Rent Futurama: Series 6 (2011)

Futurama: Series 6 review by Mark McPherson - Cinema Paradiso

Series 6 (or the second part of the sixth season if you count the movies as a season) of Futurama features perhaps some of the worst episodes of the entire show. For as much as I love Futurama with its robust animation, quirky characters, gutsy sense of humor, and intelligent writing, this is by far the point where things went downhill for the series. Watch in terror as the ideas dwindle this season.

There’s a decent start to the season with Bender being placed in the witness protection program. However, the follow-up episode is just a Moby Dick in space episode, without much more to it than that. Fry joins the local law enforcement and this results in little more than a parody of Minority Report (despite a rather pleasing bit about color spectrums being used for traffic). Bender clones himself and creates a monster.

Thankfully, there’s a break from the monotony when we get a backstory on Zoidberg’s origins that has ties to the works of Farnsworth. Not a bad episode for expanding on a character is mostly just present to be the butt of jokes. There are at least a few interesting bits of playing with robot mortality in an episode where Bender becomes a ghost. Nothing all that compelling but a decent concept for some funny jokes about the paranormal.

But, wow, the worst episode of this set is without question Neutopia, where the Planet Express crew switch genders. All that comes of this episode are some experiments and dated gender jokes that would’ve probably played better in season one than season six.

The rest of the episodes are tired formulas that don’t produce much in the way of decent writing or gags. Leela becomes a kid’s show host. The Planet Express crew goes on a diet. The Planet Express crew time-travel and change the American War for Independence. Fry introduces the common cold to the future, threatening to kill everyone (again, another episode better suited for the first season).

The season does end on a high note with the final two episodes. While Bender becomes an overclocked god, Fry questions his future with Leela, a prospect that Bender can help with. And once again we have an anthology episode but this one is more just a grab bag of different styles. The episode has a central theme involving crystals but each entry features a different animation style which includes 1930s rubber-hose animation, 8-bit computer graphics, and classic Japanese animation of low framerates and awkward American editing. I particularly dug the anime portion of this episode considering the astute usage of Americanizing Japanese locations (a pagoda features the subtitle of being located in Ohio) and using real Americanized anime soundtracks from Robotech, Voltron, and Battle of the Planets.

With the exception of the final two episodes, Series 6 is mostly a dud of a season on the whole. The few clever episodes are far outweighed by the more brilliant episodes. And considering that the better episodes present feel more self-contained than a building of the universe, this is the easiest series set to recommend skipping entirely.