Skip to main content

Futurama Reviews: S09E07 -"Planet Espresso"

As far as coffee jokes go, Futurama can never do better than that subplot from “Three Hundred Big Boys” about Fry drinking three hundred cups of coffee, becoming increasingly more agitated, and ultimately saving the day as a Flash-like superhuman. It hit several of the biggest standard jokes about coffee and that seemed like enough. “Planet Espresso” dives more into the subject, adding onto the mountain of clichés but without coming off any funnier than that partial bit from an episode twenty years ago. And much as I discussed last week the value of the show taking on a world or industry it hadn’t before, the coffee industry -even with the ubiquity of Starbucks- feels a bit of a stretch for a full episode’s focus.
It does come though with some unexplored territory. I didn’t realize until this episode that Hermes was the only main character whose parents had never shown up on screen (there was a mere reference to his “fat ugly” mother and her “zombie bones”). This episode introduces his father Badrick, who abandoned the family when Hermes was a child and as it turns out built a coffee bean farm in the jungles of Jamaica that he also seems to have run into the ground. Now he is on his deathbed and Hermes goes to see him to curse him out one last time. After the death and funeral, Hermes and the Professor discover that underneath the land there is a buried derelict spaceship millions of years old, and through a hallucinogenic experience learn that aliens of the planet Thermos evolved from coffee and spread it around the universe including to Earth -though they had crashed before they could complete their mission there. Though not telling anyone about the spaceship, the Professor declares they’re a coffee company now as Hermes takes over production and ‘Planet Espresso’ immediately becomes a lucrative coffee chain.
Whatever is so special about these evolved coffee beans that would supposedly push the last human developments is never realized. And there are no effects to the coffee that Hermes grows that are in any way different from normal caffeine. No convincing reason why Hermes would want to continue in his father’s footsteps here either apart from just the impetus to outdo him. It’s honestly a pretty contrived excuse for him to repeat his dad’s mistake, leaving LaBarbara and Dwight for this obsessive new venture. It feels like the episode was partially engineered just to give Hermes his own story this season, and it’s a pretty lame one that touches on themes of family he went through already in “The Six Million Dollar Mon” -not a great story, but better than this one.
The bulk of the episode is focused on coffee jokes and jokes about coffee culture, and most of them are of that hackneyed meme variety -the “don’t talk to me before my first cup of coffee” kind that have circulated on the internet for decades now. Turning Planet Express into a Starbucks clone allows for a brief sequence for the writers to vent their anger about the relationship between labour and management -and perhaps reference last year’s strikes as the whole gang in management protest the single employee Fry’s lack of willingness to work 24 hours at reduced pay. But it’s a sketch, and it lacks creativity. Even when Mom comes into the story with the proposal of a franchise, it’s the dull side of economic commentary, and the fact of the coffee’s mediocrity only emphasizes this. There is no sting to any of the coffee or coffee addiction jokes, the episode feels relatively flat in its ambitions. To compare it to something like “The Problem with Poppers”, which took on the fast food industry, or “Fry and the Slurm Factory” with its spin on addictive cola, where is the weird dimension akin to the food being sentient or having some twisted component to its make-up?
The episode goes to a few neat places with the Jamaican setting, and the resurrection late in the episode of Hermes’ father as a coffee plant himself -to impart the moral lesson before promptly being pruned by Zoidberg. Some aspects of the coffee world are imaginative, and I appreciate as well as anyone a good 2001 parody like the one that opened this episode. This is the second episode in a row to end on a note of humanity being doomed -in this case through subjugation by the very aliens who brought coffee to the world in the first place after they bought Planet Espresso off Mom who had bought it off Hermes -their logo being a pastiche on Starbucks so grossly on the nose and again in a way that feels kind of tired as a joke.
Altogether, this was an episode that doesn’t have nearly enough substance for its satire, and pairs that with a personal story for Hermes that isn’t very original or interesting itself. It doesn’t have a fun  take on coffee culture and the industry around it. It just has conventional jokes and dim extrapolations. It’s the decaf of Futurama episodes.
And now for some stray observations:
  • It feels like Bender has two lines in this episode and they’re both about his body being used in unconventional ways -as a steel drum and a coffee grinder. I get that sometimes the main characters can’t be front and centre, but I remember when being the breakout star meant Bender got a healthy amount of zingers per episode.
  • Hermes keeps repeating “licky licky” in his angry confrontation with his dad and I can’t believe that’s how the show makes a Snow reference.
  • Points for consistency I guess -the show remembered the song from “Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back” and sure enough we see the hurricane in Kingston Town that blew his alphabet blocks out of order.
  • Dwayne the mutant shows up as a delivery guy here but with a whole new skin colour. A bit late for this show to have it’s occasional Black Smithers mistake.
  • I did sort of like the running gag of Hermes being appalled by the Professor ingesting so much stuff he finds seeping out of parts of the five million year old spaceship.
  • After the Dune episode last season, Kyle MacLachlan returns again as his Head in a Jar to of course order “a damn fine cup of coffee”.
  • Dawnn Lewis has been in just about every episode this season. At this point she might as well be promoted to main cast. LaBarbara Conrad is around enough and they’ve given her plenty of other roles as well.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Strange History of the American Spoof Movie

Parody movies have been around for a lot longer than we tend to think of them. Even from the earliest days of Hollywood there were movies meant to satirize a particular subject or genre. In the silent era, Buster Keaton was responsible for a few. And in the early sound era, almost as soon as the monster pictures took off did you see comic versions of them -Abbott and Costello hosting a few. But parody movies tended to be subtle for most of cinema history, or parody came in conjunction with another goal of the comedy. It really wasn’t until the 1980s and 90s that it took off and became popularly understood. And there is perhaps a line to be drawn to the counterculture comedy explosion that began in the 1970s through avenues like  Saturday Night Live , which frequently parodied from even its earliest years popular movies and cultural properties of the time. But that is still a way’s back. To my generation though, ‘parody movie’ is perhaps a less known term than the more blunt ‘s...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Stylish and Charmingly Reinvented David Copperfield

The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery (Which He Never Meant to Publish on Any Account)  is the most important book Charles Dickens ever wrote. It is not the most famous or influential by any means (that would of course be A Christmas Carol ), but it is the book that is the purest expression of the authors’ style, identity, and worldview. It is his most personal work, semi-autobiographical in its story of the chronology from infancy to adulthood of a character who overcomes great loss and hardships to find a fulfilling life as a writer. To read David Copperfield  is to understand Dickens himself. Armando Iannucci knew this when he decided to make a new adaptation of the novel for a twenty-first century audience. He also knew that Dickens adaptations are ubiquitous at this point. Films are a bit rarer, but every few years a new television adaptation rears its head to keep the authors’ unique world an...
Post a Comment
Read more

Notes on the Title Cards of The Lord of the Rings

It might be sacrilege for one who both considers The Lord of the Rings  trilogy to be one of the greatest triumphs of cinema and has been an avid lover of the films since adolescence, to declare that the original theatrical cuts of the films are better than the much beloved extended editions. Easily it’s my most controversial opinion regarding these movies. Don’t get me wrong, I do like the extended editions quite a lot, especially as someone who just enjoys spending time in that universe. They flesh it out more, add extra flavour, and in increasing the length by about an hour really emphasize the epic quality of these films. But I find that the original cuts are generally more cleanly paced, more seamlessly edited, and much more accessible to audiences. All the stuff there is to love about The Lord of the Rings  is there in the original versions, the plethora of new and extended scenes merely add to that for fans. And of those, they fall into three camps for me: 1....
8 comments
Read more