148. Zapp Gets Cancelled

Original release date: September 11, 2023

The premise: Zapp is tried in a DOOP court for his years of abusive and inappropriate behavior, getting him “cancelled” and forced to attend sensitivity training. The open chair of Nimbus captain is quickly filled by Leela, who is eager to prove herself in a new, esteemed position.

The reaction: Considering Zapp Brannigan’s impulsive, chauvinistic ways, an episode about him getting “cancelled” is certainly an idea that makes sense on paper, but in practice, it felt like a bit of a stretch of the character to get him to fit the story they wanted to tell. Zapp is an incompetent buffoon, but we haven’t really seen him acting that inappropriate on the job. His abuse of Kif is generally him being dismissive of him, or to mildly degrade him to look himself look better (“Kif, stand in that hole so I look taller.”) Here, the last straw is Zapp showering on the bridge (with his genitals exposed thanks to a short curtain) and using Kif as a loofah to dry himself. Kif is incensed, but none of the crew reacts to any of this, nor do we hear anything from them at all. I feel like it would have made more sense if Zapp ruined a peace treaty with a sexy alien creature by aggressively hitting on her or something, that’s more his speed. So by court order, Zapp is officially cancelled, forced to wear a Scarlet Letter style “C,” and similar to the COVID episode, we go through the lexicon of words and terms associated with cancel culture (locker room talk, “it was a different time,” “you should smile more,” PC, snowflakes, and so forth.) Meanwhile, Leela, feeling unfulfilled in her dead end job at Planet Express, hopes to do something that matters as a newly instated DOOP flight captain. On her first mission to planet Tactilia, an unsullied planet filled with naive creatures and a massive natural resource of air, she’s crushed to find the DOOP President wants to convince them into signing a treaty giving them air rights (“Sometimes we coerce people with war. Other times, we take the high road and trick them with peace.”) It’s some okay imperialist commentary that sadly doesn’t really connect with the cancel culture stuff. Zapp’s sensitivity training is being taught by a ruthless instructor, Dr. Kind, who wants to degrade his students to give them a taste of their own medicine, but then it’s revealed he himself was cancelled, and he proceeded to hijack the class and shuttles off to Tactilia to pollute their supply of air. It’s not really clear why he’s doing it, just because he’s a bad guy, I guess. The ending has Leela refuse to fire on Dr. Kind out of fear of innocent casualties, and then the DOOP President tricks Kind to fire on himself in a weirdly anti-climactic ending. You’d think Zapp would do something based on what he’s learned to help resolve the conflict. Or they could have done an ironic South Park-esque ending, where the “cancelled” crew would do the things they came under scrutiny for to save the day, like the robot “exposing” himself to blind Kind, or that larger woman throwing food to thwart him somehow. But instead, Zapp just gets his job back. After his eight-hour sensitivity training, he’s reinstated as captain, which in itself is a decent joke, but not one the episode on the whole felt like it’s earned. As has been the case with the topical episodes this season, they feel more like current event stories first and Futurama stories second. There’s certainly no sci-fi spin to the concept of cancel culture, Zapp’s takeaway at the end is basically nothing (“I now know there’s a difference between right and wrong: one of them gets you cancelled,”) and not even in a way that it feels like the point. Compared to the crypto and COVID episodes, this is definitely the best of the topical triptych of episodes, as I did get a few laughs out of it, but that, as they say, is faint praise.

Random thoughts and tidbits:
– Zapp’s abuse of Kif at the beginning started to get incredibly uncomfortable. Beyond him being wrapped around Zapp’s crotch, he gets his skull crushed by Zapp squeezing green fluid from his cranium to put out a fiery adversary, wrings him out like a wet towel, then slaps his ravaged body on a coat rack. I get that this is supposed to be the ultimate insult for Kif to actually file a complaint against Zapp (“It’s pronounced compliment,” Zapp mindlessly replies,) but like I said earlier, this felt way too out of Zapp’s wheelhouse to be this physically cruel to Kif. Based on this opening, I was really surprised that after the trial, Kif basically disappears from the episode. He goes on family leave so Fry takes his place as first officer to Leela, and then he shows back up at the end to silently be thanked by Zapp. Given how Zapp and Kif are the most developed secondary characters this show has, this felt like it could be a perfect story about Kif finally getting fed up with Zapp, and Zapp having to prove that he’s changed to get Kif to forgive him. Yes, their dynamic won’t change much going forward, but it could be an interesting story.
– Dr. Kind is basically John DiMaggio doing his Dr. Drakken voice from Kim Possible, but a little more gravelly. Boy, that was a good show.
– I liked that the right glove of Leela’s DOOP uniform had her wrist gadget incorporated inside of it.
– I’m not sure why Leela reacts in such awe to the Nimbus, considering she’s been aboard it many times since the first season.
– The DOOP president talks about how Leela’s hiring is part of DOOP’s rebranding efforts, to “show we care about looking like we care about hiring women.” But it’s weird that in all the crowd shots we see of DOOP officers, it looked relatively balanced between the sexes. I understand the point they’re going for, but it seemed deflated based on what I was actually seeing on screen. Perhaps she was referring to women in leadership positions, but there’s basically nothing added to this joke so I don’t know.
– Fry and Bender are pretty superfluous in this episode, to the point where it felt like they didn’t even have to be in the story at all. With Billy West voicing Zapp and John DiMaggio voicing Dr. Kind, the actors still would have had a lot to do in this episode without doing their primary characters.