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Futurama Reviews: S11E10 -"Final Ending: The Last Conclusion"

Futurama is over once again. Well not quite. In the last week it was confirmed what I and others suspected given the lack of a renewal announcement: after four short seasons Futurama has been canceled at Hulu. This isn’t fully the end of the series there as it is producing three more movie-length specials to come out sometime next year, but once those are complete the show will be yet again gone in the ether. Matt Groening and David X. Cohen have made the usual remarks about looking for a new home again, and after this happening three times before I’m not going to say they won’t find one and Futurama won’t somehow come back again. But I also feel they are running out of options -they went from a major network to a cable network and now to streaming, where even could they end up next?
It is worth taking at least some stock in those upcoming specials being the real finale to the show -as such the title to this episode is both premature and starkly accurate (and it might have been a tad embarrassing if it weren’t). But then "Final Ending: The Last Conclusion", credited to Margo Pyrceman -possibly another pseudonym for Ken Keeler, is less a series ending itself and more a subtle wry commentary on endings overall and the Futurama habit of writing new ones regularly. It is also perhaps a nod to the fact that the show has already had a couple really great endings and it would be futile to try and top them.
This episode does not top them, it frankly doesn't come close. It ever-so-slightly leans into the meta route though, which makes for at least an interesting choice. Perhaps most curiously, it does not revolve around the Fry and Leela love story as most of the previous finales have. Initially at least, it appears to be about Fry's past. It begins with Fry thinking back plaintively to a memory from his childhood. He proceeds to tell the gang the story of the time when he was about ten when his mother let him and Yancey go into Manhattan on their own for the first time. The brothers decide to use this trust to sneak into a PG-13 movie -a science-fiction film of course called Deathbot 3000 in which a couple kids accidentally summon a robot that begins to take over the world. Fry relates the story of this movie to the gang who are rapt with attention, but he cannot finish it because something happened in the theatre. Before he can elaborate though, the Professor interrupts with a musing on the human need to know the end of stories.
It leads into a story of his own about the foundation of storytelling, presenting primitive versions of the Futurama gang (interestingly all sporting Homer Simpson lip) taking in a story about hunting a mammoth. Some are uninterested and distracted from the narrative being told by proto-Farnsworth but proto-Fry is engaged and needs to know the end. Present-Farnsworth's yarn is then itself interrupted by Zoidberg's annoyed disinterest. As it happens, Decapodians, evolving a different way, never had a culture of storytelling and thus Zoidberg has no real understanding of the appeal of stories (there are I'm sure a number of moments throughout the series that contradict this). A huffy Zoidberg though secretly yearns to understand storytelling. While the gang is distracted by this, they don't notice that Bender has disappeared too. He has been captured by the Robot Mafia due to crossing them one too many times and has been tied to a rail track ahead of an oncoming train.
Each of these nested stories is picked up again in roughly the order they are introduced -with one barely significant comical story about Hermes having to choose between two types of manwich his wife presents for him. It's a little bit reminiscent of the structure of Cloud Atlas, only more hectic. The gang all depart Planet Express after Fry reveals the next part of his story -wherein he and Yancey while fighting over popcorn are discovered by the NYPD (it's their movie day), who arrest them for being underage in the most inappropriately hardcore way possible. Deathbot 3000 was a flop, never released on video or DVD (or Brain Worm), so Fry has never learned the ending. Determined, Leela embarks on a mission to find the film and finish it. The Professor continues his story (to seemingly an empty house) of an impatient proto-Leela and Bender going after a mammoth. Zoidberg is tasked by Amy with looking after Mandy while she goes to her hair stylist. A highly involved narrative, it sees Zoidberg join Mandy for storytime at the local library where a reading of "The Regular-Sized Engine That Might" is interrupted before its own ending by the cops, who have declared it a banned book. Zoidberg takes Mandy home, via train on her insistence -and by this of course she means jumping on top of a train underneath an overpass. Perhaps it is the same train that nearly runs over Bender -missing him due to the track alignment, which the mafia correct in time for the next train. Fry and Leela's journey takes them to Applied Cryogenics where old film reels are stored and sure enough they find the movie. Then Fry, while trying to retrieve a Charleston Chew from the freezer tube he had been frozen in, opens it to reveal Roberto inside serving a sentence. In a scuffle, Fry and Leela are thrown out the window, while grasping the unraveling celluloid itself (the reel becoming wedged to a freezer tube). 
Though it is not technically part of the story Fry was telling and is awkwardly placed at this juncture in the episode, we find out that he and Yancey were turned into their parents, faced grounding -but Fry nobly took the fall to allow Yancey the chance to go to a nighttime party he was excited about. In 1999, Fry gives the Best Man speech at Yancey's wedding, recalling the incident and noting that party was where Yancey would meet Julie, his eventual wife. It is a sweet moment, with an emotional tenor recalling the thread of their brotherly love from "The Luck of the Fryrish" (even as it contradicts that very episode by depicting Yancey's wedding before Fry 'disappeared') and emphasizing the imprint that Deathbot 3000 had left -and possibly why Fry was thinking about it in the first place. Honestly, it's not a bad story.
All other stories wrap up. In a creative denunciation of the trolley problem, the train coming at Bender splits in two and seemingly hits him. Zoidberg treats Mandy for a burst appendix she sustained in one of the train cars with some minor assistance from that pair of classy hobos -Amy and Kif arriving just in time to be horrified then relieved that she is alright. The Professor's story concludes with a lesson -the mammoth hunters followed their prey into inescapable tar, which has now also trapped proto-Leela and Bender (also proto-Farnsworth somehow). Proto-Fry, having listened to the end, knows to avoid it; thus the Professor reasons that hearing stories to their end helped the human species survive (so watch to the end of Futurama is I guess the message). And Hermes makes his completely inconsequential manwich choice.
Fry and Leela plunge through an open sewer into old New York, where they find themselves dangling in front of an oncoming train. In some admittedly clever contrivance, their attempt to climb up the film reel causes it to move against the headlight of the train -projecting the end of the movie onto the side of a building in front of them. Deathbot 3000 ends on the two kids pushing a button that stops time all around them, leaving them alone but together to live out their lives in a frozen world. It is of course the exact ending of "Meanwhile", Fry and Leela's reaction seemingly indicating the show itself agrees that was the probably the best way for its story to end. There is a little sentimental touch as Fry and Leela appear doomed where Fry takes stock of how good his story has been and that he cherishes it. They drop and the show cuts to black... before promptly coming back to curtail any ambiguity by showing them okay, Bender alive as well, having been romancing the train that hit him. He gets another death fake-out before the show fully ends, the text "Bender went on to make a full recovery" making for not the most dramatic way to close out a show.
There isn't really a particular point on stories or endings that "Final Ending: The Last Conclusion" reaches, apart from just basking in a kind of abstract appreciation of them. The various stories are all fine, the show threads its tongue-in-cheek tone nicely. In a way the stories are a decent collage of some of the kind of episodes Futurama has produced, if fairly character-based more than concept-based. I appreciate the sense of honesty to this episode, much as I would have liked something more meaningful. Futurama has set an unfair precedent for itself.
I am glad it isn't just the end yet, perhaps I should reserve expectations for the last of the upcoming specials. I won't deny I would feel a little worse about this episode if not for that cushion. But if this is the last regular episode of Futurama I will at least acknowledge it is a regular episode of Futurama, with enough of the quirks and qualities and sense of humour the show is known for. There may be something beautifully poetic in this episode about endings refusing to be an ending itself. Fry, Leela, Bender, and the gang aren't going anywhere. Whose to say their story needs to end anyway?
One more time, some stray observations:
  • "Mom, you told us like five times!" "Yeah, but you're pretty dense."
  • It's kind of cool to see the subway on Futurama, and 1980s Manhattan. Obviously there are certain jokes to go with that context but it also is a rare source of grounding for this typically not grounded show.
  • Why is Bill Clinton the President in a movie made in the 1980s?
  • “You can’t just leave me here to die.” “Good point, we’ll stay and watch.” A decently funny episode to go out on, I'll give it that.
  • “Zoidberg I’m so glad I ran into you!” “A sentence nobody has ever said before.” Damn Zoidberg.
  • That a library has fireplaces for fiction and nonfiction is maybe too dystopian for me, thanks.
  • Good that we're getting all these trains on the last day of railroad service ever.
  • Who the hell was the Baltimore Urinator?
  • Fry perusing the films of the 80s: “Aliens, E.T., Back to the Future.” A fascinated Leela: "Wow, lot of documentaries back then."
  • Fry’s Dad: “Since you’re so young, I’m going to punish you extra hard while you’re impressionable”
  • "And so Hermes had thick and chunky...and sex". One of the weirdest sentences ever uttered in this show and that is saying something.
  • "As long as we keep climbing at twenty-four frames per second..."
  • This brings to an end the episodic season runs of Futurama on Hulu. I don't think it needs to be said that they were broadly not to par with past eras of the show, but I do think there are some worthy gems and curiosities in there that I wouldn't throw out or disregard, several in this season alone. Maybe Futurama will never be complete as I once assumed, and maybe that's okay. I'm glad I got to see more of the show and more of these characters, and will get at least a little bit more to come. Any concluding feelings related to that, I will reserve for the end of those specials. I am indeed looking forward to them.

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