Futurama: “The Bots and the Bees”/”A Farewell to Arms” (7.1 & 7.2)

Matt Groening’s recent announcement that he has ended Life in Hell felt odd for a number of reasons, chief among them that Groening has never seemed like he wants any of his creations to end. The Simpsons looks to outlive us all at this rate, and Life in Hell until recently looked like it would do the same. If anything, the comic was a successful model of how to age an ongoing work well, though, since unlike The Simpsons, Life in Hell successfully transitioned from being primarily an outlet for Groening’s bitter musings into a more tender comic frequently centered around his family life.
Futurama has been killed repeatedly, and while it’s really David Cohen’s show, it can’t help but feel like some of what’s kept it from dying off has been Groening’s refusal to let his properties end. However, the question that comes to mind at the beginning of the show’s seventh season (if you want to count it that way) is whether Futurama is a show that needs to keep going. Despite being if anything more popular now than it’s ever been, both the movies and the previous season have been more inconsistent than the show’s original run and, what’s worse, have since the show returned to television been far less ambitious.
Then again, maybe there’s nothing wrong with the show coasting for a while, with only occasional spurts of greatness. Last night’s premiere of “The Bots and the Bees” followed by “A Farewell of Arms” featured two enjoyable episodes, neither one particularly wonderful, but both are certainly funny enough to warrant watching. While that may not sound like high praise, that’s still better than most shows on television, which may be enough to warrant its continuation.
The slightly stronger “The Bots and the Bees” centers on the ridiculous but surprisingly well-explained concept of robots raising children. This isn’t the first time the show’s gone to farfetched lengths in order to feature a parent-child relationship (think of Cubert, for starters), nor is it the first time that robots have been given a previously undiscovered trait in order to make them more analogous to humans and thus give Bender a story. So we’re well within familiar ground as far as that’s concerned. The story itself, though, was both well-told and less rote than it sounds in outline, making Bender into a role model parent while his son Ben “Vending” Rodriguez’s mother is the deadbeat. Ben is so cute that it makes this believable, and though the story felt like a mishmash of things we’ve seen before, the jokes at least felt new and hit their marks.
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