Great episode!
That song was just brilliant.
I guess it’s a good thing Bender doesn’t have a backup unit after all.
“That was the old Fry. He’s dead now.”
Great episode, though I feel like a better twist would’ve been that time is in fact a loop and not a line, rather than the alternaverse one they went with. While alternaverse does leave itself open for future storylines, I’ll always have it in the back of my head that they’re not in the “real” universe and it’ll bug me.
And so are the original versions of all Fry’s friends. Kind of a depressing episode, really.
Technically they’re not so much dead as in the past. Which means there’s still the chance for Fry, Bender, and Farnsworth to get back to them. It won’t have been the first time (not by a long shot) that the show has revisited an old storyline thread.
I loved them going past old episodes. Definitely among the best of the series.
Well I think it basically was a loop. A line that circles around again where the exact same thing happens no matter what sounds kind of like a loop :)
The killing hitler joke made the time loop worth it. And oh my god when they missed there was literal LOLing
Time is more like a swirl since there was a 10ft difference between universes. I was kind of surprised they didn’t go with the memory limitation gag in the machine rolling over the time to 0 instead of the death and rebirth cycle of the universe. However, they’d have lost two great jokes (at least) if they had.
This is the best episode of the season so far anyway.
Absolutely the best episode in the season. It’s probably the first episode in season that uses the context of the show to good effect. This season has, for the most part, totally ignored both the setting and the history of the show which isn’t always a bad thing, but I think it’s been detrimental in this case.
Nah, he specifically said it was an alternate reality. Twice, actually. I doubt they’d make that distinction unless it were intentional.
I thought this was strong. It didn’t exactly work for me altogether, but it was definitely a great episode, and I appreciate what they were doing.
It felt a lot like the Farnsworth Parabox, where they were just having fun with jokes that they could never justify in the main storyline proper. But the attention to detail (like the Ep 1 flying saucer attack) and classic scifi shoutouts were fantastic.
Here’s something I’ve been thinking about: how much Big Picture plot stuff do you think they have left? I mean things like Nibbler pushing Fry, or Leela’s parents - things that they had planned out from the get-go. It seems like they burned off a good chunk during the end of the original run, and then in the movies they brought in the number shirts and Igner as Farnsworth’s son. How much of that do you think that still have on a notepad somewhere?
Yeah, I fully expected them to overflow at 2.147B and go 2.147B in the past. Still, I’m glad they didn’t as well since the joke was worth it (twice).
Definitely the best of the season and up there with the best of the series. 1) Sci-Fi hook with some intelligence, check, 2) sentimentality, check, 3) Bender being awesome, check.
Definitely the best of the series, and I think it was as good as any Futurama episode. This has me really excited to see what they come up with next, and whether this plotline will be pursued further or referred to later, maybe some in-jokes between Fry, Farnsworth and Bender. Perhaps the three of them from the middle universe will show up at some point.
I think this might also explain the previous episode - they needed to establish that Bender can be killed permanently to make the end make sense. I also wonder if they’ll use this to make some tweaks or changes, we already know that this universe is 10 feet lower than the last one. That might have solely been so they squish their alternate selves, or maybe it’s in there to establish that the universes aren’t totally identical.
Anyway, I really loved this episode, the details they put in were great, the premise was awesome, really good use of the scifi setting, and it was full of cool ideas and some great jokes. It’s the first episode of this season that I’ve really felt the need to watch a few times to pick everything up. It was really emotionally engaging as well. I can’t think of any episode that is clearly superior to this one, it’s up there with the very best of Futurama.
I wouldn’t stress too much about the universes being different. If you recall, the universe is also squished because Fry sat on it at the end of Farnsworth Parabox. It’s the same kind of joke, really: without a frame of reference “the entire universe” being “lower” is a nonsensical statement.
Except that episode also introduced the notion that robots couldn’t be permanently killed. It was a bad idea anyway… robots are disposable product as far as Mom is concerned. Like Leela’s singing boil, it’s probably one of those things the writers will just hope we’ll forget.
If the universe repeatedly plays out the same way, then “original” Fry and his universe wasn’t the original either. It’s kind of a Physics joke - there’s no difference between where they ended up and where they started (even though the professor accidentally assassinated Eleanor Roosevelt) and all of their friends have already died an infinite number of times. It’s kind of a downer in the “other Leela was all alone” didn’t get happily ever after with Fry a couple universes back but hey, she also got to be hugely successful and have a failed marriage with Qubert!
If only they’d worked a coin toss in there somewhere.