The Top Ten Futurama Episodes

I had to double check and make sure that I hadn't written this list before, because I've been such a cheerleader for "Futurama," it feels like I should have properly geeked out over the individual episodes at some point before now. We're about two weeks away from the premiere of Season 7 on Comedy Central, so there's no better time to do this. So here's my Top Ten "Futurama" episodes. And to save you the suspense, "Jurassic Bark" is not on this list. It had the saddest ending of any cartoon I think I've ever seen, but I cannot remember a single damn thing about the rest of that episode.

10. "A Fishful of Dollars" - It was a close decision between this episode and "Insane in the Mainframe," but "Fishful" got more mileage out of a wonderfully absurd idea. Newly wealthy Fry goes on a spending spree to try and recapture some of his past, and buys the last existing can of anchovies. This draws the attention of Mom, of Mom's Old-Fashioned Robot Oil, in her first appearance. There are tons of great gags about 70s and 80s cultural detritus, Fry's stupidity, and the slapstick bumbling of Mom's sons. I also love the Zoidberg horror ending, which comes out of nowhere, and somehow totally works.

9. "The Farnsworth Parabox" - "Futurama" does multiple universe theory, creating doubles of the whole crew and expanding from there. The show had several episodes based around very heady science-fiction concepts, and not all of them came off very well. "Parabox" was great because it kept finding new variations on one simple idea: there's another universe in this box. The chase sequence through all the different boxes and all the different universes just piles on the visual gags, and we learn that two Zoidbergs may not be better than one, but they're certainly funnier together.

8. "Leela's Homeworld" - The truth about Leela's origins is revealed at last, one of those big mysteries that the creators took the time and care to set up over multiple seasons. Spoilers ahead. I enjoy all of Leela's subsequent interactions with her parents, especially in "Teenage Mutant Leela's Hurdles," but none of them are nearly as poignant or emotional as this episode, where we descend into the sewers for the first time, and learn that lonely Leela was never really alone. The story worked so well, "Lethal Inspection" with Hermes and Bender practically repeated it beat for beat in Season 6.

7. "War is the H-Word" - "Futurama" found ways to parody westerns, mob stories, sports stories, campus comedies, and more. However, I think that one of their best jaunts into any genre was when Fry and Bender unwittingly joined the army, and Leela followed incognito, just to prove a point. From Zapp Brannigan forced to question his sexuality, to the aliens being giant bouncy balls, to Bender being outfitted with a bomb that is triggered by the word "ass" (the word he uses most), the humor was inspired. They even had an Alan Alda robot with "irreverent" and "maudlin" settings!

6. "The Prisoner of Benda" - Yes, it's the body switching episode. It's not just that the characters switch bodies, but that this leads to situations like Amy overeating in Leela's body, Fry and Leela getting physical while they're in the Professor and Zoidberg's bodies, and Scruffy's sentient wash bucket trying to seduce him using Amy's body. It's one of the rare episodes that uses almost every single member of the cast perfectly. And of course, because this show is written by nerds, they came up with a mathematically sound equation to get everybody back into their proper bodies in the end.

5. "Godfellas" - "Futurama" is a show after my own heart when it does things like build an entire episode around Bender exploring existentialism and religion. Bender becomes the deity of a tiny race of people that colonize him while he's floating around in space, does a terrible job of it, and then meets someone who might be God. The conversations about destiny and free will are lighthearted, but sincere. Bender is at his most thoughtful and sympathetic. And for extra geekiness, the show parodies Arthur C. Clarke's "The Nine Billion Names of God" in a very silly subplot.

4. "The Sting" - This one completely caught me off guard the first time I saw it. Spoilers ahead. Now I was pretty sure that Fry wasn't really dead, but everything happening in Leela's head - with a totally plausible explanation for it - hadn't crossed my mind. This is my favorite of the Fry and Leela romance episodes, because it puts them in a very different dynamic and situation than we normally see. This time it's Leela chasing Fry, realizing her feelings after it's too late, and maybe being eaten up by her own guilt and remorse. It's a big piece of their relationship that was missing until this episode.

3. "The Late Philip J. Fry" - Time travel stories are abundant in "Futurama," but this one tackles a more traditional conception of time travel, with a twist. The Professor's time machine can only go forward, setting up multiple opportunities to parody post-apocalypse scenarios, riff on "In the Year 2525," and illustrate Poincaré recurrence theorem - which is then immediately used to set up another joke. And then there are the poignant moments, which are even better. One of my favorite scenes in the whole series is Fry, the Professor, and Bender sharing beers and watching the end of the universe.

2. "Amazon Women in the Mood" - My vote for the most entertaining, most ridiculous, most hysterical episode of "Futurama" would have to be the one where Fry, Zapp Brannigan, and Kif are captured by giant Amazon women who intend to intimately "snu-snu" them into oblivion. All attempts to placate the Amazons are foiled by Zapp's boorish behavior, so it's up to Leela, Amy, and Bender to save the day. The Battle of the Sexes rages through many "Futurama" installments, but never again to these wonderful, sexually terrifying extremes. And it has Bea Arthur as the Femmeputer!

1. "Luck of the Fryrish" - Yeah, I'm a sucker for the mushy ones. Fry and Yancy's sibling rivalry hits close to home, and seeing it continue to drive Fry's actions in the future, and finally lead to a touching reconciliation across a gulf of a thousand years, is one of the most brilliant things that the show has ever done. This was the one that really set the standard for all the character episodes that came after, that would be the show's turning point into more melodramatic, more personal stories. Sure, Fry's an idiot, but in episodes like this, the show also treated him like a real human being with human frailties. And that's what made it so easy to care about him, and the rest of the Planet Express gang too.

Happy Watching!
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