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Futurama Reviews: S09E02 -"Quids Game"

One of the biggest influences on Futurama, going back to its earliest episodes, is the silliness of classic-era Star Trek, and though “Quids Game” in title and basic premise is obviously designed more to evoke the more recent phenomenon Squid Game, its aesthetics -but for some violence- are very demonstrably those of goofy Star Trek episodes where the crew is forced into a gimmick scenario for some austere alien or god-like being -it’s the same trope that Futurama played with in “Where No Fan Has Gone Before” to charming effect.

And it’s pretty fun here too, an episode where it is supplemented by another bittersweet journey into Fry’s past -always a region of some interest that has yielded several of the most touching moments of the show- from which the broader premise derives. The theme is perhaps a little stretched, and certainly considering it is another occasion  of the show making a grand statement about a character -namely Fry having a visceral aversion to ‘cheating’, even while we know he has cheated before on the series. But the episode thoroughly earns its retcon while being ultimately more brutal, in more ways than one, than I expected.
The script by new writer Cody Ziglar revolves around the trauma of Fry’s eighth birthday party, which he is forced to relive when on the occasion of his present birthday, the Planet Express ship, carrying a completely arbitrary collection of about forty characters from across the series, crash-lands onto a barren planet overseen by a trio of maniacal aliens who force them into deadly versions of the games Fry and his friends played at that birthday party.
So we see everyone forced to dangle Barrel-of-Monkeys style over a pool of acid, fates hanging in the balance through Fry’s ability to blow out all the candles on a birthday cake, musical chairs where the losers are devoured by a jack-in-the-box monster, a piñata that kills with every item that falls from it, a scavenger hunt where anyone empty-handed is disintegrated, and finally of course -Pin the Tail on the Donkey. Through all of these there are apparently real stakes, as characters get harshly killed off, but it’s also just a lot of great demented fun -sometimes feeling like one of the “Anthology of Interest” episodes from the show’s original run. Fitting the same conceit, it knows how to play with its characters in this scenario -even for just a joke or two. And once someone like Zoidberg bites it, all bets are off -so the morbid humour of Fry accidentally slicing the Professor in half or Kif being crushed by a book becomes really effective. I certainly laughed more in this episode than most of the shows from the last season.
Each of these segments of chaos though is accompanied by the appropriate flashback at Fry’s earlier birthday. And you’re curious as to why, given in the early goings especially it seems nothing too dramatic. Philip’s parents had arranged  this games-themed party for him, and against the odds he keeps winning each one, something that at every turn he innocently points out has never happened before. But we see in the party, his friends gradually start to become annoyed -not least of whom Josh Gedgie, who fans might remember was Fry’s school rival by the time of the episode “Cold Warriors”, established here to have been at one point his best friend. But, a fairly egotistical kid, he is also the first to label Philip a cheater. And the other kids back him up, already implicitly predisposed towards Gedgie -the most popular in their group.
While the sting of being called a cheater haunting him all these years later feels forced and honestly a bit obtuse in the life-or-death situation, I really respect how the episode takes seriously the pressure by and judgement of kids. And also just how unfair it is to the young Fry. In the current situation, after eventually losing Leela along with just about everyone else, he is again marked as a cheater by his current best friend Bender -who along with hilariously Hattie “watchacallit” McDoogal are the only ones to make it to the final game. Naturally Fry does the noble thing and has his eyes gouged out to prove the point, he and Bender soon wind up affirming their friendship, and Hattie wins anyway. Everybody is brought back and Fry after thirty-plus a thousand years is vindicated as “not a cheater”.
I like the ending of the episode an awful lot, which as is the custom for Fry backstory shows, pulls back the curtain one more time, revealing that Philip’s parents -though mostly his mother- had actually cheated on his behalf to “let him feel like a winner for once”. The sweetest of intentions, but the opposite effect. In giving him the chance to be a winner, she inadvertently made him feel more of a loser than ever before. And he can only watch disheartened as his friends storm away. It is the only time outside of “Jurassic Bark” one of these episodes leans into an ironic sadness to close out on rather than something heartwarming. And I am stunned that it came out of this late-period Futurama.
Now for some stray observations:
  • Truly an eclectic bunch at Fry’s birthday party who have no business being there. I understand Hattie, who was briefly his landlady, Petunia who he slept with, and maybe both Leela and Amy’s parents, but what the hell are Zapp Brannigan, Elzar, the Hyperchicken, and Barbados Slim doing there?
  • That said, I loved the return of Abner Doubledeal! Nice to see Yancey Fry Jr. in the background too being supportive of Phil. They got good use out of Tom Kenny this episode.
  • A reference by Philip’s father to “our boys in Grenada” would put this episode’s timeline in 1983. But they also refer to the Bicentennial with recent relevance. It sets Fry’s age (whatever it may be now) at the start of the series as twenty-four, a little younger than I thought he was.
  • If Fry had had his lucky clover by that point, that might have accounted for his birthday luck. I feel like Ziglar or somebody else directly chose to cast Fry so young here so as not to make that an issue.
  • Scruffy doesn’t believe it’s a black hole: “I see it as more of a gray brown or perhaps toasted umber.” The emphasis on that last word is exquisite!
  • “Everything’s coming up Gedgie”. Cute, but there’s a reason that line worked with Milhouse Van Houten, and doesn’t with this pompous, arrogant child.
  • Alien: “Fun for ages three to ninety-nine.” The Professor: “No wonder I’m not enjoying it!”
  • So it turns out this isn’t designated Season 8-B, like in the Comedy Central days. I guess I was under the impression this batch of episodes was produced concurrently with the last batch last year because 20 episodes were ordered at once. But they weren’t all produced at once and Hulu, wikipedia, and the Infosphere have all separated them, so officially we are in Season Nine. I have gone back and corrected the discrepancy for “The One Amigo”.

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