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Futurama Reviews: S10E08 -"Crab Splatter"

This season has had a few decent episodes so far, either in terms of their premise or jokes, in spite of some lapses in construction or presentation. Admittedly, I have assessed them a little bit on a curve. They’ve been on the better end of the metric of the Hulu episodes, but don’t compare to the median of the show’s overall quality. But I’m glad to say that “Crab Splatter” at last does -the first unambiguously good episode this season.
Written by Shirin Najafi, it features a character pairing that I can’t remember ever appearing before -Leela and Dr. Zoidberg; though the episode actually begins with Amy and Kif and a meteor striking their apartment building, destroying the home of the Johnson family below them. Embedded with crystals, Amy takes the meteorite to the Professor, who determines it is an ancient specimen from Decapod 10. They return it to that planet where anthropologist Dr. Judith explains its origin within the evolutionary history of the Decapodians -planetary debris flung out into space when an asteroid destroyed the Crabosaurs, only now having reached Earth in the form of a meteor.
This initially innocuous bit of lore expansion gives way to the real story when the Planet Express returns and Zoidberg finds that the Johnsons have moved into his dumpster (affordable rent AND with good schools nearby!). With nobody else willing to take him in, Fry and Leela do the kind thing, only to tire of his imposition and reality TV addiction very quickly. Leela then has the idea to leave Zoidberg with her parents, who are apparently constantly badgering her for company. The fact that Leela takes her parents for granted isn’t so out-of-keeping with her behavior towards them since “Leela’sHomeworld” (she has expressed anger or annoyance with them on a few occasions), but it is a sad thing to see given her lifelong longing for them. Fortunately, the episode is aware of this, and in a bit of a routine trope, as Zoidberg spends more time bonding with them, Leela starts to feel envious and excluded.
Zoidberg meanwhile is having a great time being accepted for a change (among the mutants I suppose there’s nothing off-putting about his appearance or smell), and when he tells Munda and Morris about how he never knew his parents because of his species’ mating practices (glad to see the show remembering that), it comes to a head with Munda and Morris deciding to adopt Zoidberg to Leela’s horror. At a party celebrating her new sibling she erupts, and we learn that it is not just about the idea of Zoidberg as a brother but the notion of her parents taking him in when they had previously given her up as a baby. I don’t particularly care for the cavalier attitude they have in reference to this, but I greatly appreciate seeing Leela actually expose some resentment towards her parents for abandoning her. It was raised but brushed aside in “Leela’s Homeworld” in the midst of the happy reunion but it makes sense that those feelings would be there. A bit of late-stage character development you love to see.
In the heat of her anger Leela passes out, and at the hospital it is discovered that she has suffered a blenal failure and needs a new blenal gland to save her life. As it is something that only mutants of her family seem to have, her mutant relatives are rounded up to determine if they are a suitable match, but none are -until it is revealed that Zoidberg has several blenal glands and is surprisingly a match for Leela, confirming they are in fact biologically related. Here is where a convenient Dr. Judith reappears and reveals that the prehistoric ‘crab splatter’ of Decapod 10 unleashed by the asteroid strike made its way to Earth where it formed the evolutionary basis of all Earth crustaceans and mollusks -and that the same DNA was eventually absorbed by some mutants like Leela’s mother, making Leela and Zoidberg, however distantly, genuine family. Within the context and parameters of Futurama’s world, it makes a shocking amount of sense, and perhaps confirms a long suspicion around the Decapodians’ relationship to Earth’s crabs and squids.
Zoidberg gladly gives up a blenal gland for Leela, and while recovering at their parents’ home the two really accept each other as siblings -though are also still a touch annoyed by Munda and Morris’ overbearing affections, and Zoidberg decides to move back out. Fortunately, the Johnsons vacate his dumpster for a refrigerator in Hoboken. But while things are relatively back to normal for both of them, a sweet picture of Leela and Zoidberg with Munda and Morris that each of them keeps indicates a contentment with their new family relationship.
I have a soft spot for Zoidberg getting a happy ending (still bummed his relationship from “Stench and Stenchability” didn’t stick), so it is really nice to see him welcomed into Leela’s family and staying there by the end of the episode. The adoption was never annulled so going forward Leela and Zoidberg are siblings and I hope that will be reflected at least a little in their dynamic. This was a nice episode for its characters, a creative episode for its world-building, and a pretty funny episode in a few spots that I’ll reference below. “Crab Splatter” is genuinely one of the best episodes of this iteration of Futurama; not anywhere among the series’ greats I’ll note, but one that could stand on par with any modestly good episode the series has produced in any of its eras. I hope before it all ends again there can be more like it.
And here, some more stray observations:
  • The thread of the Professor immediately falling in love with Dr. Judith and trying to marry her was pretty fun. She wasn’t into it  but it was wholesome anyway.
  • I also really loved every scene with the Johnsons and their bizarre contentment living in a dumpster. They are totally on Zoidberg’s level of delusion and I would like to see them again.
  • “Were the crabosaurs cool?” “That’s the theory.”
  • Hattie McDoogal is the landlady of Zoidberg’s dumpster. Makes sense, she’s pretty much everybody’s landlady.
  • Even in the future, old folks still have tech issues -though given these cameras are in the eye, how exactly is Munda unknowingly blocking the view?
  • Not gonna lie, that seemed like a pretty chill vacation the Turangas took Zoidberg on. All through the episode I was just thinking how ungrateful Leela is. Her turning down their traditional vacation is part of the tradition!
  • “Your own grandfather, interesting”. I love the idea that Fry just brings this up at parties as an icebreaker.
  • What that doctor lacks in Zoidberg’s incompetence, he makes up for in a crippling bedside manner. Pull yourself together, geez!
  • “If I die please donate my debt to a children’s hospital.”

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