Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder - "But if I keep them and she marries him... then he probably won't want me dating her."

I'm a long time Futurama fan. It's the sort of thing that seems to have been designed explicitly for the use of me or people like me. In no other place can you find jokes about Star Trek, scifi cliches and Nixon in the same place. Not to mention that on average it's got a really great cast and an incredibly compelling romance plot in the background. The fifth season of Futurama is I think one of the finest mixes of sci-fi romance comedies that shall ever be forged.

The last two Futurama movies have, however, been complete disappointments. Bender's Big Score was okay, even if it was a bit redundant storywise with the fifth season... but The Beast With a Billion Backs' arbitrary break-up of Fry and Leela and shitty octopus plot really brought Futurama into a nosedive. Bender's Game was a bit better, but I was still thinking by the end of it I was thinking that the magic was gone and Futurama's glory days were over.

Into The Wild Green Yonder proves that I was wrong and it does so by quietly pretending that the last two movies didn't happen.




I've been saying ever since these movies started airing that the Futurama writers fear Fry and Leela's relationship. They're really good at writing Fry as the lovable nerd pursuing and idolizing Leela, who is a pretty ordinary person. One of my favourite scenes in Futurama is probably from the last episode of season 5, where Fry tells Hedonism Bot that he's going to make his opera and then it cuts to Leela on the other side of the room eating what appears to be a giant severed cockroach leg saying " *gasp* Me?!". It's just brilliant stuff. But the fear the Futurama writers possess is really of what comes after that... whenever Fry and Leela have had a moment that makes you think 'oh they're together now', it's often completely forgotten a few moments afterward.

I think the reason for this is a desire on the part of the writers not to interfere with the character dynamic. Futurama stems from the Simpsons and if there was ever a series that tries to maintain the status quo, it's the Simpsons. But for whatever the reason, the writers kept the two in a sort of pre-dating stasis field for the longest time... until, that is, now.

Into The Wild Green Yonder is not a Fry and Leela movie. The plot doesn't have much to do with their relationship and it's only in the background. But here's the thing: they have one. After so much bullshit about Fry suddenly dating someone else and Leela going back to being completely disinterested, they finally did a Futurama story where the two of them appear to already be together. And guess what? It doesn't actually change much! The character dynamics are more or less the same, except that I'd say that both Fry and Leela are greatly improved. They aren't mushy at all... Fry will still be as tasteless and dumb around her as always, while Leela still has a healthy amount of contempt for him. It's actually a bit sudden, considering that nothing happened between them last movie, but again that's why I'm saying they're pretending the last two movies did not happen. And in any case, what you get as a result is a nice breath of fresh air.


Amazing what happens when you let your characters develop rather than futilely clinging to an outdated status quo. One wonders why they didn't do it earlier.


Besides that, the rest of the movie was really nice. The first three movies often resorted to rehashed jokes. You know what I mean... having Mom do various Mom things that she's done before or just throwing the Hypnotoad out there. But this movie decided to do something controversial, mainly: tell new jokes. Fry's bits about how to be dramatic, the protesting feminists, Bender's bit with the Robot Don and pretty much everything Nixon said and did were just hilarious. For the first time, it felt like the Futurama writers were really having some fun.


What's more, I'd say this is the first actual movie out of the set. The other three had the problem of being a bit like three or four episodes of Futurama with a vaguely overarching plot gluing it all together. This one though had a beginning, middle and end. The major plot twist actually managed to be a bit surprising and it all wraps up nicely.



I've heard it said that this may be the last bit of Futurama ever made. If so, then I'm glad they went out on a note like this. It certainly wasn't the best bit of Futurama ever made, but it was quite well done.