The format for animated sitcom structure as originated by The Simpsons can result in some really weird ideas, many of which don’t particularly work together. The first act of a story frequently has little to do with the rest of a story, and how well everything adheres varies wildly. It’s not a matter of bad storytelling so much as a platform that allows the show’s writers to go off on wild tangents in search of more laughs. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s usually far more noticeable in the latter case, when a 22-minute episode of television becomes a picaresque series of adventures that leaves us wondering what the point of it all was.
Not that I’m complaining about the way “Assie Come Home” ditched its first story, which at first toed the line of racism before completely jumping over said line. Futurama has used alien species or robots as a way of deflecting racism in the past, but when the Planet Express crew heads out to a gang-ruled planet, this trick backfires completely. There are some pretty lousy jokes about the Bloods and the Crips, which only get worse once their Futurama equivalents show up and start speaking in heavily accented “street” dialogue. It was painful to watch. Even at just a few seconds long, this segment threatened to completely wreck the entire episode.
All of this ended up as an excuse to have Bender’s body stolen, and the next few minutes of “Assie” are spent with the crew trying to reassemble him. Fry, Leela and Bender’s disembodied eyes and mouth meet up with a few of the show’s favorite supporting cast members, with a smattering of good and bad jokes along the way, only to find that Bender’s final missing component is in a dangerous space ocean… uhh… place. At this point the search slows down while we meet a lighthouse owner, who’s enjoyable though not consistently so. After a pleasant introduction, he turns out to want to save people’s lives and is into the Bible? Still, he’s fun for a little while, and although he ultimately turns out to be less a character and more a plot mechanism, this middle section of the episode works.
At this point, there’s a pretty dumb idea about how Bender’s shiny metal ass is so shiny it’s needed for the lighthouse, and Bender gets remorseful about it, and then following some ridiculousness it return to him a la Lassie. This section, despite the lack of racism, was almost as bad as the beginning. Pretty much every criticism usually targeted towards Futurama, from false sentimentality to forced situations to tired jokes, arrives in the last few minutes of the episode.
The contortions required to make this storyline work at all were just too massive for the episode to sustain. Each act felt like it should stand alone, and since most of this wasn’t particularly great material to begin with, “Assie” never picked up much momentum. Even the middle section, which was by far the best, mostly felt strong because the material before it was so miserable. It’s obvious why the writers wanted to have an episode centered around Bender searching for his ass, but the execution was an absolute mess. The end of the episode, with Bender’s ass magically returning through a gravity well, was the epitome of what Futurama’s worst impulses have done to the show since its revival. It’s a bad parody in the first place, a science fiction recreation of something from pop culture rather than a genuine joke. “Assie” was overflowing with these, and they (plus, again, the racism), completely crowded out the handful of inspired laughs.