Futurama is one of my all-time favourite shows for so many reasons. Few shows have made me laugh as much, and even fewer have made me cry in a way that Futurama has. The show also has produced some of my all-time favourite episodes of television ever, so I was definitely intrigued when the show was shockingly announced to return back in February 2022. This wasn’t a show I grew up with as a kid, so I wasn’t as bothered about season 8 essentially undoing the ending of season 7 as many longtime fans were. That being said, Futurama Season 8 was a mild disappointment. It’s not bad by any stretch of the word, and some of it is genuinely solid, but to bring the show back after 10 years and completely reverse one of the most beautiful endings I’ve ever seen in a TV show, they needed to be incredible. Topicality is not something that’s bothered me about Futurama since the show has always been influenced by modern culture, but like the Comedy Central era of the show, some of the “timely” episodes just didn’t work at all.

One of these misfires was the episode “Rage Against the Vaccine”. Futurama has already dealt with vaccines in the episode “Cold Warriors”, though that episode covered the common cold while this Season 8 episode dealt specifically with COVID-19. This made many fans groan, but I was fairly optimistic due to the show’s ability to deal with topics such as climate change and the Iraq tax rebate. Alas, this episode was just painfully unfunny. While “Cold Warriors” wasn’t the funniest episode either, it still had a wonderful emotional core to it that helped elevate it to something fairly enjoyable. 

Another misstep for Futurama’s 8th season was the episode “The Prince and the Product”. The Fry and Leela relationship was one of the core tentpoles of the show working with some of the best moments and episodes coming from their blossoming relationship. Hell, every Futurama finale to date dealt with their relationship in some way! Yet “The Prince and the Product” for some inexplicable reason suddenly has Leela acting completely out of character. There is a slight explanation but it’s incredibly lazy, hacky, and just bad writing. 

There were a lot of opportunities for true greatness in some of these episodes but they just didn’t fully come together or deliver on the quality I expect from Futurama. Even the signature time-travel episode “I Know What You Did Next Xmas”, which usually are season highlights, fell flat. Overall, this season has had some fairly weak writing from writers I know are capable of so much better.

However, as much as this season underdelivered on premises the show usually nails, it also managed to surprise me by turning some ideas into comedy gold. Topics that had the potential to go wrong very fast like crypto currency in “How the West was 1010001” and cancel culture in “Zapp Gets Canceled” were actually handled with a lot of care and humor. The season in general was able to bring a lot of good jokes to most of the episodes this season, which the show has always been fairly consistent at (bar season 7).

The element that I was most interested in seeing, though, was how the season would handle emotional depth: the factor that made Futurama the superior show to The Simpsons in my eyes. So many episodes of the show have truly beautiful, poignant moments that help raise the show above many shows in general. “Jurassic Bark” is the go-to example of the show’s emotional high points, but other classics such as “Leela’s Homeworld” and “The Luck of the Fryrish” bring a level of poignance that I assumed the show would probably not reach again. I hoped they could get close, but I figured that the first 7 seasons of the show had more or less said everything the show seemingly wanted to say.

But surprise surprise, I was proven wrong! “Children of a Lesser Bog” pays off “Kif Gets Knocked Up a Notch” after 20 years and it showed that there was still something for this show to say. Like most of the episodes of the season, it’s close to being great and could be something I appreciate in the future. Nonetheless, it was lovely to see that the show hadn’t lost its way in terms of emotional resonance. “Parasites Regained” was also close to reaching the emotional heights of the rest of the show, and as such was one of the best episodes of the season. While it still didn’t fully come together in a way that the original Fox era and the best of the Comedy Central era was able to, it was still a wonderful time that reminded me that Futurama can still be touching. 

This season’s highlight, though, had to be its finale “All the Way Down”. It not only happens to be the best of the season but also one of my favourite episodes of TV this year. “All the Way Down” isn’t the funniest episode of the season, nor is it the most emotional episode, but it truly excels thanks to its excellent sci-fi concept. Futurama is a show that has always truly shined at creating interesting sci-fi premises, a fact very evident in this season finale. “All the Way Down” feels like classic Futurama in terms of its concept, and there’s a lot of unique ideas at play there. The episode (especially the ending) also brings the heart in a season that could have used a lot more of it and works as a satisfying resolution to the season’s narrative for now. 

“All the Way Down” doesn’t quite make up entirely for the weak episodes of the season, and I still can’t say these episodes’ existences are justified. However, I’m still quite happy with most of what we have gotten so far. Hopefully the second batch of episodes can make this all worth it. 

8/10