasons I’m not really sure of, and eventually Dwight saves the day by limboing to save his dad thanks to his broken spine. In an episode with like five subplots, it definitely didn’t have enough time to feel like a satisfying or emotional conclusion.
– Fry and Leela’s relationship status continues to be ambiguous as we see Leela quickly won over by the Borax Kid’s phony charisma, all so we can have jokes about Fry being oblivious and dumb (“It’s good to see you two getting along so intimately!”) I was almost expecting they would go so far as to cuck Fry, but in the end, Fry exposes Borax as a fraud, and he accepts Leela’s offer to escort her to the local brothel. But it’s never really clear, was Leela actually into the Borax Kid? And again, what is Fry and Leela’s relationship? If they’re not engaged, I assume they’re still a couple, so this behavior from Leela is incredibly bizarre. They did a similar kind of subplot in season 6’s “Fry Am the Egg Man,” where Leela was smitten by a cocky Irish bone vampire hunter (who also was revealed to be a fraud), and that was in the final throws of the muddy “will they/won’t they” of the Comedy Central revival before they finally made Fry and Leela official. But to do it here is even stranger.
– The episode ends with a “spectacular” gunfight between six people over three axis (Bender, at the bottom of a pit, and the saloon owner, standing atop a bridge over town, are fighting out vertically.) This is the show’s attempt at a twist on the classic town square gun fight by having three fights at once, but it’s not really all that clever. For some reason, I thought about the Huckleberry Finn & Tom Sawyer segment of “Simpsons Tall Tales,” where everybody pulls out little shooter guns and fires at each other, but the bullets are like BBs and they don’t hurt anybody. That was a good bit, certainly compared to this. Even wilder is that they really blew their 3D budget by having multiple 3D turnaround of the entire set with the characters, and then later we see a CG Dwight limboing up the bridge as the camera whips around 180 degrees to see the saloon owner on top of it. It felt like a section ripped right out of the Futurama video game. It didn’t look bad, but it was a little bit distracting. Maybe if they lingered on it for a little less time it wouldn’t have stuck out so much.