It was an impressive streak, going six seasons without a dud, but it’s still a bummer that Futurama opened its seventh season with “Neutopia,” a non-hilarious episode that covered a lot of the same ground as “Amazon Women in the Mood,” but with lamer gender stereotypes and a disappointing lack of snoo-snoo and things that don’t fempute. “Neutopia” meandered like a late-period Simpsons, opening with Planet Express on the verge of foreclosure, dancing around with a plot about the delivery service transforming into a commercial airline, moving onto the episode’s most cringeworthy act — Planet Express and passengers crash-land on a planet of rock-men creatures and boiling liquid mercury and they have a battle of the sexes for safety. It was a good five minutes of the sort of irritating, dehumanizing gender jokes you’ll find on any number of CBS comedies with a laugh track. “Women! They love to shop, am I right, fellas?”
Okay… maybe that’s a little too far. The Futurama writers’ room is a million times smarter and funnier than the one on the Rules of Engagement backlot, and they’re supposed to be exaggerations. I did actually chuckle at the mini-rock-man offering Fry and the guys directions, and Bender crassly rejecting him. I bought that; it’s well within Bender’s character. There’s not a lot of natural machismo and swagger among the men of Planet Express, but we’ve seen that most of the guys can at least get hormonal under the right conditions, conditions usually involving some goading from Zapp Brannigan. But the women, and female mutants, and female refrigerators were, excuse the expression, neutered. Leela, who fills the show’s most masculine role most of the time, seemed especially off this week — I didn’t buy for one second that she’d hang around in a skimpy outfit and let Fry and the Professor fly the Planet Express spaceship, or that she’d hallucinate a sample sale.
The rock-men solved the apparent problem of Earth sexism by taking away all of the characters’ gender, although I guess Comedy Central didn’t quite buy this — Fry, Leela, and Amy all sleep together, with Fry bare-chested and the two women not. It turns out that there’s not a ton of humor to mine from the characters’ lacking gender, so the episode moves onto them switching genders, which at least had Fry re-assuring the show’s nerd demographic that they’re not crazy: “Now when I say stupid things, guys just laugh.”
But Comedy Central was gracious enough to air a double-feature for the premiere, and Futurama redeemed itself with “Benderama,” succeeding at that impossible task Futurama does so well: making math funny. Like last season’s group theory episode “A Prisoner of Benda,” this one had me off to Google mid-show, so I not only got a hilarious Futurama episode but also a fascinating math lesson. I imagine that the idea of a physical duplication machine has been used in other creative, artistic contexts, but only Futurama would have the nerdy gall to label theirs a “Banach-Tarski Dupli-Shrinker.” Which, in case you didn’t bother to look it up, is totally relevant to the whole joke. The Banach-Tarski Paradox proves that it’s mathematically possible to take a solid sphere, chop it up, and move around the pieces in such a way that you get two spheres, both identical to the first.
That should blow your frigging mind. If it doesn’t, I suggest trepanation, and pouring your mind out of your head, cause you’re seriously not using it properly.
This episode, like “Neutopia,” has a couple of only tangentially related sub-plots, one meandering around a couple of different scientific concepts and variants on a dystopic future. After the Professor tries putting him to work folding sweaters, Bender gets his dirty robot hands on the Dupli-Shrinker and makes two sixty percent-scaled copies of himself and the machine. Bender’s shrunken copies then duplicate themselves, ad infinitum, till they’re self-replicating gray goo nanotechnology consuming all the resources on the planet. They’re tempered somewhat by their need to synthesize robot-powering alcohol from the molecules in water, so they’re not the all-ravaging epic techno-fail the show usually develops, but after “The Beast With a Billion Backs,” Futurama has set itself a very high bar in terms of sci-fi doomsday scenarios. Meanwhile, the Planet Express crew makes a delivery to a hideous fifty-foot tall giant particularly sensitive to insults towards his mother. The two plot lines do, unlike the equation describing the Benders’ population growth, converge for a payoff, although that payoff involves a quintillion Bender copies in their least id-state.
“Benderama” has a more solid plot than “Neutopia,” plus a sharper focus on the crazy reality of New New York in the year 3011 and appearances from some of the more fleshed-out tertiary cast — give me Morbo over Scruffy any day. The show may have taken a step or two towards the shark, but it’s nice to see it’s got more of this world to explore before the show jumps it.