As much as I love Futurama for its outrageous concepts and sense of humour, the episodes that have always resonated the most for me have been the sweet ones. Silly though they may be, I really love these characters and I like seeing them in contexts that are a little more earnest, revealing, that connect you more to their humanity -even the ones who aren’t human. “Late Bloomers” does that, specifically with two characters, and while it goes down a couple strange paths, it comes for the heart. And it makes you feel good. The episode is in fact a direct follow-up to two previous shows, starting with “Planet Espresso” . That episode ended with Hermes’s father reincarnated as a coffee bean plant, and here we see he is living with the Conrads -though only speaks to Hermes. Badrick as it turns out is dying from some plant disease, and Hermes not wanting to go through the death of his parent again, especially now that they are on better terms, is desperate to save him somehow. This leads int...
“Space… the Final Frontier.” It’s a provocative phrase, isn’t it? The Final Frontier, the last great mystery of exploration. In 1966, one of the most popular television genres was western adventure - Gunsmoke , Bonanza , Rawhide , episodic stories about life on this particular romanticized frontier were everywhere. What’s a competitive show to do but take it a step further? Where do you go once the west has been thoroughly demystified? How about a Wagon Train to the Stars? That was the phrase that one Gene Roddenberry used when pitching a series concept to Desilu Productions that would go on to be Star Trek , the basis of a sixty year television franchise (and occasionally film too ) , that would have one of the greatest out-sized impacts of a cultural phenomenon of the twentieth century. Desilu green-lit the idea (founder Lucille Ball specifically) and the rest is history. Three seasons that struggled in the ratings but gained an enormous fan following, a short-lived animated follow...