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Futurama Reviews: S08E06 -"I Know What You Did Next XMas"


Don’t you hate when folks start putting their XMas decorations up in August?
I’ll be honest, I’m a little bit lukewarm on “The Futurama Holiday Spectacular”, the season six anthology holiday episode Futurama produced back in 2010. It’s not bad, but it’s not all that great either, and not the tone that I like from a holiday special. It didn’t work those times The Simpsons tried “Treehouse of Christmas” episodes and in Futurama it’s barely better. So I’m glad that “I Know What You Did Next XMas” is fully contained, even if it too branches into a few convoluted stories.
This episode feels like a bit of a Frankenstein monster -as though the writers wanted for the premise to be on the origin story of Robot Santa but realized their big idea for it couldn’t encompass the whole episode and so included a secondary plot that seems to be reverse-engineered from its title. In addition to these there was maybe a desire to peek in at the various holiday experiences of the main cast and their families -the most wholesome conception for the episode. The script is credited to newcomer writer Ariel Ladensohn, and though it’s got some surprisingly good humour and character, it very much needed another draft or an edit -as is, coming across as a script trying to do too much and at the same time not having enough material.
Despite the immediate terror of XMas season being more and more an afterthought as the years go by, the Professor determines that time travel is the right way to deal with Robot Santa -asserting rather nonsensically that he wouldn’t expect an attack from the future. He plans to use the time machine from “The Late Philip J. Fry” (now able to go in both directions) to go back and reprogram Robot Santa to his original jolly specifications. After accomplishing this rather easily (albeit in a roundabout time-is-cyclical way), everyone departs for happy family holidays except Bender and Zoidberg, who have nobody. Weirdly they end up getting along and once drunk decide to get revenge on their friends leaving them alone by kidnapping Robot Santa out of time. In doing this, they accidentally kill him and try to cover it up while Bender receives cryptic messages saying “I Know What You Did Next XMas”.
Clearly it takes a lot of overwrought plotting contrivance to get to this 90s thriller movie reference. It necessitates several big and quick status quo shifts, starting with the Professor reprogramming Robot Santa in the past, thus getting everyone excited about XMas again to spur Bender and Zoidberg’s drunken plot that only matters so far as getting Robot Santa killed to motivate this spectre of guilt. Even Bender and Zoidberg’s temporary friendship comes too easily -much as it’s nice to see these characters paired in a way they never have been before. The idea of doing a pastiche of I Know What You Did Last Summer with a time travel twist is actually pretty neat, but it fails to work here in the forced series of circumstances to bring it about. Alternatively the Professor’s goal to stop Robot Santa opens a lot of interesting story possibilities, including a sustained journey to the world of 2801; but the episode simply makes it a set-up to one admittedly interesting bit of world-building: much as Fry ensured his birth in “Roswell That Ends Well” by sleeping with his own grandmother, the Professor ensures Robot Santa becomes evil by switching his programming dial at the point it was already set to Good.
This is revealed near the end in a last act and last few minutes that are especially bad -overly explained in a way that reveals the cluttered nature of the episode’s storytelling and reducing the whole point of the episode’s title to a pretty weak joke about blackmailing Bender for being friends with Zoidberg. And yet… I don’t hate this episode. For one thing, among the messiness are several pretty good jokes -especially where Bender is proposing cannibalizing Robot Santa. The writers’ fixation on Turducken is a little strange, but I enjoyed the various types that popped up through the episode, like the Professor’s 3D-printed one or the Turanga’s mutant one (they’re easy to catch because they crave death). There is a certain chemistry to Bender and Zoidberg that I like, a reminder of what can be gained by partnering certain characters in new ways. And also, while it may not mean much, I loved the glimpses into the families here and the sense of family that comes across, especially when they all converge at Planet Express for Bender and Zoidberg. I love seeing LaBarbara Conrad again, and Cubert Farnsworth. Amy and Kif’s kids make their first reappearance, Leela brings home Fry to her parents to make a new impression. It’s the characters together and the atmosphere that makes for a kind of warmth I don’t think a Futurama holiday episode has conveyed since “XMas Story”. It’s a shame the stuff around it is so plagued by poor construction, but there are several moments I really appreciate. I will probably come back to this episode in December and see how it lands. But with XMas, how something feels can be more important than anything.
And now for some stray observations:
  • This episode of Futurama is the last performance of Coolio, who passed away last September, returning to his role of Kwanzaa-Bot -still desperately campaigning to get kids interested in Kwanzaa. He appears first in an old children’s cartoon Amy shows the kids (alongside Mark Hamill’s Chanukah Zombie), and then performs a Futurama-themed “Twelve Days of Christmas” rap ahead of the end credits. You know what, I first learned about Kwanzaa through Futurama, so I think Coolio did his character proud. The episode is of course dedicated to him.
  • Cara Delevingne is credited as a guest voice here, as the screaming announcer of the aforementioned special. She also voiced the scream of the Make-up robot in “The Impossible Stream”. What is up with that? Hiring a well-known celebrity for these extremely tiny vocal bits that any of the regulars could perform. Is Delevingne just that much of a Futurama fan or is the show cooking up something more?
  • Also on the subject of voice actors, Kevin Michael Richardson has taken over John DiMaggio’s former duties as URL, the robot cop with a very black-affected voice.
  • Turns out the Planet Express building in 2801 was a meat factory and Hermes knows a suspiciously specific amount about that. It comes in handy later when Bender and Zoidberg hang Robot Santa up on the old meat hooks Texas Chainsaw Massacre style.
  • Robot Santa aggressively yelling “COOKIES!” (even when in ‘Good’ mode) is a recurring bit as dumb as it is very funny.
  • Really warmed my heart, that montage of the gang celebrating XMas with their families. The Kroker-Wong family photo, Hermes and LaBarbara’s limbo kiss. And the best joke of the episode might be Leela and her family making snow angels in asbestos.
  • This episode comes very close to a Looney Tunes gag when Bender writes an extra zero onto the fifty pound weights in the hope they will sink Robot Santa. I wish it had worked.
  • I appreciate the love this episode has for “The Late Philip J. Fry”, the best episode of the Comedy Central run, and possibly my favourite episode of the entire series. Though at times the early goings seem to frame it as a direct sequel -we see a lot of the same worlds Fry, Bender, and the Professor travelled through then in their journey to get home.
  • So the big easter egg here (and related to one that appeared there) is that as the Professor is travelling backwards from the end of the universe to his time, one of the scenes that passes in front of him is from Disenchantment. A nice reference to their sister show but also apparently confirmation that Futurama and Disenchantment exist in the same universe and that the latter sits somewhere in the future of the former -a nice twist for the supposedly medieval fantasy comedy, especially as it nears its end with what is set to be the last season coming to Netflix in a few days. Sad news, but maybe in ten years it’ll be picked up by a brand of whatever apparatus has replaced streaming by then.

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