Original release date: August 14, 2023
The premise: Leela is surprised to discover Nibbler has worms, and worse off, they’re sapping away his intellect. Discovering they are inhabiting his litter box filled with sand from his homeward, the crew shrinks down inside to eradicate the infestation.
The reaction: Nibbler has long felt like a forgotten character on the show. His importance to series lore has been baked in since the pilot, and he and his fellow Nibblonians have played a large role in several important episodes, but just as a character, he may as well not even exist. There’s also the “genie out of the bottle” problem once he reveals he can speak and they don’t retcon it. Now that everyone knows Nibbler is hyper-intelligent, how do they treat him? Season 6’s “That Darn Katz!” grappled with this problem and resolved it in a satisfying way: Nibbler desired to be treated as an equal, but he still genuinely enjoyed the care and attention Leela gave him as a pet. This episode almost feels like a continuation of that Leela/Nibbler agreement, their renewed relationship as best friends more than pet and master, where Leela is genuinely scared of losing Nibbler. Except we start early with a joke about how Leela forgot Nibbler could talk (between this and spacing on being the mother of Kif’s children, she’s been awfully forgetful this season.) They’ve done this meta joke a few times, and here it feels like it’s to re-remind the audience, but I don’t know who’s watching this show other than the super-fans who wouldn’t need to be reminded of this. It really blows a hole in any of the attempts to have emotional stakes of Leela lamenting the loss of Nibbler’s intellect when she literally had to be reminded he had an intellect to begin with.
This is also sort of a pseudo-sequel to “Parasites Lost,” with the worms infesting Fry’s body making their grand return, except this time, they’re sapping away intelligence rather than building it up. Rather than venturing inside the body, Magic School Bus-style, Fry, Leela, Bender, and Zoidberg are shrunk down into Nibbler’s litter box so we can do a big Dune parody, with a tribe of wise dung beetles assisting them on their quest to track down the mighty sand worm (which is revealed to be the small regular worms all bundled together into one giant creature.) I haven’t seen either version of Dune, so any contextual parody they’re doing was lost on me (I assume the chamber allowing you to see other realities is a specific reference.) The joke of pronouncing “Dune” as “dung” repeatedly only made me think of the awful White/Wipe Castle jokes from “Bender’s Game,” so that wasn’t helping matters. None of it felt very funny, especially compared to all the great jokes made traveling to the different parts of Fry’s body in “Lost.” When the fight against the worms finally begins, Nibbler appears to break it up, having gotten a Dune-inspired (I think?) epiphany about the beauty of the circle of life, and how if it is nature’s will that the worms feed off him, then he’s at peace with that. At this point, I thought maybe this would the show’s excuse to revert Nibbler back to being a mindless animal, except why would they have to do that when they barely have him speak at all anyway? But Leela has her own epiphany, and discovers that the worms are sapping intellect from their hosts because they themselves are plagued with their own parasites (an admittedly decent twist.) So in the end, Nibbler is back to normal, at least until they use him again next season and we need to be re-re-reminded that he can talk. Ultimately this feels like a weird retread of such a beloved classic. “Parasites Lost” was basically the first big Fry/Leela episode, where Fry finds himself with the emotional intelligence to finally sweep Leela off her feet, but ultimately rejects this change, as he’d rather she love him for who he is. The message to this episode… I dunno, the natural order of the world is beautiful and as it should be, until you decide it’s not and change it? And again, the Leela/Nibbler stuff is immediately undercut from the beginning, so their sweet epilogue feels totally hollow.
Random thoughts and tidbits:
– So it’s totally cool that Nibbler can just eat a dog and an entire human being? I guess the fact that he’s wearing a Yale Law hat is meant to make us not care.
– Leela and Nibbler go to see the pretentious art film “Quizblorg, Quizblorg,” which we’d previously seen playing in theaters in season 2’s “Raging Bender.” The marquee has an alien symbol after the title, so maybe this is a sequel or a remake or something.
– Nibbler being prescribed ivermectin to kill the worms feels like an antiquated joke at this point. The famed horse dewormer pushed by conspiracy psychos as a COVID cure, I was actually surprised they didn’t make a more pronounced joke about it, like Fry attempted to eat it himself or something.
– Even though “Parasites Lost” had the crew using miniature robotic versions of themselves to enter Fry’s body, this time the Professor just uses a shrink ray to do the job. I’m not a stickler for continuity, but just like needing to re-introduce that Nibbler can talk, it feels like there’s been this weird aversion to addressing continuity this season, and if they do, they do it very laboriously, like with the entirety of the season premiere, and literally showing clips of Kif giving birth in “Children of a Lesser Bog.” It would have been such an easy joke to have someone mention how the Professor did this last time and for him to quickly dismiss them in a funny way, but they didn’t.
– The Worm King wasn’t the most memorable one-off character, but he definitely had some good stuff in the finale of “Parasites Lost” (his insistence of pronouncing his homeland of “Colon” as “Cologne” is a thousand times funnier than the Dune/Dung shit.) Here, he’s just there, and there’s not much he does that’s funny. Actually, Dave Herman voices two returning characters, with the veterinarian from “I Second That Emotion” also showing back up again.
– There’s a really great animation transition of Nibbler’s little spaceship flying down to land on the sand in CG, and then the windshield section flips up to reveal a 2D animated Nibbler getting out. It was very nicely done.
– “Nibbler, are you alright? How dumb are you on a scale from 1 to Fry?” Four episodes in and it still barely feels like Fry and Leela are together. Yes, Fry is undeniably stupid, but it’s weird for Leela to say something so openly hurtful about her boyfriend. In the promos for this season, we saw Fry and Leela dealing with living together, something I almost thought would happen in the premiere episode, but here, we still have Leela in her dumpy single apartment, spending her lonely evenings doing crosswords with Nibbler. Why isn’t Fry there?
– “My mind has already degenerated to the point where I can no longer predict the ending of an M. Night Shamalyan movie.” Not only is this a mostly rare example of characters specifically referencing 21st century pop culture, but seriously, making a Shamalyan joke in 2023? Plus this is after his latest movie Knock at the Cabin, which I guess was a little divisive, but I absolutely loved, so I do not condone mocking M. Night. Let the man do his weird thing.
– Leela and Nibbler having their final conversation before Nibbler’s mind fully deteriorates felt explicitly like a character suffering from dementia and slowly losing themselves, which is a pretty heavy allusion. It’s subject matter the show can definitely handle, just in an episode better written than this one.
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I feel like this episode exemplifies the “we can have it both ways” mentality Futurama increasingly has regarding its storytelling.
Leela forgets Nibbler is intelligent but also is best friends with him because of it. Leela and Nibbler can murder a man and his dog in the first scene but also be our sympathetic protagonists we’re supposed to emotionally invest in. Leela and Fry are a couple but also behave as though it’s still Fry having an unreciprocated crush. And so on.
It feels like the writers don’t think about these episodes or the series as a whole and mostly focus on creating individual moments they like, but a lot of those moments don’t go together and undercut each other as a result. Come on, Futurama, pick a lane! One idea that you commit to is stronger than a dozen that cancel each other out.
I think its more that the writers are firmly of the old-school variety that don’t like shows having continuity or things requiring consequences. It’s them ironically representing Fry’s quote from “When Aliens Attack” that clever things make TV viewers feel stupid and unexpected things make them feel scared. They want episodic situations where everything is neatly resolved at the end of the episode and the whole universe resets itself for the next wacky adventure. Effectively, a legacy comic strip like “Hagar the Horrible” or “Hi and Lois” that costs about a small house to make per episode.
Except, we’re now in a day and age where we kinda want to see some kind of growth and development with characters. Even if its small growth, we at least want to feel like if we watch a show, there is some tangential difference between Episode 1 and Episode 10.
But, the writers also want that growth, but they don’t want to have that development, so we’re in that weird spot in which things randomly happen out of nowhere for one episode and then we’re forced to pretend it doesn’t happen all the other times. Which goes back to “having it both ways”.
“Effectively, a legacy comic strip like “Hagar the Horrible” or “Hi and Lois” that costs about a small house to make per episode.”
This perfectly sums up why I find these status quo shows and reboots depressing now. All of this time, money and talent getting poured into mediocre attempts to capture nostalgia and delude us on some level that the world isn’t changing and we still live in an idealized past.
I get that these legacy shows can be comforting to a lot of people, but it feels like a destructive false hope to me, like we’re all being encouraged to close our eyes and cover our ears instead of thinking critically about the real world and its problems we face. Obviously entertainment has an important role keeping us sane in that harsh world, but it doesn’t have to blot reality out to do that. It can reflect reality and make us wiser for experiencing it, not just deny it and make us dumber instead.
I really love this explanation you two cracked. A lot of these reboots are made to function as dopamine rushes for fans to feel as they did in the past, but it just feels wholly unnecessary. Art is meant to grow and change based on the times it’s created in, even a dopey sci-fi show. Instead, at least so far, it just feels like a lot of regurgitation of the old.
“My mind has already degenerated to the point where I can no longer predict the ending of an M. Night Shamalyan movie.”
That line made me wince a little in how forced it was. But apart from that this episode was just more forgettable mediocrity, which is par for the course so far with this revival. Maybe it shouldn’t have been avenged…
This was boring.
Well here we are, 4 weeks in and I haven’t watched the most recent episode, and I’m not even bothering to prioritize it.
They shouldn’t have brought it back.
But don’t tell that to the Futurama Reddit or Facebook group.
I mean an animal like Nibbler that had parasites probably *would* be given Ivermectin. It’s still a weird thing to include in the episode though.