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Futurama Reviews: S08E02 -"Children of a Lesser Bog"


At the end of “Kif Gets Knocked Up a Notch”, the first episode of the fourth season that aired way back in 2003, Kif and Amy watched their recently birthed tadpoles swim off into the swamps of Kif’s home planet. “In twenty years they’ll sprout legs and crawl back onto land as children,” says Kif. Amy, who had been fretting about impending motherhood all episode, is reassured, replying “I’ll be ready then.”
Twenty years later, Amy is still not ready, but she has to make do as best she can. “Children of a Lesser Bog” is a direct sequel to the aforementioned episode -one that I’m sure the writers never expected they’d have to follow up on. But they’re the ones who put a real deadline on it, so they have no other choice. This episode, which is widely superior to the last one, really shines a spotlight on the awkwardness of Futurama’s timeline -one that moves forward linearly yet remains frozen for its characters. Fry, Leela, and Amy should all be in their mid to late 40s by 3023, but when this episode flashes back to the earlier one, they clearly haven’t aged a day.
Setting aside the temporal inconsistency here though, this is a very solid episode of Futurama, a character-focused story with some earnest emotional stakes and a decent number of good jokes along the way. It is not an episode for newcomers though as it’s very dependent on the continuity from “Kif Gets Knocked Up a Notch” -right down to the reminder that it was Leela, not Amy, who got Kif pregnant, and the fact that this forms a significant plot point for the episode. Written by Eric Horsted and directed by Edmund Fong, it sends Amy and Kif back to Amphibios 9 for the arrival of their offspring. After a weaning in which most of the children are devoured by predators (including in a sickly funny move, Zoidberg), they are left with three: teenage Axl, pre-teen Mandy, and toddler Newt (the one-eyed tadpole glimpsed at the end of that earlier episode). Amy and Kif get to parenting them, and all of the stress that comes along with that, until Kif is required to go on a mission with Zapp, leaving Amy alone with the brood and the anxiety that due to sharing Leela’s genes, the children are becoming more attached to her friend than to her.
The conflict perhaps feels a bit too manufactured and the episode could be accused of recycling much of the same material around maternal pressure and insecurity as its precursor, but there is some real heart to be felt. I liked a lot that the kids, though somewhat stereotypes of their respective age groups, weren’t the source of the conflict -I had a fear there might be some parental rejection at play mixed in with half-baked Gen-Z stereotypes. But Axl, Mandy, and Newt are perfectly nice if rambunctious children. The Grand Midwife, who facilitates the reunion and is basically an all-purposes representation of Kif’s cultural traditions, hovers around mysteriously for a bit before presenting the challenge to Amy’s motherhood. In the context of how that whole thing is resolved it feels very superfluous.
After the disastrous comedy of “The Impossible Stream”, it was a relief to find that this episode was funny. Not abundantly so -Zapp man-scaping gags and Bender’s disgust with reproduction are very empty sources of humour. But I liked a lot the bit where each of her children and then Amy herself started wailing as Kif flew away in the Nimbus -the timing and escalation of it really felt like a classic Futurama joke. And the subplot with Zapp and Kif checking in on a D.O.O.P outpost that lost contact, features several funny moments playing off well-established character tropes -we even see the return (and demise) of the asshole whale biologist -now a bear biologist- from “Three Hundred Big Boys”.
The episode ends very anticlimactically. After setting up a trial of sorts between Amy and Leela, it just ends on the simple affirmation that because Amy loves her children she is their real mother. It’s sweet and all, but does feel like a cop-out -the closest thing to a climax then becoming Kif’s new fatherhood prompting him to spare the lives of the parasite-looking bear family that had abducted Zapp (in this we again see his astonishing Rambo-like competence). Notably, the children are not written off at the end the way they were in “Kif Gets Knocked Up a Notch”, meaning that they’re here to stay as an aspect of Amy and Kif’s life on the series. I think that’s pretty cool. The episode did a nice job with this story, and I hope the show can continue on this track and better in the upcoming weeks.
And now some stray observations
  • The “Hulurama” mutation of the title is still there and I despise it. Also, not really feeling the “Twentieth Century Pictures presents” banner that makes the show out to be much more serious than it is. But the “Hulurama” thing has got to go! It’s like a watermark, brand consolidation to the most obnoxious degree, and I would almost prefer the dream ads of the year 3000 to looking at this garbage at the front of one of my favourite, iconic opening themes.
  • Don’t know if you noticed, but Futurama went and subtly recast one of its characters there. It’s for the best. Billy West’s performance as Leo Wong is arguably the recurring feature of the show that has aged the worst. And a show that otherwise was ahead of the game in casting with racial sensitivity (virtually all the black characters who have shown up have been voiced by Phil LaMarr, Dawnn Lewis or a black guest star). Plus, it was always a pretty egregious caricature. Feodor Chin now voices Leo with about forty per cent less of a racist accent.
  • A curious thing about the end credits: Katey Sagal is first-billed this time, leading me to believe the show is cycling between her, DiMaggio, and West over the top credit. If so, it’s an equitable choice that implicitly frames Fry, Leela, and Bender as co-protagonists. We’ll see if West comes first next time.
  • I’ve got some issues with the characterizations of Fry and Leela thus far. Fry sucking on his jacket at a stain that supposedly has been there since he got frozen feels beyond the bounds of his particular stupidity. Also, the fact he has nothing of value to offer anyone. And the attitude to Leela seems a bit laissez-faire as well, like the casual drunkenness. I know these are jokes, but the former just feels condescending, and the latter like the kind of thing the old show would have used to illustrate a slump, not a regular character motion.
  • Turns out Amy and Kif’s children have just the tiniest bit of Scruffy’s DNA in them because in his own words “Scruffy’s stuff gets around.”

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