150. All the Way Down

Original release date: September 25, 2023

The premise: The Professor creates an entire simulated universe, complete with its own simulated Planet Express crew. Bender quickly becomes protective of his fellow artificial beings, doing whatever he can to shield them from the truth that they’re not “real.”

The reaction: This reboot has been pretty underwhelming so far, but now we got David X. Cohen stepping up to the plate, Mr. Futurama himself, to flex his juicy chess club brain with a thinker of a season finale. By default, it’s easily the best episode of the season… but I say it definitely fails to live up to similar sci-fi heavy episodes of the series. The big topic this outing is about the nature of life, and whether it matters if what we’re experiencing is “real” or not. As the Professor shows off the amazing new universe he created, Amy gets him to question whether they are also living in a simulated reality as well. These discussions are eventually resolved by simulated Fry saying he doesn’t care if he’s real or not, because the emotions he feels are real, and that’s all that matters. And yes, that’s a very sweet sentiment, but it ultimately seems like a very thin concept spread out over the entire episode, as well as one that has been covered in a lot of other media. A more intriguing side story involves Bender, who himself is a simulation of actual life, forming an affection for the simulated characters, demanding the Professor maintain their tiny reality by any means necessary. An AI grappling with their “reality” is such a rich vein to tap, but it’s one that Cohen already went over in season 7’s solid “Free Will Hunting, where Bender determines whether or not he has an authentic free will, or if every action of his is predetermined by his programming. The final of that episode featured a big long scene between Bender and the Professor, talking back and forth about different variables that determine if Bender can control his actions, all of which was pretty interesting. This episode is pretty much wall-to-wall talking about the specifics of the simulation, the laws of the universe, how to determine if something is real, and so forth, but I feel like the topic doesn’t really advance that much further from where it starts, nor are any of the jokes in-between particularly funny. The finale also seems like it should affect me more than it does, where the simulated universe is “saved” by slowing it down to an infinitesimally slower speed, meaning simulated Fry and Leela can live in the anticipatory moment before their kiss for all eternity. I dunno, that seems like a moment that would have been killer back in season 3, but here at the 150th episode, it just doesn’t feel like enough. It seems like a solid concept for an episode that hasn’t been massaged into a truly excellent episode like Cohen’s other outings.

Random thoughts and tidbits:
– I was a little worried that the pixelated simulations were going to be the bulk of the episode, feeling less like an artistic choice and more like a cost-saving measure, being even lamer given the show has already done episodes making fun of limited animation (“2D Blacktop,” “Reincarnation.”) Thankfully, the simulated universe gets an upgrade halfway through to resemble their topside counterparts.
– The Professor brainstorming on the toilet and regaling the crew with his epiphanies is very much a lesser version of him giving delivery debriefings in his bedroom, then from the tub in “Lesser of Two Evils.” Also Amy’s irritated “We know! Stop telling us!” reminds me of her similar exhausted answer to the Professor asking if everyone took their suppositories in “The Deep South.” I don’t set out to be Captain Nitpick when it comes to re-using kinds of jokes, but this is reminding me a lot of when The Simpsons would re-do jokes, but not as effectively, which is slightly depressing that we’re at the point where Futurama is in the same position.
– This episode almost functions as a bottle episode, where a huge chunk of it is just the crew sitting around the conference table observing and talking about the simulation. We only deviate settings twice: when Bender takes the Professor to a robot strip club to make him promise to protect the simulation, and when the crew punctures the new New New York sewer line to generate the power necessary to get the simulation running more efficiently. I feel like both of those scenes could have been written as taking place in the Planet Express building to keep up the bottle episode feel.
– Another story element that sort of felt breezed past is that we see the simulated crew reenacting moments from “The Impossible Stream” and “The Prince and the Product,” leading up to their Professor revealing his own simulated universe. The idea that a recreated world and its inhabitants perfectly recreating all events of history every time is kind of neat, but I guess digging into that would have been too close to “Free Will Hunting” again.
– Parts of this episode reminded me of the Adventure Time episode “All the Little People,” where Finn is given a bag filled with little sentient versions of himself and all his friends. He can’t communicate with them, as they exist in an alternate consciousness apart from his own, but he can manipulate them, leading him to stay up for days as an obsessive wreck, playing Cupid with his mini-self and the others, almost like a creepy shipper, basically ruining their lives. The similarities stop short, since the Planet Express crew can’t directly affect their simulated counterparts, but I thought it was funny that this show ostensibly for adults told a much tamer story than a show on Cartoon Network, in one of the greatest, most fucked up episodes of Adventure Time ever.
– The Professor warns Bender that if he wants to transfer his consciousness to his simulated self to warn them that they’re in a simulation, he won’t be able to return back to his own body. This decision feels weirdly rushed, with Fry and Leela holding each other, looking worried, but not saying a word as Bender basically dies in front of them. No tearful goodbye between Fry and Bender, two best buddies? And yeah, we know Bender will be back, which of course he does, but they don’t even write a joke explanation about how he magically comes back to life. I guess the idea is that his consciousness is of the Bender in the universe above our own, but then what caused the domino effect above them?
– Bender’s lifeless body flopping forward onto a random plate of spaghetti on the table may be the funniest joke in the entire reboot.
– The ending of this episode feels incredibly familiar to me. A disastrous situation being averted by slowing down time to the point that the disaster will never happen… possibly an explosion? I think I have another example in mind, but I also just recalled the Invader Zim episode “Walk For Your Lives,” where an explosion at Zim’s lab is caught in a time distortion field, resulting in it traveling at an incredibly slow rate in the center of town. As the townspeople evacuate at an incredibly brisk, unalarmed pace, Zim must figure out how to rectify the situation. Like Adventure Time, I’d say the Zim episode has a more interesting premise, where Zim launches his arch rival Dib, who is also moving in slow-motion, at the explosion to accelerate it. Despite protests from Dib, and even the moronic GIR, that that would only cause the explosion to return to normal speed and destroy everything, Zim does it anyway, and the explosion indeed does destroy everything. I still feel like I have another example in mind, but I can’t think of it. What other sci-fi show/movie could have done something like this…

So there it is, Futurama is back, whether we like it or not, and this has been the first half of their new season. Verdict? Not very good! I can’t say I’m surprised, but there’s still a small part of me that’s a little disappointed. Maybe the back half of the season will be able to tinker itself a bit, smooth out some of the show’s bumps, maybe give us some new fresh Futurama we can all enjoy, but I dunno. Reboots are really, really, really hard. They’re superfluous by default, so you gotta do a lot of legwork to get on the same level as the original series and present something that feels worthy enough to justify coming back after all these years. To me, Futurama does not do that whatsoever. We’ve had a couple of okay episodes, and even more below average ones, but so far, these ten episodes feel completely vestigial to the series. It was weirdly comforting to me that in all of its revivals, Futurama stayed at a fairly consistent level of quality all the way until the end. On my personal Plex media server, I only have the first eleven seasons of The Simpsons, with “Behind the Laughter” as my jump-off point, but with Futurama, I liked that I had the “complete” series. When this new season started airing, I added the new episodes in, but after the fifth episode, I stopped updating my Plex, and later removed those episodes, leaving only the original 1999-2013 run of the show. Like The Simpsons before it, my Futurama collection is now technically incomplete, a tainted run like its yellow forefather. It’s a bit of a bummer. I know opinions on this reboot have been mixed, and the subreddit has basically been a battlefield between the two ends of the spectrum for the past ten weeks. If anyone out there has enjoyed these episode, hey, that’s wonderful. But for me, chalk this one up to another “meh” of a reboot. I’m sure I’ll be back next year to cover the next batch of episodes, so I’ll try to be as optimistic as I can.