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Futurama Reviews: S11E04 -"The Charm Offensive"

 It’s been a long time since Futurama has engaged in a relevant way with popular music. Depending on your mileage, it's either when Beck showed up to go on tour with Bender in season three or when the Beastie Boys made a prominent appearance back in season one. That was over twenty-five years ago and the music industry has changed dramatically -it is an ample environment for the show to comment on.
And “The Charm Offensive” does just that and in a pretty good way as it targets the pop stardom of figures like Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter. Admittedly some of the jokes are very easy and others quite cliché to Futurama’s brand, but you can’t really knock the episode for them. The subject demands it.
Coco Charm is the pop megastar stand-in here, a teen sensation poised to sell out Madison Cube Garden within quantum-seconds for her upcoming concert. Amy is apparently a big fan and her birthday is coming up so Kif determines to get tickets for her, expressing a certain insecurity about how little he can afford compared to her seemingly endless family wealth. It’s actually a compelling little plot beat, emphasized by a series of insane purchases from Amy (including a minotaur purse and a car dealership because she ran out of gas) that unfortunately isn’t discussed past that point, culminating in Kif resorting to stealing from his wife to buy the tickets. It’s an awful thing but it is at least somewhat understandable given Kif’s efforts to get tickets through TicketMistress and its bizarre array of processes, not to mention a mandatory $500 convenience fee, costing him his entire savings just for two lousy seats at the back of the venue. But then Amy hears about the concert independently and is able to bypass most of the crap to grab V.I.P tickets (so V.I.P. that they are actually on the stage). This satire of the much-maligned TicketMaster might be argued to not go far enough, but anyone who has been through the ringer with them can feel the catharsis of the show perfectly lambasting their heinous practices.
On Amy’s birthday she is a touch dismayed to discover what Kif bought for her, but recognizes the sincerity of the gesture and goes along with it, discreetly passing along her V.I.P. tickets to Fry and Leela. At the same time, the Professor -a curmudgeon about pop music- endeavours to mathematically and psychologically comprehend why music elicits such a powerful emotional response in listeners. It’s a corner of the episode that functions as a base educational lecture on musical theory, but it also is a space to engage in a little fun meta humour, amping up a flowery Christopher Tyng score to underline the ways music can manufacture emotions.
Irrespective of this, the episode proceeds along to the concert itself -a fairly flagrant Eras Tour pastiche. Amy and Kif need binoculars even to see the show screens, while also spotting Fry and Leela in the luxury seats. But Leela as it happens isn’t actually a fan of Coco, and despite being mere feet from the star, puts on headphones to listen to an audiobook. Coco’s performance energizes and exhilarates the rest of the audience though, including Kif and Amy at the back and even Fry at the front. It all goes well, until the last act when Coco (who it has been established is a bit of a scientific genius herself) utilizes the ‘programming language’ of music to start a revolution. Much as Mom did before her in “Mother’s Day” she turns her rabid fandom into a “Charmy” and lifts Madison Cube Garden into the air as a domineering spaceship. A lucky Leela however, manages to escape with a still-dancing Fry.
It’s at this point that an episode which began seemingly focused on Kif and Amy shifts gears by leaving them in Coco’s clutches and spotlights the rest of the cast instead figuring out what to do about the uprising. Zapp is of course sent in the Nimbus to subdue Madison Cube Garden, but his efforts are in vain. The Professor comes up with a plan to override Coco’s hypnotizing melody with a counter-melody of surrender to be shot via a Bluetooth signal into an outlet on the venue’s T-shirt corridor -it’s the trench run from Star Wars, and one of the better examples of lampshading I’ve seen recently. Fry unwittingly sabotages the mission however via the music still being stuck in his head and the signal hits Zapp’s ship instead. The earworm effect is so severe that Fry can only be cured by brain surgery -Zoidberg brutally removing the effected brain cells.
Coco meanwhile confronts Earth’s forces, revealing her invasion to be pacifist in nature. Her charmy has infiltrated and destroyed the world’s stockpiles of war weapons and doomsday devices. Naturally, this is just in time for the Omicronians to invade …again. Yet within a minute Lrrr is revealed to be a fan of Coco and so the conquest is called off. A very brief satire of anti-war messaging diffused pretty cheaply for the sake of what happens next. Lrrr comments that now there are “all these armies and no one to fight”. Fry asks, “what could be so evil that literally every sentient being in the universe hates it?” The answer of course is TicketMistress.
The episode probably should have ended here, and an older episode would have -but in the last few minutes we follow the armies’ assault on TicketMistress which is predictably run by an algorithm that is itself run by -who else- Mom. And even with her unusually genuine assurance the money goes to good causes, the hatred of convenience fees is strong enough that everybody trashes the place anyways. In the epilogue the lingering threads from earlier are finally resolved -the source of the V.I.P tickets is revealed and Amy sweetly states she preferred Kif’s tickets. To Kif’s confession of theft, she forgives him with a kiss. Honestly, she should have given him more shit though.
“The Charm Offensive” is at times all over the place, but each little section is at least somewhat entertaining, the larger satire is fun, and the targets fully deserving. The episode probably could have been a bit weirder in its image of 31st century music stardom, but the critical points are still there. A charming show.
Listen up now for some stray observations:
  • I want to see the old timey reporter again. “I’m told those classy tunes will really gas your chickens.”
  • Got a kick out of that “Safety Second” poster in the background with the thumbs up guy missing his hand.
  • Damn, Leela’s so bored with a world famous pop star right in front of her that she’s doing her taxes. Savage!
  • Zapp served under Ensign Zinc’s father, whom he got killed. “Glad you’re following in his footsteps.”
  • I don’t know what I expected from the Professor’s counter-melody but “Farnsie Say Surrender” was amusingly not it.
  • You know that tune is in Fry deep when not even “Walking on Sunshine” can get it out.
  • Even Lrrr is tired of constantly invading Eath. “Seriously, again?”
  • “When demand goes up it raises prices, when demand goes down it raises prices”. Ain’t that the goddamn truth. I never had any experience with TicketMaster until they took over the TIFF market and lord it was awful! I am totally sympathetic with the sentiments at the end of this episode.

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