Season Analysis: Futurama was energized in its final batch of new episodes, adding a few new entries to its pantheon of all-time classics.
TIE: “Murder on the Planet Express” and “Meanwhile”
Throughout its run, Futurama established a reputation for engaging both the head and the heart. It explored legitimately engaging science fiction concepts and managed to be one of the most poignant animated series in television history. I had to pick two episodes as the best of Futurama’s 2013 output, as they respectively exemplified these two major aspects. “Murder on the Planet Express” mish-mashed the trickery and paranoia of The Thing, The Game, and Alien in a nifty tale in which a trust-building exercise for the Planet Express crew quickly turns into a fight for survival as a hitchhiker turns out to be a murderous shape-shifting alien that mimics and eats the members of the crew one by one, and then it turns out this shape shifter was part of the trust exercise all along.
The series finale, “Meanwhile,” used a much simpler concept to achieve a much deeper emotional effect. The Professor has invented a device that can send the user 10 seconds back in time. Fry plans on using it to watch the sunset over and over as he proposes to Leela, but all the time-jumping goes awry and the device gets broken, thereby freezing time. Fry and Leela are the only ones who remain unfrozen, and they live out an entire married life together, against the backdrop of the universe at the moment their marriage began. Eventually, the Professor breaks through via some dimension-hopping and everything is reverted back to pre-10-second-time-travel shenanigans. Fry and Leela will not remember this time together, but it surely remains in existence in some realm, just as Futurama itself bids us farewell but surely lives on in some way.
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