146. I Know What You Did Next Xmas

Original release date: August 28, 2023

The premise: The Professor uses his retooled time machine to go back in time to fix Robot Santa, ridding him of his homicidal nature. Now, in a present where the crew is free to spend the holidays safely with their loved ones, Bender and Zoidberg are left all alone, and after getting considerably drunk, they decide to use the time machine to kidnap Robot Santa to stop Xmas from happening.

The reaction: Bender and Zoidberg is a team-up we haven’t really seen much of, so throwing these two characters together definitely has potential. The way they pair them up also makes sense; they’re the only members of the crew without any families, so they feel equally left out on Xmas, which leads to some awkward bonding, followed by jovial over-drinking. It’s a nice scene, and a spirit I hoped would continue through the rest of the episode. But before that, the set-up: the Professor has modified his forwards time machine from “The Late Philip J. Fry” to also go backwards, so he can go back to Robot Santa’s very first Xmas to switch his Naughty/Nice settings, freeing the future of its annual holiday bloodbaths. Immediately upon returning, everyone revels in a happier, gentler Xmas, as we cut throughout the episode to our characters celebrating in their own ways, which boils down to how they uniquely prepare their own turducken. It’s kind of a cute joke, how they each think they’re so special with the elaborate dish until they all whip them out and realize they all did the same thing. Meanwhile, Bender and Zoidberg drunkenly decide to go back to the previous Xmas and kidnap Robot Santa, but they end up accidentally killing him instead. It felt weird that we never got to see the good Robot Santa, which would have lent more credence to the idea of this better Xmas that would give everyone the freedom to go off and celebrate. But in the end, we see why: because of a classic time loop, the Professor’s actions in the past actually caused Robot Santa to be corrupted in the first place. I dunno, it’s clever, I guess, but I feel like I’ve seen so many time travel stories where a character finds out they actually caused their own present to happen by accident, that this “twist” doesn’t really do anything for me. Nor does the final reveal that the bloody “I Know What You Did” messages were written by Robot Santa as means of blackmailing Bender about his new friendship with Zoidberg. Who would Santa expose him to? The entire crew and their families are there, they all know about it. Whatever. This episode wasn’t bad, I just wish there was more fun Bender/Zoidberg bonding stuff. The back half of the episode is them trying out new methods to dispose of Robot Santa’s body and it’s just not that interesting. These last two episodes are definitely improvements from the start, but we still feel like a ways off from what I’d consider primo Futurama.

Random thoughts and tidbits:
– Yeah, it’s weird to be watching this at the end of August. It’s interesting to think about how shows used to be produced, you’d know in a normal TV schedule you could always do a Christmas episode or a Valentine’s episode and they would air on those holidays. But now with streaming shows, the “network” can decide to premiere these shows whenever they want. I guess they made this hoping that maybe they would come out towards the end of the year, but oh well, no big deal.
– I guess this episode seemingly confirms that Zoidberg and his girlfriend Marianne, last seen in “Stench and Stenchability,” are no longer together. I know a lot of fans were pulling for her to make a return, which could still happen, but I guess not for now. Also Zoidberg doesn’t mention Harold Zoid in talking of having no family, but maybe he’s dropped dead at this point.
– I couldn’t quite place what style they were going for with the Xmas special. The Chanukah Zombie and Kwanzaabot (RIP Coolio) move through the snow without lifting their legs like a Rankin-Bass stop motion cartoon, but since it’s 2D animation, it looks weird and almost cheap. There’s heavy shading and a relatively generic look to it, I was just confused as to what they were aiming for. If they couldn’t afford to actually make a stop motion piece, they’d have been better going for like a classic minimalist UPA look or something.
– As the Professor travels backwards through time from the end of time back to his own present, we see flashes of future events, including a scene featuring the characters from Netflix’s Disenchantment. This was probably done as a response to Disenchantment‘s first season, which did a similar sequence of flashing through time quickly, and we briefly see Fry, Bender and the Professor in the forwards time machine. I only got through season one, as I very quickly lost interest in the show and never recovered, and after all this time to now, with the final season coming out soon, I just never had any desire to go back and give it a reappraisal. Has anyone watched the whole thing and wanna give their thoughts on it?
– For some reason, for the first two thirds of the episode, when we see Robot Santa, he just keeps saying “cookie.” Like he’s picking up an actual cookie and eating it, then yelling “Cookie!!” as he eats the table it’s sitting on. Then later he picks up a circular thing of the ground and thinks it’s a cookie. It’s a really strange bit that didn’t really work for me.
– The show embraces its new continuity with not only the return of Amy and Kif’s kids, but we also see a bunch of tiny stockings for Nibbler’s worms hanging over the fireplace. We also get the return of Leela’s grandmother, who I’m not sure has ever had a second appearance since her introduction in “The Mutants are Revolting.” She might have appeared in the episode with Leela’s parents’ anniversary party, but I don’t remember.
– Cara Delevingne gets a guest credit, but I have absolutely no idea who she could have played. She’s not Amy’s daughter, she wasn’t any of the kids in the Xmas special, I have no clue who it could’ve been. Apparently she also was in “The Impossible Stream” as the make-up robot on set, who didn’t even had a line, she just screamed. What’s this about? Delevingne was on the last season of Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building, so maybe she heard they were working on new Futurama, was a huge fan, and had her agent make some phone calls?