by Sol Harris
Parasites Regained is the third of the four new episodes released so far to serve as a direct sequel to a classic episode of Futurama. This one harks back to Parasites Lost, one of the best episodes of the entire series, in which Fry contracts parasites that cause him to become more athletic and intelligent, only to find Leela beginning to reciprocate his romantic advances.
This time round, it’s Nibbler who has the worms. After being banished from Fry’s body, the worms have taken up residence in Nibbler’s litter box, but they’re having the opposite effect on him for some reason. His intelligence is deteriorating rapidly, and soon he’ll be no more intelligent than a Boston terrier. Leela’s best friend is losing his mind, and the medicine they give him doesn’t work because the worms in his litter simply re-infect him after every time he uses it. And Leela can’t change the litter itself because it’s made up of precious sand containing essential minerals he needs to live taken from the ancestral pooping ground on his home planet.
The crew are left with no choice but to shrink down and embark upon an epic quest across the sprawling desert of… Nibbler’s litter box. It’s all just an excuse for a Dune parody – but it works phenomenally well. The litter box desert biome injects a whole slew of creative new creatures and designs into the show. It’s crazy to say this, but it’s a joy to see the litter box explored.
More importantly, though, the episode is very funny. The gags work regardless of your relationship with Dune. The race of dung beetles’ insistence that it’s pronounced “dune-g beetles” is great, and a brief cameo from Kyle McLaughlin in a tip of the hat to David Lynch’s 1984 adaption of Frank Herbert’s novel serves as an Easter egg for those who do get it without getting in the way of anything for those who don’t.
While some of the voice acting has felt slightly off in the revival up until now, as though the age of some of the cast is really starting to become audible, everyone clicks firmly back into place here, as though they just needed to warm up a little bit first. Frank Welker, in particular, gives an especially wonderful performance as Nibbler, especially as he starts losing his ability to speak coherently.
There’s a solid emotional core to the episode as Leela and Nibbler’s relationship is really examined for one of the first times since the crew became aware of his superintelligence. It’s a shame they didn’t pull on this thread a little bit harder, as there was the potential to make this a real tearjerker that might have helped it compare favourably to some of Futurama’s best outings.
While it’s the closest the revival has come yet, Parasites Regained still doesn’t quite feel like classic Futurama. The pacing feels too fast in spite of the show’s slightly-longer-than-it-used-to-be runtime, and there are some really noticeable ways in which the script could have been tightened up (Nibbler showing signs of his mind deteriorating before the trip to the vet would have been nice, for example, and the episode’s resolution of just stamping on the sub-parasites feels like a waste when it would have been so much cleaner to shrink Nibbler down to their size so that he could eat them all, thus completing the circle of life he had grown such reverence for. David X. Cohen, if you’re reading this, get in touch. We’ll send you script notes for free).
Still, minor flaws aside, Parasites Regained is the best episode of the revival so far and the first that feels like a better than average episode of the show overall.
