by Sol Harris
Futurama has a long track-record of stellar time-travel episodes. It’s a topic the show has always approached sparingly – in fact, David X. Cohen and Matt Groening upheld a ban on time-travel stories in the writers’ room for the first two seasons because they felt like it was something that could be too cheap and easy for the show to fall back on if they weren’t careful. They finally broke the seal with Season 3’s Time Keeps on Slippin’ in which messing with a field of chronitons (time particles) causes isolated pockets of the universe to randomly lurch forwards in time. They followed it up later that season with their first full-blown, conventional time-travel adventure, Roswell That Ends Well, in which the crew are thrown back to 1947, only to discover that they were the aliens that caused the Roswell Incident. Both of these episodes are in the conversation when it comes to ‘greatest episode of all time’. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to find a top 10 episodes list that doesn’t contain at least two or three of the show’s time-travel outings.
Another firm favourite episode is The Late Philip J. Fry, in which The Professor builds a time machine that can only travel forwards, only to get himself, Fry and Bender stranded in the year 10,000. This week’s new episode, I Know What You Did Next Xmas, is a sequel of sorts. Not only does it turn out that The Professor kept his time machine, but he’s successfully modified it so that it can now travel backwards in time as well as forwards. And he intends to use it to travel back in time and prevent the show’s murderous Robot Santa character from ever being turned evil in the first place – that way, the world can enjoy Xmas for once.
It’s a frustrating episode in that it tries to have its continuity cake and eat it, too. It’s so deeply steeped in the show’s lore that it invites you to take things very seriously — and that’s the problem. Once you do, it becomes clear that much of it is also running on ‘it’s just a cartoon’ logic. And if there’s one thing sci-fi nerds are known for, it’s certainly not being willing to brush aspects of continuity in one of their favourite shows aside. For every loving callback this episode throws our way (Nibbler’s worms from Parasites Regained have stockings hung on the mantlepiece, Kwanzaabot raps about Fry’s dog, Seymour, over the end credits, and Zoidberg restates the fact that his species dies when it breeds) there’s something else like the utterly glaring absence of Marianne, Zoidberg’s girlfriend established in Stench and Stenchibility, the penultimate episode of Futurama‘s previous season. And while the time travel here, itself, is rock solid, it opens up a major can of continuity worms and also leaves the episode to run into some pretty major plotting issues elsewhere, as though the writers were so hellbent on making sure that the time-travel held up that they forgot to make sure that things like the logistics of how the threatening notes left for Bender throughout the episode were written and delivered made sense on any level. For the nerds who care, we’ll get into one of these major continuity problems — spoilers and all — at the very end of this review.
All of that said, I Know What You Did Next Xmas is yet another very funny episode — definitely among the funnier efforts from Season 8 so far — and it manages to be remarkably sweet purely by showing all of the core characters’ extended families together at once for the first time. As well as the usual characters like Cubert and Dwight, we also see the likes of Leela’s grandmother as well as Amy and Kif’s kids for the first time since their formal introduction earlier this season in Children of a Lesser Bog.
The episode also throws some fun cameos our way. As well as Coolio’s posthumous performance as Kwanzaa-bot, we get to hear Mark Hamill’s Chanukah Zombie speak for the first time after his musical debut in Bender’s Big Score. Cara Delevingne returns for her second mysterious role on the show this season… our best guess is that she’s one of the screams heard on the TV special at the start, but she could be anything from the owl to one of the backing singers heard during Coolio’s closing rap. (Is it possible that she threw out a couple of noises for the sound mix while she was in the studio, recording a proper role that we’ll hear later this season? And is it possible given fan speculation that Emilia Clarke was too busy to return as Marianne, that fellow British-accented woman, Cara Delevingne, could be taking over that part? Only time will tell). We’re also treated to a brief glimpse of the characters from Matt Groening’s third show, Disenchantment, through the window of The Professor’s time-machine, recalling a similar Easter egg in that show where the time machine briefly appeared and further establishing the theory that Disenchantment is set in the same universe as Futurama, during the time period after aliens destroy civilisation for the first time but before they destroy it a second time (as things are depicted on screen here, it actually takes place in-between this episode and a future event involving giant Bender punching a hole in Planet Express, but let’s chalk that up to a direction error whereby we don’t see that The Professor went slightly too far back and then went ever so slightly forwards again).
I Know What You Did Next Xmas isn’t the new all-time classic episode of Futurama that many of us had hoped for, but it’s yet another solid entry from Season 8 and, while it may not be quite up to par with most of the show’s past time-travel episodes, it’s the best Xmas episode they’ve given us since the original Fox run.
Pedantry corner: As promised, here’s one of the most egregious continuity issues thrown up in this episode for those who care about this sort of thing. The Late Philip J. Fry ends with Fry, Bender, and The Professor travelling beyond the end of the universe in the distant future. After the big crunch, they’re left in nothingness, only to witness a brand new big bang that creates an entirely new, seemingly identical universe. The world of Futurama is established to be a continuous, infinite stretch of universes ending only to be replaced by brand new, almost indistinguishable universes in their place.
In the episode, our original Fry, Bender, and Professor (P1) leave their original universe (U1) and enter a second universe (U2). After assassinating Adolf Hitler, The Professor accidentally overshoots things and the characters end up travelling to a third universe (U3). The show has been set in U3 ever since.
In I Know What You Did Next Xmas, P1 goes back in time to stop U3’s Robot Santa from ever becoming evil only for it to be revealed that he’s the one who accidentally turned him evil in the first place. Instead of returning to the future of U3, he chooses to go back to his equivalent time in U2, instead, safe in the knowledge that each other other universe’s Professors will do the same thing like an inter-universal Mexican wave. On a side-note, this does technically mean that The Professor is the only original character from the start of the show who we’re still watching and that the show is now set in yet another universe — one where Adolf Hitler was assassinated.
The Professor from U2 presumably went back in time and accidentally caused U2’s Robot Santa to become evil in exactly the exact same way. No problems there. But instead of returning to his time, he also presumably travelled back to U1, which would contradict the events that play out in The Late Philip J. Fry where we see our original U1 Leela living out her life as the new boss of Planet Express. No problem though — it’s easy enough to imagine that The Professor went into hiding so as to avoid messing with the space-time-continuum any further or something of that nature.
BUT.
This means that U1 never had a Professor in it who went back in time and caused Robot Santa to become evil. So why is he evil from the very start of Futurama?
HOWEVER…
Here’s the explanation we’re going to roll with from now on and we invite the show’s writers to do the same.
In the show’s first Robot Santa episode, Xmas Story, The Professor clearly states that “Due to a programming error, Santa’s standards were set too high and he invariably judges everyone to be naughty”. This doesn’t quite gel with the events of I Know What You Did Next Xmas, where it’s revealed that he actually just has a ‘naughty/nice’ switch that The Professor mistakenly sets to naughty.
Be it through the show’s paradox-correcting time-code or the revelation that events of time travel were fated to have always happened that way from the start, Futurama‘s time-travel has mostly followed a deterministic model up until this point, which makes sense seeing as each new universe seen in The Late Philip J. Fry turns out almost identical to the last one and seeing as God is a literal, tangible being in this world — the one who personally creates the time-travel portals generated by that time-code, in fact.
Thus, perhaps each iteration of Robot Santa is fated to always turn evil. With no Professor going back in time to cause it to happen, the universe course-corrected in U1 and his programming ultimately corrupted, leading to the error described by The Professor back in that first Xmas episode.
Continuity restored. You’re welcome.
FUTURAMA can be streamed in the UK via Disney+
