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Original release date: August 21, 2023

The premise: Bender gets extremely jealous having to share Fry’s attention after Leela moves in with them. As petty revenge, he gets a job at Planet Express competitor Momazon, the monolithic delivery service, but soon finds himself trapped in their enormous fulfillment facility on the Moon.

The reaction: One of the most poorly aged lines in the original FOX run was in season 4’s “Three Hundred Big Boys,” which ends with a joke about how buying Amazon.com stock is a risky move. Now Amazon is one of the biggest companies on Earth, and in this newest reboot, the mega conglomerate MomCorp works as the perfect surrogate for it. Unfortunately, the show doesn’t really have anything new to say about the subject. It’s an issue I’ve talked about with The Simpsons, where doing social commentary about specific targets is difficult to do in this day and age, when the Internet can beat you to the punch about current events within minutes of them actually happening, so by the time you stroll along, the subject’s already been tapped. They don’t even try to tackle anything of real substance, or that could be made into an interesting story turn, just basic stuff we’ve seen before, like jokes about putting a small object in a giant box or an Alexa device mishearing what you say. Thankfully, everything else works a lot better than what I’ve come to expect so far with this reboot. I wish I’d seen more of it, but I liked all the stuff with Fry and Leela disagreeing about their new shared living furnishings, leaving them with multiples of everything (“Let’s just go to bed. We have seven to choose from.”) The story build with Momazon becoming self-aware and growing itself in size made sense, as did Mom backtracking her intent to destroy the AI when she finds that it’s ultimately helping her bottom line. I did think that Bender the warehouse worker was a squandered opportunity. We barely see him on the floor, then he gets brainwashed (I guess?) into staying in work mode, but then he sends Fry and Leela a message for help somehow? And then the ending is them finding him and that’s it. They could have had Bender pride himself as the ultimate worker, snitching on employees not following the rules, sort of like he was in “A Pharaoh to Remember.” This episode felt the closest to classic Futurama, and I guess by default is my favorite of the bunch so far, but even then, it’s nothing that I’d say was truly great.

Random thoughts and tidbits:
– So here it is, as teased in the promos, Fry and Leela finally move in together… at Robot Arms Apartments with Bender. I guess I feel a little foolish not seeing that coming. It really seems like this could have been an episode all on its own, with Leela wanting to find their own place, Fry feeling bad about leaving Bender by himself, and this being the compromise. There’s so much material they could mine with these three co-habitating, both in Fry and Leela learning to live together, and in Bender getting up in their business. I watch Futurama because I love these characters, give me that episode. I don’t care about more level 1 Amazon jokes.
– I still feel a bit weird about the backpedaling of Fry and Leela’s relationship. Fry basically proposed to Leela before the time bubble debacle, but now they’re back to just being a couple. I honestly don’t care that much, but it’s inevitably gonna be strange when they pull the marriage card again further down the line.
– It irrationally bothered me that we see Leela enter Fry and Bender’s apartment into the big open living space, and we see Bender’s small room is in the door next to it. But from the beginning in “I, Roommate,” we see that room should exist in-between the front door and the giant living room. The only other instance I could think of Fry opening the apartment door was when Morgan Proctor came to visit, and that time, you see the extended walls that you can interpret as that first room, I guess.
– I’ve said it before, but I’m a sucker for any time Bender gets sad about “losing” Fry. The whole cabbage fight instantly reminded me of the beginning of “The Beast with a Billion Backs” where Bender gets Fry a cabbage (“Humans like cabbage, right?”), but when Fry leaves, he turns it into a surrogate Fry in sorrow, then throws a tantrum and mashes it with his fists. That one moment is the perfect encapsulation of his range of emotions: overwhelming sorrow followed by petty anger.
– Mom’s slapping is a running joke that is definitely wearing thin. In a similar vein to The Simpsons driving their recurring gags into the ground, a Mom appearance always brings with it a new slap joke. But how many are left? Instead of handprint recognition to enter the Momazon warehouse, she has a slap recognition panel, then later the AI slaps her. Mom’s sons get deliveries of Slap Balm before they’re hit. There’s a good three or four jokes like that, it just seemed like too much. She can still slap her sons, I just don’t need a new joke about it each time.
– The new reboot of Beavis and Butt-Head is almost like the yin to new Futurama‘s yang for me. Two shows I love dearly get their third reboot that I didn’t really care to watch, but in the case of the former, I was really surprised how much I enjoyed it. This past season had its own Amazon episode, where middle-aged Beavis and Butt-Head end up working at a fulfillment center. The episode, and the reboot in general, works wonderfully since it’s all about how Beavis and Butt-Head react to a new situation: they take the job hearing it has “benefits” (which they interpret as “friends with benefits,”) thinking the robots are used for scoring, then spend their shift repeatedly getting robotic helpers to bring them spray cheese. Meanwhile, there doesn’t really feel like a big enough sci-fi bent with the Momazon stuff. The fulfillment center engulfing the entire universe is okay, but compare that to Kidnapster in “I Dated a Robot,” reinterpreting file sharing to downloading celebrity replicas, using their actual kidnapped selves for their likenesses.
– Why is Hedonismbot working at Momazon? The guy is super rich. They could have made a joke about that, like he gets himself off being degraded in such a grueling job.
– Al Gore makes an incredibly quick and random cameo, although part of me thinks that they used archival audio of him, given how generic his lines were (“I warned you this would happen!” “I said climate crisis!“)