I can't believe it's happening again but with the release of futuras otherwise we have now hit the fifth episode in the show's history that was written as a potential series finale we also of course are going in knowing that it isn't the series finale with 20 more episodes on the way over the next couple of years but the fut tra writing staff always Hedges their bets and so we do know that this one could have been the end it was written just in case but how did it compared to the previous four potential series finales
would this have been a satisfying ending honestly it feels like a little bit of deja vu asking all these questions Deja Vu I feel like I've heard of that before no wait I'm thinking of deas Soul okay so first off I do think it's kind of important to note that because we know there are 20 more episodes coming in the future and that this episode isn't going to be the series finale it takes a bit of pressure off of it I'm now going in not needing this to absolutely blow the roof off in terms of
a finale episode because we know there will be at least one more shot in a couple of years but even with that in mind there is definitely higher expectations when it comes to these episodes once again Ken Keeler takes a crack at this finale script after having written all four previous attempts the devil's hands are idle play things into the wild greed Yonder overclockwise and of course meanwhile which stood as the actual finale for 10 years I actually made a pretty detailed video about the four previous finales like 3 and 1 half years ago obviously
before we knew the show would be returning so maybe I'll update it when we hit that final series finale whenever that happens so how does it stand up well I think otherwi wise is a really strong episode and it does a lot of things I really love as a potential series finale however I do not think it's surpasses or even quite lives up to the previous series finale meanwhile and honestly that's okay but I do think otherwise is probably stronger than some of the other finale attempts like into the wild green Yonder or overclockwise placing
it pretty firmly in the middle of my ranking typically these finales will start with a title caption that references that this might be a series finale this one claiming we're not out of networks yet and right off the bat they bring in one of the funnier but smaller aspects of the show's history Bender's sort of ongoing feud with the can opener Bender was nearly killed by this thing first and I second that emotion stupid can opener you killed my father and now you've come back for me this obviously also states that the can hoper murdered
Bender's father as well though this isn't referenced at all and otherwise might have been a nice touch if they had referenced this but that's okay and then we also see Bender actually get paralyzed by the can opener in bending in the wind so this is an ongoing thing between the two of them and it also makes a point to reference that Bender sings folk songs when he's magnetized down in the valley the folk singing magnet joke was established in the second episode of the entire show the series is landed which was also written by Ken
Keeler so pretty immediately they are paying homage to things that have taken place across futura's history all the way back to the very first season which is a nice start but I think what really works in this one is that they sort of treat the Planet Express Ship as a surrogate for the show itself and with the ship being destroyed they hold a funeral and eulogize the ship which is very clearly a way for them to eulogize the show in classic few trauma fashion it hits emotionally and comedically she saw us through lots of great
adventures and a few mediocre ones honestly some of those three-part Adventures were kind of sloppy I'm not sure if when they say three-part Adventures they're referring to the Anthology episodes or the movies but either way I think the self-deprecating jab here is pretty fitting there are definitely some sloppy anthologies and a couple of those movies aren't very cohesive the funeral allows for this really sweet sequence where the crew walks around the ship One Last Time to Say Goodbye Christopher Ting's score here really helps with the somber mood all around this worked great for me but
the Sci-Fi aspect of this episode centers on this ship graveyard or as the professor refers to it the plasma sea at the bottom of the Multiverse which contains jet streams of alternate realities obviously with the rise of Rick and Morty and other more popular modern media multiverses are really trendy right now however Futurama was dabbling in multiverses all the way back in the farnworth parab box in the original Fox Run and I think the way they're used in this finale is super effective while paying respects to the ship fry starts to become overloaded with memories
even ones that haven't actually happened to him and rather than explore a ton of alternate Dimensions they sort of play on how Fry's untethered memories motivate and change his behavior it isn't explained explicitly in the episode but I like to assume that the reason fry is able to tap into into all of these alternate memories over the plasma sea is probably due to his lack of a Delta brain wave but these memories are fascinating and I think obviously the biggest takeaway from the episode for most people is going to be one of these specific images
if they caught it we'll cover that last but there's actually a lot of other stuff to dive into and they get pretty creative with these alternate Memories the idea is that not all of these memories actually happened to our version of fry in this 10-second sequence there are 37 shots most of them are just old Adventures from the show's history history and I won't go over every single one but it is worth noting that a handful of these shots were actually reanimated versions of older episodes but most importantly a select few of them are alternate
realities the second shot we see is the classic ending of Time Keeps On Slipping however in this alternate universe you can actually see that Leela is only spelled with one e for some reason the fifth shot of the Montage is actually the one that became the iconic not sure if fry meme from the lesser of two evils however in this version fry has no eyes and also features the color palette scene from the alternate fry that we meet in the Farnsworth parab box the no eyes bit is actually also a reference to one of the
other universes in the Farnsworth parab box we didn't see anything ever however we know this has to be a separate eyeless alternate universe because Fry's color palette is different the seventh shot in this Montage shows the shot from the birdbot of ice Katra when Bender and Fry are arguing after Bender becomes the captain of the ship once again this features the parab Box alternate color palette from however we know it can't be the universe we visited in the farenorth par boox either because in that Universe Bender is gold so this is just firmly establishing that
there are multiple realities where Fry has the black hair green jacket color palette and we immediately see this color palette again in the eighth shot once again showcasing the iconic fry squinty I meme but with the pallet swapped fry instead this time this one theoretically could be in the parab Box universe that we visited but hard to say next we see bobblehead fry who is also seen in the farmsworth pair box this actually looks like it was the same shot in location reanimated from that episode but only drawing fry not Leela and vendor's versions of
themselves and also giving fry changing Expressions which didn't happen in the original episode and then the 11th shot in this quick flash montage is the one everyone will be talking about if they caught it which is of course the shot of older Fry and Leela with a purple-haired baby boy and also Bender with ears holding Seymour or at least a dog that looks like Seymour we have seen Bender with ears before he put them on in godfellas so that he could put in ear plugs to try and get some sleep and then in Murder on
the planet Express the shape-shifting alien accidentally kept human ears when pretending to be Bender but I think the idea here is really just that this is an alternate Bender obviously this could be seen as a huge tease for fry and Lea's future but with Bender having ears I do think this is meant to hint that it isn't strictly the future for R Fry and Leela but more so a possible outcome fut tra has dabbled in utilizing FR lela's future son before in the 32nd issue of the comic book series they meet Leland which is a
a nightmarish combination of fry Leela and Bender Who ends up being this future dictator really brief appearance but this is the first time they ever explored this then also in the Comedy Central era the episode law and Oracle was actually originally meant to be an episode about a backwards time traveler who basically moved literally backwards in time tenant Style with the end of the episode intending to reveal that the character was fryan Leela's son the episode obviously shifted significantly and this never happened though it's an idea I always wanted them to revisit but honestly now
now with such an explicit Fry and Leela child tease in the body of the show I really hope that this is explored more in the coming two seasons or maybe once again in the next series finale it is very much just a blink and you'll miss it tease here and it isn't really touched on further in the episode but it feels like something that they should explore moving forward and though the rest of this flashy memory montage is all moments from the show without any real changes there are a couple that are kind of fascinating
to consider one of the memories we see is the simulated pixel versions of Fry and Leela from last year's season finale all the way down so my question is did fry remember watching this moment of his simulated counterpart or does he actually also have the simulations memories flowing through him similarly interesting we see a shot from The Sting that was confirmed to be a part of Leela's coma dream which is obviously not a memory that R fry could conceivably have and lastly there's a shot of fry and lelu from Bender's Big Score but that version
of fry was actually Lars so he also seemingly has memories from his time time Paradox duplicate I don't have any real theories as to what this all means but I do think all of this is really fascinating to consider but this is where the episode takes its big turn fry passes out from the memory overload and the crew goes back into the ship to rescue him just before the ship is detonated and falls into the plasma C and when we return from commercial break inexplicably fry has been rescued and everybody is okay and I really
loved Fry's description of his mental breakdown here I had some kind of attack I started seeing flashes of things that happened also things that didn't happen except it felt like they did happen or will happen and this basically drives the rest of the episode fry is sort of haunted by these memories of things that feel real but he didn't actually experience and for the second series finale in a row a traumatic event leads fry to want to propose to Leela so tonight at Sunset I'm meeting Leela on top of the vampire State Building I'm going
to ask her to marry me and this is where the deja vu comes in because if that sounds familiar it's exactly the plan he had in meanwhile for his first proposal an event that was wiped from his and Leela's memory because of the end of that episode as well as the beginning of the impossible stream but this time it's playing on the fact that this is all happening again what's the matter nothing I I just felt strange like we'd had champagne here before and this All Leads more explicitly to fry having another Vision overload but
this time of the events of meanwhile and I'm of two minds about this idea on one hand I love the way they're sort of collapsing all of these stories in on themselves with those events having been wiped from their memory the fact that they are still affecting the characters somehow makes it feel like it has this lasting impact instead of just being a thing that only the audience saw and knows about but on the other hand while I think this is a great episode it does sort of feel like the story itself is kind of
explicitly chasing the success of Meanwhile by referencing it so overtly I think if this had been the actual series finale I would have maybe felt that this was a slightly unsatisfactory ending for that reason however I also think with the reveal at the end of the episode it makes it sort of beautiful in a different way which I'll get to later fr's Phantom memories mostly lead to him wondering if he's even sane or if he's entirely losing his mind and honestly what I love most about this aspect of the story is the simple fact that
Leela confidently stands by him despite all of this Insanity that he's going through and all I ever wanted to do is marry you but first I need to understand what's happening to me I'm not going anywhere the last Act is primarily about the crew testing out their brand new ship which is actually a design I really dig but it also follows this ghost chips plot the highlight of which is the Reverb they throw on the words ghost chips basically there are rumors and sightings of these mysterious ghost ships and Fry seems to think that one
of them is the old Planet Express Ship I also really loved the professor having not one but two references to a pilot episode joke you should see the wire I used all the latest lengths these kinds of bookend jokes are in my opinion a really nice touch when doing these series finales nothing too too overt but just a nice call back from the end to the very beginning the entire Bender is jealous of the can opener plot line also has some really fun moments but if I had any criticism of this episode as a whole
it's that it didn't really tie into the climax in any meaningful way it was nice to have a funny Bender subplot for the finale the moment when he just straight up shoots the can opener is hysterical you think they'll try me as an adult but it really didn't lead to much else and I wasn't really overly fond of the whole Bender one hand joke however while meanwhile was such a great series finale back in 2013 that episode did have a real lack of focus on any characters outside of Fry and Leela and with Bender being
such a big part of the show I do think it's totally valid to want to make sure he gets some time to shine in a possible finale which all culminates in what I think is a mostly pretty effective ending the crew as well as the Nimbus get into a firefight with a ghost ship over the plasma sea with all signs pointing towards their certain Doom I guess this is the end again I don't mind dying as long as it's with you uh I really love this line and the fact that fry really just laments that
he and Leela never got married which of course leads Leela to asking zap if he'll marry them before the end since he's a captain and in this beautiful moment the pair kiss newly married just before the ship is destroyed and then of course we get the reveal that for this entire episode we were actually following an alternate Fry and Leela and that the Ghost Ship they were fighting was our crew on the original Planet Express Ship in their proper reality I really enjoyed this reveal though I do think think that maybe the quick Exposition dump
was a tiny bit clumsy though I don't really have an alternate pitch for how they could have executed it it just kind of required a little bit of overe explanation as to what was going on this scene also showcases another interesting Revelation the professor points out that out of the ship in the sequence they were seeing numerous alternate realities and possibilities while there were some new things showcased like everyone worshiping a king Bender And also the entire crew in coffins which is maybe a reference to the fact that the show has been so close to
death so many times they also showcased scenes from some of the Anthology episodes in alternate animation Styles specifically the old Disney style animation from reincarnation as well as the gi. Joe style animation from Saturday morning fun pit basically meaning that even those Anthology stories are technically Canon by ways of the Multiverse they also showcase Dreamland castle for yet another disenchantment reference and while the whole alternate reality aspect of this is fun to talk about what I liked most about it was the idea that the entire crew came together and patched the ship back up to
get it running again sort of an illusion to the crew of the show return in after so many years to rebuild it I could see some people finding the fact that a lot of this story was following a different Fry and Leela to be a little unsatisfactory but here is why this works so well for me though we followed an alternate Fry and Leela for most of the episode that Fry's actions were motivated by the memories of our Fry and Leela the unrealized events of meanwhile in particular were driving even these other versions of the
characters we know and love I think it's really nice that even across universes somehow these two will always find one another even if it is just moments from their demise one thing I've talked a lot about with my good friend tun Ric Tariq about these fut trama finales is that the best ones tend to have these great final lines lines that sort of have a feeling of finality while also hinting at the possibility of what's to come for the characters the devil's hands are idle play things nailed this the first go around please don't stop
playing fry I want to hear how it ends and then I think meanwhile also delivered a comparably great final line in that same vein what do you say want to go around again I do and I think otherwise also kind of nails it in this regard fry draws out one of his Phantom memories for Leela which is a moment from meanwhile which is a nice confirmation that R Fry and Leela now have at least some recollection of those events and then they say this what does it mean I don't know let's find out the episode
ends with a cover of Warren zavan song mutineer performed by Jason Isbell and Amanda shyers which is almost a cheat code I find the song so emotional it makes me tear up pretty instantly however they actually start playing the song on the second verse instead of the first and I think these lyrics are pretty intentionally highlighted I was born to rock the boat some may sink but we will float and given the events of this episode I think that this kind of perfectly describes fry his entire existence is sort of this anomaly thanks to his
lack of a Delta brain wave he's been tasked with saving the universe because of it on multiple occasions he was born to rock the boat one could say and in some realities that boat rocking works out and in others it ends in beautiful tragedy like the fryan Leela we followed through a lot of this episode some may sink but we will float guys I think this was a really Valiant effort as another series finale I do not think it's as strong as Devil's hands or meanwhile but I think it's stronger than overclockwise or into the
wild graen Yonder and it's definitely one of the best episodes of the Hulu era and in about 2 years they're going to get at least one more chance to end the series on a high note and I guess the question is do we think they can do it I don't know let's find [Music] out Johnny I stay me watching Johnny to cell he talks cartoons he's a really cool fellow he keeps you posted on adult cartoons if that's what you're into then grab a spoon and a very big bowl of your favorite cereal feels like
Saturday morning cartoon material Johnny TOS watch him on YouTube now enjoy the groove and Bust the Move
